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Police crisis negotiations in the UK and the USA: comparative analysis
Section 7. Organization of law-enforcement activities
Koshkina Ekaterina, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom, MSc in Criminology and Criminal Psychology E-mail: [email protected]
Police crisis negotiations in the UK and the USA: comparative analysis
Abstract: This article examines the essence of police crisis negotiations and the structure of a crisis negotiation team. The differences between British and American negotiators are discussed as well as the role of profiling during crisis negotiations with mentally ill hostage takers.
Keywords: police crisis negotiations, barricade situations, barricade subjects, crisis negotiation team, mentally ill hostage takers, crisis intervention skills, hostage taker profiling.
Crisis negotiations are “highly successful at resolving crisis incidents without the loss of life or the use of tactical force” [10, 347]. Statistically, over 90 % of the negotiating incidents resolve peacefully [9, 14] because the main task of a negotiator is “to develop a reason for the subject to talk to the police and to surrender” [10, 347]. However, even if the ultimate goals remain the same in both the USA and the UK, there are visible differences between the American approach and the British approach to negotiations in general.
Crisis Negotiation Team
The history of crisis negotiations started with the “Munich massacre”, “an eye-opening hostage event” [7, 38] that took place during the 1972 Summer Olympic in Munich, Germany. Then some members of the Palestinian organization called “the Black September” captured Israeli athletes, coaches, and officials in their apartments. They all were killed a few days later. This incident made NYPD Detective and psychologist Harvey Schlossberg, “the father of police psychology in USA” [7, 3], realize the need for trained negotiators. Schlossberg and Simon Eisdorfer, “the commanding officer of the NYPD Special Operations”, were “a part of developing the first US Hostage Negotiation Team”, which “became reality in the spring of 1973” [7, 38-40] and tested in a high-profile standoff at a Brooklyn sporting store. At present, the Crisis Negotiation Team (CNT) is “a fixture of the police department” [7, 40] and law-enforcement agencies in the USA as well as many other countries.
Normally, in the USA, the CNT consists of, at least, five people since “crisis incidents are not solved by any one person” [10, 347]. The first member of the team is the CNT commander, or the Team Leader, who “monitors team and implements liaisons with on-scene and SWAT commander” [13, 59], “assign team roles and makes the initial decision on any demand issues, trades or items to provide the subject” [10, 348]. The second member of the team is the primarily negotiator, who “listens and talks to a subject” [13, 59], and “develops
strategies and tactics for resolving the incident” [10, 348]. The third member of the team is the secondarily negotiator, who “monitors negotiations and the primarily negotiator, listens to a subject, provides the primarily negotiator with potential topics for discussion, controls access to them, and relieves the primarily negotiator” [13, 59]. The fourth member of the team is the intelligence officer, who “gathers intelligence regarding the incident, information about the subject, hostages, victims, and any information that may be needed and useful for incident command and tactical personnel” [10, 348]. The fifth member of the team is the mental health professional, a forensic psychologist or a clinical psychiatrist, who “provides a variety of services to the team” [8, 85] as, for example, “an assessment of the subject’s mental and emotional state and potential for violence” [10, 348]. There may be more people in the CNT or less. Most police department ‘teams’ in the United States, according to Strentz [13], include only one person because many department does not understand completely that “a crisis negotiator, like the tactical response or command staff, must work as a member of a team”. On the other hand, the roles in the CNT as well as the titles of those roles may vary with the local specificity.
In the UK, the team consists of four individuals, but sometimes it may be presented by three persons. The different titles of team roles and their functions take its place. For instance, there is not such a member of the team as the coordinator in the USA, which exists in the UK, and the team leader performs his functions. The intelligence officer and the mental health professional are absent from the team structure in the UK. Besides, American negotiators as opposed to British negotiators normally do not combine being police crisis negotiators with another job within their law-enforcement agencies. The team members are not interchangeable in the USA, but they are in the UK. However, the principles of negotiations are the same, it is always the resolution of a crisis incident peacefully by developing for a subject the reasons to talk to the police and
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Section 7. Organization of law-enforcement activities
surrender at the end of the day, with the exception of what may be called ‘the style of negotiating’. The Americans seem to be much more proactive and result-oriented, aiming for solving the problem fast and effective at most, while the British tend to be much more oriented on the subject’s well-being despite the time that might be wasted on dealing with him, and more conversation-oriented.
Barricade situations
There are two types of crisis incidents needed a negotiated response — hostage events, and barricade situations. The main difference between them is demands of a subject. There are two type of demanding issues — ‘instrumental’, and ‘expressive’. Usually, instrumental needs are something easy to talk about with a stranger, and, as a rule, they are voiced first. It may be food, water, to call police officers off, and so on. Expressive needs typically emerge later, “they can be very personal, and the subject’s shift from instrumental needs to them may indicate the development of trust" [8, 99]. In case of hostage situations, a hostage taker demands from the police “to secure freedom, money, rights, privileges; in prisons — more recreation, better food or safety” [10, 347] and uses hostages, which “have to be persons who held by force and cannot leave of their own volition” [10, 46] as the ‘bargaining chips’. In case of barricade situations, a barricaded subject does not want to have anything to do with the police because “he has created a crisis incident because he does not know how to cope with and adapt to traumatic events in his life” [10, 351].
