December 7, 2025 • 54 mins
When Australia’s most volatile moments unfold — a siege, a suicide attempt, a hostage situation, or a person in deep crisis — there’s one specialist quietly working to bring everyone home alive: the police negotiator.
In this gripping episode, Adam sits down with Leading Senior Constable Lee Wolahan, one of Victoria Police’s most experienced and respected negotiators. Across more than 800 critical incidents, Lee has faced people at the edge — physically, emotionally and psychologically — and helped guide them back to safety.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Apoche production.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shann. I'm your host,
Adam Shand Somewhere right now across Australia, a crisis is unfolding.
It may be a siege, hostage drama, domestic violence incident,
person experiencing a mental health episode, or someone threatening to
take their own life. It may just be someone who's
reached the end of their tether and needs to be
(00:35):
listened to.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
When the cops are called to a crisis, the negotiators
coordinate the car.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
In each of these scenarios, a police negotiator will be
on the scene trying to move that person in crisis
from no to yes, to help them re engage their
rational thought process, to de escalate the situation, and to
give them another way out when all seems hopeless.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
In the last twelve months, police negotiators from the Critical
Incident Response Team have been called to more than seven
hundred jobs.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Most of these jobs you will never hear about. Some, sadly,
you hear about when negotiations break down or when force
is required to ensure public safety. At the Sydney siege
in quest today, negotiators described the immense pressure when talks
broke down, But the vast majority of these scenes are
peacefully resolved and everyone gets to go home because of
(01:29):
the skills and the experience of the negotiator.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
It's a delicate balance of empathy and strategy, proving power
lies in peaceful speech.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Today, it's my pleasure to speak to one of Australia's
most experienced police negotiators, leading Senior Constable Lee Wallahan of
Victoria Police. Lee is a specialist and is passing on
his skills to rank and file police who are the
first responders in these challenging moments. Thanks for chatting today, Lee,
Thank you for having me I for sire, it absolute pleasure. Mate.
(02:01):
Tell me what makes a good negotiator.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Probably the thing that makes negotiator successful is I'll start
with one of our students who's now graduated from the
most recent course. His name is Jake. Jake is kind,
he's professional, he's interesting, he's interested, he's a good communicator.
He's a worldly person despite his young age, and he
(02:26):
is able to make decisions under immense pressure and make
good decisions and back those decisions up with sound reasoning.
But it's probably better if I tell you what negotiator
is not a negotiator is not a psychologist. They're not
a guidance counselor. They're not a marriage counselor. They're not
a real estate agent. They're not an employment specialist. And
(02:48):
sometimes that's what people think a negotiator needs to be,
is someone who can talk that person through their issues
and through their problems. But when that person's in crisis,
and that person's got leverage and we'll talk about that later,
that person doesn't need counseling and psychology because it's not
the time. If you were to take a psychologist and
bring them to a siege situation, they take one look
(03:09):
at the person in crisis and say, this isn't the time.
They need a police officer. And what we are is
simply police officers with specialized skill set like Jake and
the world leading team that am part of. They possess
all of those skills in man man anymore.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
But you've chosen to specialize in this. Over the years,
I guess people have gone through this sort of a
role and they've gone to other jobs. You've chosen to specialize.
Why is that.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
The first experience I had with a police negotiator, I
was a young constable working in Fitzroy. It was two
thousand and two. I think petrol was about sixty cents
a lead. It was a different time and so we
didn't have a lot of the different levels of supervision
and support that we do today. And the job that
we had was a job in a small flat a
young man who was armed with a knife. We got
(03:56):
there on scene and without any backup, we went into
the apartment and I could hear distress from the other
side of the door. I always cautioned my students that
you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to the
lowest and best level of training that you have, and
that's what happened. I tried to kick in the door
and my foot went straight through it, and then my
partner then over the next minute or so, I had
(04:17):
to try and pull my leg out of the door,
and so the element of surprise was gone. I went
in and saw something and I'll never forget, which was
a young male with a knife to his throat. He
was naked and he was clearly in distress. And so
I fell to the lowest level of training I had,
which was I pulled out my weapon. My service pistol
was a smith and Western k frame revolver at the time,
(04:40):
because in my training, knife equals gone, and I didn't
think about the nuance of the situation and what that
person might actually be experiencing. I pulled out the revolver,
I pointed at him, and I just started shouting. After
a while, a tactical team arrived, and then they said
the negotiator was coming. And the whole time I just
kept shouting the police chawler and dropped the knife, dropped
the knife, and that wasn't working clearly. Soon after that,
(05:03):
a police negotiator turned up and the attack team we're
very respectful of him. They moved to the side. He
moved forward and I could hear him in a calm
and a slow voice. He said, look at him, he's terrified.
