June 2001 Volume 82 Number 6
"serving the protectors"
| June 2001 Volume 82 Number 6 "serving the protectors" |
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The Negotiators |
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| by John Ballantyne |
SA police negotiators are kept in a high state of readiness to confront life-threatening situations such as sieges, armed robberies or high-risk arrests. Here, one former and two current negotiators reveal how they bring resolutions to the seemingly impossible.
On call at all hours, SA police negotiators are ready to deal with anything from terrorism to threatened suicides.
Cool nerves, the ability to listen, and infinite patience are just some of the qualities they need to bring about peaceful outcomes to high-risk stand-offs.
Life and death can hang in the balance, as it did seven years ago when a young man threatened to jump to his death from the seventh storey of the Riverside Centre on North Terrace, Adelaide.
The man, in his early 30s, was deeply depressed after the unsuccessful outcome of an unfair dismissal claim he had brought before the Industrial Relations Commission.
He was now perched on a narrow ledge, wanting to take his own life.
The primary negotiator dispatched to the scene was John Peake - now a detective inspector and officer-in-charge of Crime Training.
Glancing down the side of the Riverside building from the seventh storey, Peake recalls seeing “obstructions on the way down that would have stood a good chance of killing or very seriously injuring (the man).”
The mattress which the Metropolitan Fire Service had placed on the ground below was of limited value.
“I don’t know the life-saving qualities or features of that mattress,” says Peake, “but it’s certainly a drop I wouldn’t want to make.”
Fortunately, on this occasion, the negotiator team was able, within a couple of hours, to convince the man to abandon his threatened suicide. He surrendered himself to Peake and had a brief conversation with him; and those present hoped that this was the end of the matter.
But only a few weeks later, the young man was back on the same seventh storey ledge of the Riverside building, threatening to commit suicide again.
Peake was once more called to go there on account that he had dealt with this man before.
This time, however, the situation was much more grave.
“There was no doubt in our minds that he was going to jump,” says Peake. “He wasn’t an attention-seeker, as the label’s given. He satisfied us that he was going to take his own life.”
Nothing was left to chance. STAR Group officers arrived on the scene, prepared to intervene to prevent the man’s suicide.
A group of curious onlookers gathered early in the drama. But, as the episode dragged on for more than a couple of hours without apparent resolution, they lost interest and dispersed.
The negotiator team, by contrast, settled in for a long and gruelling operation.
Negotiators, when they conduct an exercise, traditionally work as a four-member team, with each member on different occasions undertaking different roles.
The team-leader brings the team together and takes a lead in developing tactics on how best to resolve the crisis in hand. The primary negotiator takes the main responsibility for entering into discussion or communication with the person at issue.
In case the primary negotiator starts drying up on ideas, there is also a secondary negotiator who can feed other ideas and suggestions, and also act as an intermediary between the primary negotiator and other support personnel.
A liaison officer is available to deliver messages, record information, or interview witnesses.
“While the events are there unfolding before you,” Peake recalls about the Riverside affair, “the adrenaline keeps your mind very active and focussed on the job at hand.
“It’s quite a mentally draining process though for everyone on the team, because everyone’s trying to think two or three moves ahead and trying to think in different directions.
“The person - at that stage anyway - has full control over the way it’s going to go.
“Perhaps, I’ll draw back a bit about saying ‘full control’. It’s the negotiator’s role to be able to control the thinking of the person. But, in reality, at that stage, if he was going to jump, then he had control over that.
“But it’s the negotiator’s role to be able to influence the person to rethink the way they’re going about handling this and provide them with a more salient and ultimately a safer way of bringing about a resolution for their problem.”
"There was no doubt in our minds that he was going to jump."
Peake was on an open-air walkway very close to the narrow ledge on which the young man was sitting. The man allowed Peake to open a window between them and speak with him.
At that point, recalls Peake, “I certainly could have taken a chance of reaching out and grabbing him,” he recalls. “I was certainly within arm’s distance of the man. But that would have been an unnecessary high-risk action to take, and one that at the time probably wasn’t justified.”
While Peake was continuing to talk with the distressed man, STAR Group members were silently taking up their positions.
Taking their cue from Peake’s observations and signals, they swiftly executed a manoeuvre to minimize the possibility of the man being able to jump.
One officer inside the open window grabbed the man in a bid to prevent his movement. At the same time an abseiler, who had been concealed on a balcony above, came down and positioned himself immediately in front of the man as a secondary back-up to stop him jumping forward. A third officer from the side rushed over and pushed the man through the window to ensure his safety
“...patrol officers haven’t got the time to spend talking to people, trying to sort out their problems, giving them advice. We’re lucky. We’ve got the time.”
After this ordeal, which had lasted some six hours, Peake felt a real sense of professional accomplishment and pride that the negotiators had played such a major part in the successful outcome.
