Crisis Negotiations

"I assisted the authors with their first edition; they are now on their fourth edition. This is more of a textbook for negotiation practitioners. It certainly talks about techniques and so forth. It may not be particularly appealing to the average citizen who wants to learn more about this but I think for someone who wants to pursue a career in this or learn more about how it works at the street level this is the only book out there which really covers it from that academic perspective. It is very basic. It deals with things like how you set up a negotiation team, what sort of training you should have, command decision-making and tactical team interaction, how to deliver items into the site and how to affect surrenders. It is pretty specific on the dos and don’ts. I think the book came along much later and by then most law enforcement agencies had changed their way of doing things. You could in essence say what they have done is to collect together the policies and procedures we really spearheaded in the FBI. But you are right, prior to the education programme there was a fairly restrictive approach to dealing with these cases and not just with the FBI but with most police forces. It was basically a confrontational approach in which we essentially said, ‘Come out and surrender, or else.’ That was, of course, typical of law enforcement worldwide and it sometimes worked but often resulted in significant failures with loss of life."