And I nodded, and my gun was shaking, and then
I felt the calm hand over the top of my
revolver and he lowered it and he said, I'm not
talking about him, I'm talking about you, mate. It's okay
(05:24):
to be scared. This is a scary day. It's not
a normal day for him, and it's not a normal
day for you. So I want everyone to take a
breath and take two steps back. Within ten minutes, he
had that person in a different state of mind and
the leverage was then easily and respectfully given to that
police negotiating And that was a moment in my mind
where I said, this is fascinating, this is something that
(05:45):
I aspire to. That was the start of my journey
towards becoming a police negotiator. But in Victoria we are
very different. We're not like other negotiating units. We're embedded
in the tactical team and we are where we have
all the same skill set, we have the same equipment,
and we have the same training. That makes us very
different from negotiating's pretty much around the world. Benefit of
(06:05):
that is that instead of being on a phone one
hundred meters away at a command post, you're front and
center making eye contact with the person who has the leverage,
whether that's on a ledge or with a person that
they've kidnapped, or a hostage situation or even a counter
terrorism event. And so because of that, as you and
I are sitting opposite each other here, I get to
(06:26):
see the blink rate, perspiration, what the hands are doing.
Is there any cognitive dissonance, Is there any difference between
what I'm seeing and what they're saying, and you get
to subconsciously take in that information and process it in
real time when you are face to face with someone.
And that's one of the big benefits that we have
in Victoria is we have negotiators who are part of
that tactical team. I'm absolutely thrilled to be part of it.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I know you're a disciple of eck car Toll The
Power of Now, and he talks about alert stillness being
rather than doing being in those moments. How does that
plan into these situations when you are so close to
someone who may harm themselves, you, somebody else. How do
you keep in mind in that alert stillness that you need.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
I please you ask that question, because my wife asked
it to me today. She said, I know the sort
of work you do, and I know the calmness that
you bring to a chaotic situation. But I just watch
you roll up a garden hose and lose your blob.
So there is something with you that is different to
a lot of people, and I cherish that. And I
think most of the negotiated team are a cut from
(07:33):
a similar cloth. And we always say to each other,
move slowly, be the slowest person in the room, because
if you go into a room and you try to
exert confidence and confidence and you try and show everyone
how big and how important you are, it has the
opposite effect because your brain is making ninety thousand plus
decisions every day and they're subconscious. And so what we
(07:56):
try and do when we get out on scene is
we try and move slowly. We speak softly, and that's
something that as a father I use with my children.
Speak softly, you will bring a calmness to a chaotic situation.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Does that work at home?
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I'm working on it. My father always said to me
that if you don't look back at the younger version
of yourself and think that you used to be an idiot,
then chances are you still are. So I'm working on
being a father, I'm working on being a police communicator
and a specialist. But I'm always saying to myself and
people that I work with, We're always saying we're not
good enough. We need to be better, and we need
(08:31):
to be learning more, and we need to be evolving.
And I think the day you say I've learned it
all and seen it all and done it all is
probably the time that you're fooling yourself or you need
to write encyclopedia.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Because this job is a leveler. You can have success
one day and the following day can be a horrible
failure and you can go away with a terrible memory,
a terrible trauma for everyone involved. And it's relentless too.
I mean, people have no idea how many jobs the
negotiators do. What's your routine schedule of your roster like,
so we.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Work a day, afternoon, and night shift, and so we
have a twenty four hour coverage. We've got a base
of eighteen negotiators, which is not many when you consider
the size of Victoria. We cover the whole state. There's
no regional negotiators, so we don't have negotiators in country spots.
It's us. And so when you go to a deployment
sometimes that can mean that everyone has to go without
(09:24):
so it means you can't go to everything. We have
a saying the negotiators sell that you can do anything
in a negotiation, but you can't do everything. And it's
the same thing with Victoria. We have to say no
sometimes to people. We have to say no, you've got this,
it's in your wheelhouse. Keep at it. And so to
your point, I have had what some would call failures,
(09:44):
and part of my evolution as a human being is
to learn that the process is what matters, not the outcome.
If we're outcome driven, and if we're caring constantly about
what the end state of a negotiation is is, we're
setting ourself up for a failure. I should say, and
I remember, I had a death that happened. Someone either
ended their life in front of me, or it was
death by MISSI adventure. We still don't know, but that
(10:08):
person died and I was the negotiator, talking to him
the whole time, and I saw it happen. And when
I came home, I was exhausted. I'd done a fourteen
hour shift. There's a lot of scrutiny that is attached
to this level of policing, and there should be. And
so when I had fulfilled all my obligations and the
scrutiniers had established that we had acted within the self test,
(10:31):
which is scrutiny, ethical, lawful, and fair, then I went
home and I was tired, but I was wired. And
I was sitting out on the deck with my then
seven year old daughter, and she said to me, and
I'll never forget it. Mummy said that something bad happened
at work today and I said, yeah, it did. And
she said, is the man okay? And I said no,
he's not. And she said did you talk to his mum?
