LPS In Focus: Crisis Negotiators

Crisis negotiators: a calm voice in the chaos

A man was up a tree. With a weapon. Threatening suicide.

That’s all Cst. Nicole Tyhurst knew as she was driving – lights and sirens on – across the city. The scene was secure, but the man was in distress and not coming down.

He needed help.

As a crisis negotiator for the London Police Service, Cst. Tyhurst is used to being in difficult scenarios. On any given day, she can be called from her regular duties as a patrol officer with the Uniformed Division and be thrust into life and death situations where tensions and stakes are extremely high.

“You have to remember that these people are pretty much at the lowest point of their life,” Cst. Tyhurst says. “They’re at rock bottom. If they’re dealing with us, they’re having a very bad day, so you have to be patient and try to get them talking. Sometimes they have nobody, so you become the person they can talk to.”

Crisis negotiations on television tend to be framed around hostage situations, which are fairly rare in reality. More often than not, crisis negotiators deal with people who are suicidal or who have barricaded themselves in a building for some reason – often to avoid being arrested.

Every situation is different, but the goal is always the same: a peaceful resolution.

“The main thing we try to do is build rapport and trust,” says negotiator Sgt. Mark McGugan. “First we need to slow everything down. A lot of times they’re just frustrated and they want to be heard, so we try to calm them down and let them talk. If we can get them thinking about the good things in their lives, we can take them out of that crisis mentality and try to move forward.”

Negotiators work in teams of at least two. Usually that means one person acts as the lead negotiator, supported by a second negotiator who can manage information and share it with everyone involved – members of Incident Command, Communications, and patrol officers.

That information is vital to the process.

“Sometimes you bond over the simplest things, like sports or certain likes or dislikes,” Sgt. McGugan says. “But if you’re not paying attention and you get a detail wrong, or it appears that you’re not listening, you break the bond and you have to start over. Active listening is important. Having a partner to keep the details straight so you can focus on the person is very helpful.”

Negotiating is a delicate art. Negotiators speak in terms of “hooks” and “triggers” – topics that either engage the person or push him or her away. It can be tricky trying to find a way into the conversation that opens the person up and helps change perspective.

For the man in the tree, the hook was a close friend. Cst. Tyhurst, a negotiator since 2012, got him talking about the friend, which helped him see that he had reasons to live. Eventually he came down and was taken to hospital.    

It isn’t always easy to find that hook and keep the person focussed. Increasingly, negotiators deal with people who are distracted by social media or cell phones and may even be broadcasting what’s going on. If they are engaging with other people online, they may not be paying much attention to the negotiator.

“Back when I started, there would be one phone line in the house that we could shut down or block so the person could only speak to us,” says Sgt. McGugan, who has been a negotiator since 1997. “Now we can’t do that. We can lock out cell phones, but usually that’s our only means of communication, so we don’t. We have to bring them back to talking to us, which is harder to do now with all of the social media going on.”

Harder though it may be, LPS negotiators have a great track record when it comes to resolving these situations successfully – a product of experience and training. Training begins with a two-week course at the Canadian Police College, and then continues typically with two days of training at LPS headquarters every year, plus conferences and seminars. The service currently has 17 trained negotiators.   

Unfortunately, they remain in high demand.

“We see a lot of people in crisis for different reasons,” Sgt. McGugan says. “It could be mental health or symptoms related to drugs and alcohol. We try to bring them down and talk them out.

“Usually if people in crisis have some time and think about it a little deeper, they start looking at it differently. They see that people care about them and we can get them the help they need. If we can get to somebody, our success rate is extremely high.”