Welcome to Week One of PST 321. In the text this week you will find an interesting chapter on the history of hostage negotiations. The text discusses several pivotal cases in the development of hostage negotiations over the past few years. The last section of the chapter covers definitions concerning hostage negotiations. Please take a few minutes to read over the definitions more than once.
The text is very accurate concerning the percentage of actual hostage situations where negotiators are called out. I do about 5-10% hostage call outs to 90%+ of “other” types of call outs. Most of the time I am negotiating with suicidal persons. For this reason you should pay particular attention to areas of this course that cover suicide. There are several different crisis situations enumerated in the text. The text discusses the fact that hostage negotiators have to negotiate in many different situations. However, it is also true that emergency communications personnel are forced to deal with many of the same types of situations that negotiators confront. I shall elaborate on a few of the situations that are covered in the text.
Barricaded subject and suicide calls are fairly common occurrences in today’s world. Many times the 911 operator is the first professional person to communicate with the subject during the crisis. Why would someone who wants to kill himself bother calling 911 anyway? They are probably not serious about it or they would just go ahead and do it. WRONG!! This is a common fallacy about individuals that barricade themselves in their home or office and then call 911. The fact of the matter is that most people who commit suicide will talk it over (directly or indirectly) with someone first. The call to 911 may very well be the last chance for this person to live. The 911 operator could find himself in a situation where his choice of words could mean the difference between life and death (as if you did not have enough stress at work already). The suicidal person may just want to give a “verbal will” to someone. almost everyone knows that 911 lines are recorded. I know of an incident in which a suicidal man called 911 to tell how he wanted his estate handled after his death. The reason he called 911 was that he was illiterate and could not write a suicide note. This man also suffered from a bi-polar disorder of which he was not even aware and probably never would have discovered had it not been for a 911 telecommunicator who knew how to deal with the situation. The topic of suicide will be covered at length later in this course.
Domestic Incidents are another common occurrence in society today. Many times the 911 telecommunicator will receive the initial call from the spouse of the aggressor. Eventually the telecommunicator my find that she is forced to deal with an aggressive spouse who threatens to harm his family if police arrive at his home. How should the telecommunicator deal with this type of situation? What if the man says that he is armed and will not come to the door if the police arrive? What if the man says he has already killed one of his kids and will kill the rest if the police arrive? This is one of the topics that I will discuss online this week. I will discuss how you would deal with this type of situation, and how this compares with the way a hostage negotiator would deal with this type of situation.