(10:53):
And that I actually had before we started engaging with
this person, and I said yeah, and she goes, what
did you say to his mother? And I said I
told her we'd look after a boy. That's what I
said to her. And then she said to me, well,
that didn't happen, though I did it. And I said no, no,
I didn't. And she said is the mum sad? And
I said yeah, yeah she is. She's very sad. And
(11:14):
she said are you And I burst into tears and
I said, yeah, I am sad. And that for me
as part of the process. If you go home after
something like that and you don't let that emotion out
and you bottle it up or you disguise it with
something else, you are kicking that can down the road.
And so to speak, on the survivability of being a
(11:36):
negotiator for fourteen years, it is that vulnerability, being able
to say that I am having a human reaction from
something that is personal and it is emotional and there
was a sadness attached to it. What is absolutely unacceptable
is for me to start blaming myself or taking that
person's life as if it is my responsibility, because it's not.
(11:57):
And I say that's my students. I say it to
the police officers every day that you cannot operate with
the fear that that person's life is in your hands,
because it isn't. What is in your hands is the process,
your training, and the decisions that you make. And so
I've learned that by doing more than eight hundred critical
incidents in my career, where the process is what we
(12:19):
work towards. Yes, that person deserves our best, but we
are not at our best if we're operating on fear,
if we're operating on obligation, or if we're operating on guilt.
Whenever we go and do our communications.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And equally, if you do save somebody or it's a
positive outcome, the tendency would be to accept the term hero.
That's also double ed sword, isn't it absolutely?
Speaker 1 (12:41):
And I don't subscribe to that at all. I get
paid to do a job. I volunteer to do this job,
and it comes with consequences and if your ego gets
in the way and you start thinking that this is
your success, and then that's a folly. Because I work
with a world leading team at critical incident response, the
men and women there are I'm so proud of them,
(13:02):
But what I'm most proud is not the outcome, but
the processes that they follow every day, the training that
they have, and the professionalism that they conduct themselves with.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
One of my favorite stories that you've told me in
the past occurred on the Bolty Bridge. Was a double
negotiation in a sense, I think that story really encapsulates
a lot of what you're talking about. You want to
take us through that.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
It was a late night on a Saturday night and
we had the call out to go to the Bolty Bridge.
Back then, they didn't have the defensive barriers that prevented
people from scaling them, and there was a guy sitting
on the ledge. We didn't know who he was, which
is unusual. Usually we had to do some background checks
or we get to establish this person's identity and start
to get a feel of our strategy moving into this negotiation.
(13:44):
The traffic was still going was quite heavy. We moved
into position and approached him. I just want to touch
on a leverage first, because I think it's important that
people understand our relationship with leverage. Leverage is what's stopping
you from doing your job, either taking a person into
custody or preventing a suicide, or arresting a person for
(14:05):
a crime. If that person has leverage that prevents you
from doing that. That's why we get called because they
have leverage. If we focus on the leverage, then that
person then feels that that leverage holds way more value
than they did before. And unfortunately, because we get called
because police before us have been unsuccessful. We don't get
(14:26):
called by a triple zero. We get called by other
police units. So when we get there, oftentimes the police
are focusing on the leverage. Drop the knife, come down
from the ledge, let that person go, don't hurt anyone.
And so unfortunately, what that does is it's kind of
like a dog with a tennis ball. If you show
that beautiful animal that you want that tennis ball, you
know it's over before it's even begun. And so there's
(14:49):
a freedom to that that we have in the legs
that I would like every police officer to learn about.
And a person in Victoria and Australia is if you
focus on the leverage, you'll push that person towards it.
You can't let the fear of what they might do
with that leverage cloud your decision making. So we started
engaging with him. I was working with a guy called
Ben Fantastic Negotiator, and we were both engaging with this
(15:12):
mail and he kept trying to dictate the terms of
where we were and weren't able to stand and that's
quite common. It's a person who is in a crisis
point trying to reach out for some sense of control.
Eventually we had to shut down the bolty because buses
full of Bucks parties were going past saying jump. And
you know, very very harden to hear that kind things.
(15:36):
You hear that sort of stuff a lot, and it's disappointing.
But if I'm being honest, I had a similar incident
on a ledge above a train station and there was
hundreds of people just standing watching and one or two
people said jump. But when this guy, after hours and
hours of negotiation, came down in the cherry Picka, they
opened up the doors and the fire it fighters led
(15:58):
him out. Everyone heared hundreds and hundreds of people and
patted him on the back and clapped him on the back.
And so the humanity that I see victorians have, I'm
reminded of it every day that more often than not
people are kind, and more often than not people say things.
And it's like saying something on the internet that it's gone,
but you can't take it back. You just said it,
(16:19):
and you probably didn't understand the consequences of that. But yeah,
that sort of stuff was going on a little bit.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
But set the scene here because I think I've undersold
the atmosphere where he was, what he was doing the moment.