Barricade situations may be divided into two groups, differing from each other. The first group is ‘hostage barricade’ when “barricade subjects are persons threating to harm themselves, and sometimes others by their actions, but have no hostages” [10, 346]. The second group is a situation when a barricade subject has victims. Such incidents are extremely typical for “domestic situations where one parent threatens family members”, and, technically, these members “are not hostages, they are victims of their parent’s actions” [10, 346]. However, it does not mean that they may not be in danger, “there are plenty of examples of the barricade subject killing” hostages because “one of the main threats in these situations is ‘If I cannot have them, no one will’ [10, 346]. The American theoretical sources and the British negotiators do not describe the barricade situations identically. In the USA, it is accepted to divide barricade situations in two groups — ‘hostage barricade events’, when a subject actually has hostages and threatens to harm himself or hostages, or else wants to die in one way or another, and ‘barricade situations’, when a subject has victims, who are his family members, children, current or former inmates, and do not wait for the police to intervene. In the UK, both situations are barricade situations.
Mentally ill barricade subjects
Supposedly, about 50 % of the hostage takers are mentally ill [7, 41], and their condition is often blurred by drugs or alcohol, or both at once. According to Lanceley [8], antisocial personality disorder along with paranoid personality disorder and borderline personality disorder are common among
barricade subjects, what explains attention paying to methods of negotiating with them in American academic sources. However, it does not mean that other personality disorders are rare, it means that, apparently, these disorders are typical for what may be called ‘subjects population’ — people experiencing difficulties in abiding by social rules or laws, and establishing relationships with their family members are most likely to become barricade subjects. It should be mentioned here that mentally ill subjects tend to create barricade situations spontaneously, in order to express their inner crisis for getting help or stop being repeatedly ignored. This makes them extremely “unpredictable and prone to violent emotional outburst” [10, 346] and increases “the importance of ‘rapid’ profiling” [5, 392] because an individual’s traits defined by mental illness the barricaded subject suffers from are able to explain his ‘expressive needs’ or demands.
Thus, if the crisis intervention skills of a negotiator are enough for successfully resolving hostage barricade situations, then barricade situations “are often resolved using a heavy dose of psychologists, social workers or psychiatrists” [10, 346]. The main reason of it is that “knowing the type of mental disturbance allows a negotiator to understand the motivation and perceptions of the hostage taker and to predict the response to the negotiator’s words and the tactical team actions” [11, 119]. There are official guidelines of how to negotiate with mentally ill subjects in accordance with their diagnosis and case studies of the past incidents available for researchers in the USA, but not in the UK where they are classified for safety reasons. On the other hand, it also may be connected with the phenomena called ‘repeated subject’: when a subj ect creates crises regularly using in next events experience in interacting with negotiators derived from previous events. If those individuals had free access to this information, it would affect dealing with them.
Profiling during police crisis negotiations
Lanceley [8] wrote that “as with any profile, the following is a generalization”; therefore, a negotiator needs to “keep in mind that each person and situation has unique qualities”. So, first of all, information about a number of subjects, location, involvement of innocents, weapons, another ammunition, drugs or alcohol engagements, stance, and substantive demands of the subjects, are necessary to obtain for profiling a type of a siege. Then, since “from a practical standpoint it would likely be impossible for a negotiator to have an understanding of every disorder within DSM-V” [14, 75], negotiators in the USA tend to get mental health professionals involved in the negotiation process as consultants or profilers to have information about motivation and a state of mind of subjects. As a rule, this decision proved its value in the most negotiated incidents.
Although there are no procedures of profiling a subject during negotiations specifically designed in both concerned countries, there are differences in how the British and the Americans do it. In the UK, any team member may play the role of a profiler, and, in fact, it is a more collective task that
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Police crisis negotiations in the UK and the USA: comparative analysis
an individual j ob. In the USA, it is a duty of that team member who is a trained mental health professional, typically — a forensic or clinical psychologist. Besides, the Americans tend to pay more attention to the external factors connected to a crisis in whole as a location of an incident, any weapon presence, involvement of innocents, and alcohol and drugs intoxication. The British negotiators are more interested in a subject’s state of mind, motivation, and demands. Availability of a mental health professional in the CNT might be the reason for it since there are the recent researches in the USA dedicated to using such an expert in police crisis negotiations despite it may lead to what the British negotiators call ‘putting people in the box’. Thereby, its remains unknown, which is better — to have or not to have a psychologist in the team, and each considered country has its own valid answer to this question. As regards to the tools employed in field profiling, negotiators in the USA and the UK both resort to the help of law-enforcement and national databases as well as various recording and writing equipment for making notes.
Negotiators in both countries have the same complications with getting information, such as human factor, and ‘lost in translation moments’, but in the USA, the problem of wasting time during obtaining information, which is actual
for the British negotiators, does not exist so long as there is an intelligence officer, who is to do. Nevertheless, in both countries, it is for negotiators to decide how to use the profile — they think up a strategy to negotiate with a subject and implement it. In America, profiling seems to be more scientific and psychiatric, whereas in the UK, it is more close to daily life; it is more about a subject than his mental issues. In other words, the final goal of profiling in the UK is to help negotiators to find the way to resolve an incident, while in the USA, it is to identify the problem and create the solution based on its key characteristics. Whichever way negotiators in both countries do it, it is, seemingly, always helpful, informative, and giving ideas for conversation, excluding the fact that profiling is not an exact science and cannot be an answer to all questions.
In conclusion, it should be said that any academic research about negotiations in the UK is limited by requests from the police to take into consideration that strategies and tactics of crisis negotiations are classified and supposed to be assessable only within law-enforcement agencies. This do not allow comparing USA’s and UK’s official guidelines of how to negotiate with subj ects depending on a type of mental disturbance they suffer from more closely and deeply.
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