But there was a sad sequel to this episode. Only weeks afterwards, the distressed man set fire to himself and died from his injuries.
The Negotiator Co-ordination Section, according to its present co-ordinator, Senior Sergeant Chris Lawrance, owes its origins to police concerns from the 1970s onwards, both in Australia and overseas, about how to respond more effectively to life-threatening situations, such as terrorism, sieges and armed robberies.
The 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis first prompted police across the world to assess in detail the concept of negotiation as a principle strategy in resolving high-risk situations.
Other events which prompted such concerns, according to SAPOL’s negotiator trainer, Sergeant Lyndy Baker, were the 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London “and also incidents that have happened in America, (such as) armed robbery (and) prison sieges where they sort of just went in and ‘lost’ - you know, shot people. There was no negotiating.”
The American FBI introduced a course on hostage negotiations at its academy. In 1979 Australia started co-ordinating counter-terrorism courses for state and territory police services.
SAPOL today has 41 negotiators attached to the STAR Group. Co-ordinator Lawrance and trainer Baker are the only two who are full-time. The remaining 39 are part-time negotiators, on top of their other normal policing duties throughout the metropolitan and country areas.
Placed on rosters, they can to be summoned to high-risk situations, such as dealing with domestic siege or barricade incidents, helping with the execution of high-risk warrants or arrests, or preventing suicides.
Negotiators’ aim is “to achieve a peaceful resolution to a situation without loss of life, injury to any person or damage to property”.
Last year, according to Lawrance, negotiators had an 87 per cent success rate in resolving high-risk situations by negotiation.
To date, in South Australia, negotiators have never had to deal with terrorism. But they are always prepared for a wide range of scenarios. Negotiators are kept in a high state of readiness by undertaking both domestic and counter-terrorism courses every few years to re-qualify themselves.
Baker speaks highly of the consistently high standards negotiators maintain - especially in comparison with their counterparts both interstate and overseas.
American FBI agents, she says, may cover some of the same ground “in little bits and pieces, but certainly not to the extent we do it. I’ve noticed in all the research and all the people I’ve spoken to, certainly in America - they do their training, and that’s it. You can perhaps go on some advanced courses that are run by police who’ve left on a consultancy. But there’s no regular training within that department or section.”
Selection for SAPOL’s negotiators is rigorous. There are highly competitive entry requirements. Candidates undergo a series of psychological tests and have to demonstrate, among other things, sound communication skills, assertiveness, and a capacity to handle stress.
After a strict filtering process, a few candidates are selected for a fortnight-long assessable course.
Even after that, says Baker, “they’re not qualified. It’s only for us to look at them to see how they’re going. Alternatively, do they want to do that? Because when they see the commitment and what’s required, sometimes some people just don’t realize it mightn’t be for them. So it’s a two-way street.”
In the last intake, of the 87 who applied to join, only nine were eventually accepted.
According to former negotiator Peake, successful candidates generally have “a broad range of life experiences (and) an obvious ability to speak with and relate to people.”
And from his own experience, he jokes: “I guess 28 years of marriage can’t be overlooked as an obvious training opportunity in many ways.”
Baker emphasizes that a good negotiator needs an ability to listen. “Lots of people,” she says, “can’t listen.”
Effective communication is a must, she says, but “that doesn’t necessarily mean just giving an order.
“Sometimes you have to stand back. We look less for the commander/control side, because quite often that’s in conflict. You take your hat off as a negotiator. You’re not there as a police officer. You’re actually doing the mediating role. You’re talking them out.”
“...incidents that have happened in America, where they just went in and shot people.”
Baker says that the necessary “skills of being able to show empathy and listen, and perhaps get into the other person’s shoes, (are) what a lot of coppers on the road can’t do.”
Negotiators, insists Lawrance, have some obvious advantages over patrol officers: “We get called to a situation because it’s high-risk, and we have got time to develop rapport, to find out what’s going on, whereas a patrol officer gets called to a job, (and has to) finish it and get on and go.
“Sometimes that causes some of the incidents we attend, because they (patrol officers) haven’t got the time to spend talking to people, trying to sort out their problems, giving them advice. We’re lucky. We’ve got the time.”
Lawrance adds: “We have the luxury of being able to have a psychologist to come to our jobs, because they’re on the call-out roster too. They’re the advisers, the same as we have people with culturally different backgrounds.
“We’ve got contacts whom we can contact to come and assist us in relation to what we should talk about. Should it be a male talking? Should it be a female talking? We’ve got the facilities to support our role, whereas the normal police officer on day-to-day duty doesn’t have that luxury.”
Peake believes that the people he has encountered in these situations “are often driven there by accumulating pressure, and, more often than not, they don’t want to be there, but find themselves in a position that they just don’t know which way to turn.
“What may seem quite major to the person really (is) quite minimal very often. But we have to treat it as... the most important thing to that person at that time, and focus on that and give them a part-ownership of bringing about the solution.”
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