It was quite something, and he was laboring under a
misapprehension that his life had gone to a place where
there was no return from.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, so there was information that we didn't know at
the time which was very significant in relation to what
his motivation was. And I'll tell you that at the
time when I found it out, But at the time
we just thought it was, for want of a better term,
someone who was at in crisis and wanted to end
their own life. He was standing on the decline slope
(17:02):
of the bridge, which just is a drop into probably
undred and fifty feet into water, at that height is
like concrete. And he was standing on that leaning out
with his belt tied around a light post. The tiny
piece of leather was the only thing holding him up
over that abyss.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
And the winds blowing, and can feel the bridge moving.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
And yeah, I didn't realize that, but the bridge does move,
and it's meant to move. But it is really disconcerting
when that, you know, thousands of tons of concrete and
steel moving underneath you. And I thought stopping the traffic
would make it less eerie and more safe, but it
made it feel even more. You feel alone because we
don't want to stimulate someone or over stimulate them, I
(17:42):
should say. So it was suddenly now Ben and I
alone on the bridge with this guy. And because we
had given an assessment, we'd made a decision. This is
a negotiation we will take as long as it takes.
And there is no opportunity here, nor do we want
to put ourselves at risk of grabbing this person. So
everyone else moved back, so then we didn't have any backup.
He was angry, he was emotional, knowing now what I do.
(18:07):
He was antisocial. He started to link out bits of
information to us, and we started to enter into the
basis of the negotiation where the dialogue happens. And we
found out and it was a shock when we did
that he had stabbed his girlfriend and thrown her out
of a moving vehicle because he thought we knew that information.
And the moment he said it, I felt Ben grabbed
(18:29):
my arm and let's push back a little bit, because
this is now not suicide intervention. This is now someone
who was trying to not face up to a crime
that has been committed, a significant crime, and so we
now found ourselves in a position where he might be armed.
He had a knife before he stabbed somebody. This is
(18:49):
now a secondary crime scene. This is starting to become
beyond our span of control. And I was writing notes
that He turned around and said, what are you writing
in that day book? And we said, it's just notes.
We write notes about everything, mate, and he said, give
me that. Give me then. Now. I made a mistake
back then, because I would not do that today. And
(19:12):
someone might say, well, is a twenty cent book worth
someone's life. That's not the way it works, because that's
operating under fear, and that's operating where you're afraid of consequences.
But he gets to make decisions, and we get to
make decisions. And so I made a decision and I
gave him the day book. He started writing something in
(19:32):
the day book and I only found out later what
it was. At the time, I thought it was a
suicide note, where I thought, I've made a mistake here.
I've given him an opportunity to put his last thoughts
onto there. I then started running out of ideas, and
that can happen in a negotiation, and that's why we
operate in pairs. I looked down at the ledge and
(19:53):
I said, oh, you might not kill yourself. You might
not die.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Volllybridge is not that high.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
People have sur by falls.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah, We've had some people that I've even spoken to
after the fact who have gone off the Boulty Bridge
and survived and been able to tell their story. So
I utilized that information and I said, this might put
you in a wheelchair, or he might have significant injuries.
He might not die. And he looked down and I
could see him processing it, and the younger, stupid me thought,
while I'm making progress here, and I moved towards him.
(20:21):
He said, so, you don't think I'll die? And I said, no,
I think he might not. And then as I was
coming up to him, he looked like he was moving
back to my side, and he did, and then he
pulled a knife from his right pocket and then he
held it up and said, well, now you're going to
have to shoot me, and he started moving towards Ben
and I and Ben pulled out his firearm. I pulled
out my taser, and we nearly ended up in a
(20:44):
position of where we had a police shooting with very
little backup on the top of the bolty bridge in
the middle of the CBD. So we backed up and
very very calmly, because you fall to the lowest level
of training that you have, and the level of training
that we have at CERT is very good. We were
able to then switch into a tactical mode where we
got inside we called the Udu loup, and the loop
(21:07):
is observe, orientate yourself, decide on what you're going to do,
and then act. And so we moved into into a
position where we interrupted his udul loop. So he has
an ability to observe, orient aside and act, and so
we interrupted that by giving him too many things to
worry about all at once. He realized that he was
beaten in that moment, so he went back to the
(21:27):
bridge again and kept the knife in his pocket. And
it was at that moment that the strangest thing happened.
A vehicle comes up on the other side of the
empty road and stops at the top of the apex
of the bridge, and a young girl with blonde hair
gets out, and I'm looking over, thinking, this can't be serious.
What is happening. There is a police blockade down there.
(21:48):
She's just driven through. I didn't know. And suddenly she
got inside my udeloup. So I looked out, and she
gets out of her car and she looked and then
I realized when I saw her face, I've seen that
face before, that stoic, very vacant stare of someone who
was in crisis. And then I went, oh, oh no.
(22:08):
And she got up and stood on the opposite side
of the bridge and poised in position, ready to jump,
And it was just it was totally unrelated. But she
saw an opportunity and moved into that position. And I
like to think that she saw an opportunity where there
was someone already up there trying to negotiate, and maybe
that person might be able to help her one of
the police sergeants from the city said, oh, can one
(22:30):
of you guys just jump across and just jump across
in and help her out. Now, the distance is about
the distance between you and I at this desk today.
It's only about a meter and a bit and I
would happily jump that, but not at one hundred and
fifty feet off the ground. So we called in some
other negotiators and they came in and took over from
that situation. But it was bonkers, to say the least,
(22:51):
that we've got two of those at the same time
in the same place in Victoria. So we went through
the process, we went through our training, and we went
through a good strategy, which was that almost to allow
this person to make his own decisions. How you feel
in this moment with whatever's happened with your girlfriend. That's
occupying your mind, and that's understandable. But what you're doing
(23:14):
with those emotions is not healthy and it's not okay.
It's not acceptable. So if you want to throw yourself
from this bridge, we are not going to stop you,
and that is your decision. And that's a very difficult
thing to say to someone because you're giving them permission
and I said to him at the time, and I
said this three days ago to someone, it is not
a crime to end your own life. It is sad
(23:36):
and it has loss and has consequences. But saying that
to him it almost put a full stop at the
end of it, and his behavior changed. And so eventually
we went through the process and he surrendered to Ben
and I. We took him into custody and he moved
on to the rest of his life to face the
consequences of that action. But eight hundred and fifty odd
(24:00):
jobs like that, you make mistakes and you learn from it.
And I remember as he left, I picked up the
day book and I opened it up, and instead of
a suicide note, it said I'm cold, I'm tired, I'm
in a lot of trouble, and I've got to listen
to this fuck with talk on and on and on
and on. I'm starting to get bored. And so sometimes
your hypothesis is right that this is not a suicide
(24:22):
atteam to this is someone looking for options. And when
your brain is in crisis, and I can talk about
brain states all day, but when your brain is in
the limbic system, which is where the emotions come from.
You don't make good informed decisions, you don't make good
informed communications. Almost every bit of your decision making comes
from the desire to connect. It's your emotions. And so
(24:46):
I've over the years and since that job, and that
was more than eight years ago, I've learned how to
recognize brain states when I'm working at a negotiation and
I'm always trying to learn and test those hypotheses that
you get with people.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Typically one of the most challenging jobs you find negotiat when.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You're dealing with someone who is antisocial. So you're dealing
with someone whose brain is online. So when you and
I right now are using the core tex part of
our brain, So that is the most evolved part of
our brain. That's where you find motor skills come from.
It's where your ability to communicate, your ability to make
informed decisions, that's where that comes from. If we put
more and more stress on people, they go into the
(25:28):
limbic system, which I talked about, and then even more
stress you go into the brain stand which is fire
flight and freeze. But if you get someone who's not
in crisis, but they've got leverage, so they've got something
that can either hurt you or hurt themselves. But they're
not doing it because they're emotional. They're doing it because
they're looking to extract an opportunity out of the situation.
You know, think someone with a hostage or someone who
(25:50):
is even saying a terror event. Their brain is online
and they're making rational, informed decisions and they're deciding that
they can outwit you. That can be the most difficult
thing to do. And I'll give you a very quick example.
I was at the Commission Flats in the city. There
was an aggravated so someone had broken into someone else's flat.
They were trashing it up, and I remember when we
(26:10):
finally got in there, he had drawn swastikas on the
wall and it was a horrible scene. But he was
trying to outwit us the entire time. So everything we
said he had an answer for. Everything we offered he
had a response to. And so he tricked me, and
I remember and it nearly cost me my life. He
was screaming and yelling, and all of a sudden, he
started to whisper. And when someone starts to whisper, your
(26:34):
brain is naturally evolved to attached to that frequency because
you're hearing something that is either forbidden something that is
different from the norm and something you want, you want
to pay attention to. And so he started to whisper,
and I leaned up against the door and I put
my ear right up. And then I heard a battery
powered circular saw fire up and he shot it through
(26:55):
the door, and it had cut a bit of my hair,
and he drove it straight down where my face had
been just moments before. So I made a mistake. And
I've always found there are people like that that they
will goad you into a sense of comfort or I've
got something that you want, and then if you get
too close, suddenly they might lash out or throw something
at you, or in some cases, which just happened to
(27:16):
some of our negotiators, they've been shot at. So they're
the tricky ones. If I've answered your question at the
end of.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
This story, he's given you the close shave on the
the number one to the side of your head. I mean.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Well, so, eventually, we have a number of different jobs
as negotiators, and that is to negotiate the peaceful surrender
of our subject. For the most part, oftentimes we have
to provide information and intelligence to our tactical commander or
the arrest team who are supporting us in achieving their mission.
And so if you believe negotiations have stalled, failed, or
(27:48):
you're at an impass, you can then affect things around
the stronghold to get that person to re engage. And
so what they did was they conducted it's called a
breach and hold, and that's where they breached the door,
and then we hold with significant options, ready to defend
ourselves to see what happens next, and then you try
and engage. It was an empty corridor, there was graffiti everywhere,
(28:11):
there was stuff all over the floor. We moved with
purpose through the stronghold, slow, methodical, and he wasn't in
this place at all, gone, completely gone. We were on
level eighteen of the Commission Flats and we opened up
a window and I remember looking out and I looked
right and I could see the eastern suburbs and the
Dan Andongs, and then I looked to the left and
(28:32):
I could see on about I'm not hitting about an
inch of concrete. I could see a person shimming across
the wall on the outside of the top of the
Commission Flat tower. He was trying to escape and he
was in very real danger of falling or death by
misadventure at that stage, and so my options then to
negotiate with him are almost non existent. He's moving away
(28:54):
from me. He's driven and determined, and his brain's are online.
He's making you know, Alex Hanold, the free solo climber,
he'd make him look silly by compar Harrison. It was
pretty phenomenal how he was moving across that tiny piece
of masonry. But eventually he moved into what he thought
was another flat, but it wasn't. And standing there hiding
(29:17):
behind a door was five of the toughest guys that
I know waiting for him, and they waited until he
got comfortable and then arrested him without any force, which
is the outcome we're always going for.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Every job is different, isn't it. But I guess the
skills overarch all these jobs. And I hear about this
seventy thirty. You've got to be listing seventy percent, talking
thirty percent. Take us through how that works in practice.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
We say you have two ears in one mouth, and
that's about the ratio. You should be listening twice as
much as you speak. And the reason is that you
want to invite that person to tell you what the
main issue is. And if you're too busy talking you're
going to try and solve that problem for them, then
problem solving is never going to work because now is
not the time. Now is the time for them venting
(30:05):
them letting out what the issues is. And if you
listen enough, you will find a good appropriate question to
put it back to them and ask them what their
decision is. And I'll give you an example of my daughter.
She was at cross country training and she wanted to
go to the car and sit down because it was
cold and it was wet and they were having to run.
And she goes, I don't want to do this, and
I said, and I just listened, and I heard, and
(30:27):
I asked a few questions, and I made sure I listened.
And I said, what's the best thing about doing cross country?
She goes, I like the medals at the end of
the year and the party. And I said, okay, well,
how do we get that? She says, by doing races?
And I said do we get them by winning races?
She goes, no, just by doing our best. And I said, okay,
now I'm going to give you a choice. You can
go to the car, and I'll sit there with you
(30:48):
and we'll listen to music and we'll have fun. Or
you can choose to go back and you can choose
to train, learn and grow and do your best. But
it's your decision. What would you like to do? I
involved her in the process, and I didn't say you're
going to do this, or there's going to be no McDonald's,
or you're not going to get that's not going to work.
It might work in the short term. But someone once
said parenting is making tough decisions now, easy life later,
(31:12):
and negotiating is the same thing. And so we make
tough decisions as soon as we start talking to people
and we listen, but we always give them an option.
What is your decision, what would you like to do?
The last thing we do is stand there and threaten people.
If you don't do this, there's going to be these consequences,
and there are real consequences, but we don't lay it
out like a scolding parent. You have to involve that
(31:33):
person in the process, and that's what we try and do.
I was asked recently where do kids act up the
most in the supermarket? And it's at the register, right.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Because it's designed to have always chocolates and lollies and
toys position there to drive the mad and then they
drive their parents.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Man, that's right, But there is a psychological solution to everything,
and there is a practical solution. And the practical solution
is to give your kid that lollipop or the magazine
with a toy on the front. And so what I
started doing with my children was as we shopped, I
have said, you know, you go pick three pieces of fruit,
because I have a hypothesis that kids act up at
the supermarket at the register, not just because the actions
(32:14):
of the supermarkets, but because they see you out there
making decisions, putting things in the shopping trolley. They see
you making decisions and choosing things, and that is ultimately
very exciting for a young growing mind. And they know
that that register, if you look at it like it's
a gated system, it's the last part of the gate
where you get to make a decision, and that's what
(32:35):
all the stuff they want is. So what I started
doing was I noticed that if I involved them in
the process, by the time it got to the register,
they might ask once, but there was no screaming and
dropping of the toys or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Was police, drop the toy.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah that's right, Yeah, yeah, get down off the couch.
And so I applied that to my policing as a negotiator.
Is I involved that person in the process instead of
just giving them ultimatums. You're not allowed this, you're not
allowed that. That's not going to happen. You're going to
do what I say now is the time we're at
the end of the register or I need you to
get into the divisional van. No. I include them in
(33:12):
the process, and it might seem like it will take longer,
but it's difficult decisions at the beginning and an easy
life later. And that's what we do at a siege situation.
Is the first thing I say to anybody is has
anyone explained to you exactly why I'm here? And the
answer is usually no, Okay, Well let me explain that
to you. And if you've got any questions, you ask
(33:32):
them please, because I don't want them to be a misunderstanding.
And so you know, we build up that sense of
trust and it's trust and it's rapport and you don't
always need one or the other. Remember, you can do
anything in a negotiation which you can't do everything. People
always think, oh, I've got one of my coppers talking
to this guy and they've got great rapport. That's good,
(33:54):
But you've been there for four hours. Is this now
a successful negotiation? And why have you called the negotiator capability?
We might then have to come up and okay, let's
put report to the side. Let's focus on trust because
at the moment, he's enjoying rapport and he's liking the
control that that brings him. And yes, he might like
that detective or seeing you comfortable, but we have a
(34:15):
job to do and we have people that we serve
in Victoria, and so I've noticed people are fascinated about negotiations,
but a lot of people misunderstand it what it actually is.
And sometimes that means we don't make friends at jobs
because you're tapping someone on the shoulder who's working their
butt off and saying sorry, we need to take over now.
(34:37):
We're not there to make friends. But you talk to
those people afterwards and you try and smooth things over.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
I've got the greatest respect for people who are on
the divisional van. I think seventy five percent of their
jobs and their domestic violence related Yes, they're going into
scenes where they're telling people older than them how to
solve problems in their relationships and so forth, and a
lot of your work does come out of those situations.
You're also skilling the frontline officers in those principles, but
(35:04):
at least when they cross the threshold, they have some
sense of what to do. What do you try to
impart to them.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
So one of the biggest things I try and say
with any policing is you need to justify your decision making.
And we have a thing called the tactical options model,
and there's all sorts of things in the tactical options
model that most people would be familiar with, but they're
things that we can use in our skill set to
respond to people. And one of them that I think
(35:33):
is criminally undersold is presence. I do a lot of
study and I read a lot of books. And there
was a study in New York that they had done
based on the serial killer Ted Bundy. What they had found.
When he was finally convicted, he spoke with psychologists and
a lot of them wanted to know what made him
the villain that he was. But the psychologists that went
(35:56):
to the front of the queue were the ones who
wanted to know how did he choose his victims, what
did victims selection look like? And so when they interviewed him,
he said, well, it's a whole bunch of things. It
was their gait, it was the way they moved. They
looked like a fish out of water. They looked like
they didn't belong, like they would be missed. But it
was hundreds of different things that when I put it
(36:17):
all together in my mind, I had a red button
and I just hit that red button and said, that's
my victim. But that's just a hypothesis, right, and so
you've got to test it. So what they did was
they drove around in a van and they filmed random
people just for moments walking down the street. They showed
those footage to criminals and people with a criminal history
and gave them a red button and said you just
(36:39):
all you have to do is watch, and when you
see someone that you were determined to be your victim,
you hit that red button. When they collated all the
red button hits, there was men, women, children, police officers, teachers,
but they all shared the same qualities, and those qualities
were they looked like there was a chaos in their movement,
like they didn't belong, like they wouldn't be missed, like
(37:00):
they were frustrated, like they were flustered, looking at their watch,
walking the wrong direct, turning back, making second guessing themselves.
And so what I learned from that is what's the
opposite of that look like? And how can we get
police officers or anyone listening to this to use those
principles so that you don't become a victim. And so
(37:21):
whenever I'm teaching our students and with our negotiation team,
the work starts long before you get out of that
car at the incident. The work starts in your planning,
The work starts in your presence, The work starts in
your body language. Be the slowest person in the room,
not the fastest. Don't command attention, don't command respect, Earn
(37:46):
it and it will come freely if you're confident. And
if you're confident, and there's a difference between confidence and bravado.
And I find that if I was being honest about
myself as a young police officer, I was chopped full
of bravado. Because you graduate and you get this uniform
and you do the marching out, and it's a phenomenal
experience and I wouldn't change it for anything in the world.
(38:08):
But the young, stupid me was full of bravado. You
will do what I say because the law is there,
and I work for that institution and I respect it,
and so should you. Life doesn't work that way, and
people are complex and they're interesting and they're very different.
And if you walk into a room and you demand
people respect you, it's not going to work very well.
(38:28):
And so what I try to teach people is is
like you would have done today. You did preparation, and
you're very good. I know your history, Adam, and you're
very good at and researching and building relationships that doesn't
happen overnight. There's a funny story about I think it
was Pablo Picasso. He used to sit in a cafe
(38:51):
and do sketches for people for money. And there was
a woman lined up and she gave him a you
know at the time, a large sum of money, and
he did this thing and a minute and a half
and gave it to her. And she said, that took
you a minute and a half, and he said, no,
it didn't matter. It took me my whole life. And
it's kind of like the same thing with negotiating it.
We will go to a job and we'll deal with
(39:12):
someone and they will go We did all the hard work,
we talked for five hours and you just turned up
and in three minutes, you guys solved it. And it
didn't come in three minutes, it happened. It took me
fourteen years of negotiation. It took me twenty five years
of being a police officer. And so I wish mate
that I had this fast forward button to give people
(39:34):
life experience and the ability to prepare. But they can
certainly do it faster than I did.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
The negotiator is part of a technical hierarchy of options.
Eventually you have to step aside and let the next
option take place, which may be forced. Yes, how do
you know when you're losing the battle, but the negotiation
is over.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
There's an old saying that when someone tells you who
they are, believe them the first time. It's not always
the case. When you get someone who's scared, who's frightened,
who's emotional, whose brain is offline, and get away from here,
or I'll do this aba and see. After a bit
of experience, it's quite easy to spot someone who's just
lashing out of the world because they're stalling for time.
(40:21):
But if you get someone who says to me, I
will never ever listen to a thing you say or
do what you want, and then they go ahead and
continue to prove it. You can trial and build all
the trust and report you want. But if that person
is highly motivated with the desire to foil your plans
(40:42):
for one of a better word. And I wasn't at
these jobs, but you take, like Binson Laguancio, those sorts
of characters very intent on what happened, then well, you
know you're testing me here. But we had multiple day
sieges with both of those characters. One of them men
did in a fatality with the so OG, and then
(41:02):
another one ended up with options used then and arrest
by the SOG being made. But you're dealing with someone
who gets given all the time in the world, but
instead of breaking down what their reason for being in
that situation is and dealing with the emotion, they instead
increase their leverage and they increase their desire to take
on police in an armed confrontation. And it's not ideal,
(41:26):
but that's why we have specialist teams like the cur team,
and that's why we have the sogs, is to take
that seriously and take the fight to that person who's
ultimately as anti social and violent as they come. And
there are those people in our community. They're rare, but
we need to have a capability to answer that force
with force.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
We also see in the movies negotiators are talking to
a criminal, someone in a siege or something, and the
subject will say, get my wife down here, I want
to talk to my wife, or someone else's bring the
girlfriend in or the friend in. Does that ever happen?
Do you ever addicate your role like that?
Speaker 1 (42:02):
So the answer to the first part, yes, it happens
all the time. We get I want this, I want this,
give me this. I've had. I want a seven four
seven laden with fuel, ready to take me to the
Cayman Islands, to a non extradition country where I'm going
to live out my days on a marijuana plantation. I've
had all that. Ultimately, what you need to do is
throw those demands we call them or once through a
(42:25):
prison in your mind and go what do they really need?
And so, like my daughter are picking up the magazine
at the front of Coal's she doesn't want that little
toy in the magazine. She wants to make decisions and
put things in the trolley and watch them and scan
them and be part of the process. What she needs
is to feel heard and feel instead of me just
(42:45):
you sit there and be quiet and we'll get this done.
But if you involve the person in the process, the
once go away quite quickly. And so I had someone
very recently. He was on the outside of a building
and you know, like the lethal weapon on the right
on the ledge. I opened up the door of the
room so I could talk to him, and he said,
close that door, I'll jump. So that's what he wants.
(43:06):
Close the door, I'll jump. And he wanted the AFP.
Go get the AFP. And I said, okay, you can jump.
I'm not going to stop you. I don't have any
safety equipment and that would be that would be very reckless.
But you can jump. Well, then get the AFP. He said.
I said, oh, look, they don't have authority or jurisdiction here,
it's me. And he started counting up, not down, started
(43:28):
counting up. So I don't even know where he's going
to with this one. And he did the old fake
You know, I'm going to jump now unless you do
what I want. And I just stood there and held
my ground, and a younger me wouldn't have done that.
And I said, well, that's okay, mate, you can, but
I just need to let you know the boundaries. You're
allowed to make decisions out there, and there are consequences
for that, but I'm allowed to make decisions in here too,
(43:49):
And I'm deciding that you need help. You're in crisis.
And he goes, we'll bring my mom down here, and
I said, what would you say to her if she
was here? And his voice broke and he started talking,
and then I realized he doesn't need his mom down here.
He wants his mommy down here, but he doesn't need it.
What he needs is a sense of support. And he
goes back to the one that he trusts the most,
(44:10):
which is his mother. And I said, I can't bring
your monmy down here, mate. He goes, do it or
I'll jump, and I said, well, I don't think it's ethical,
fair or lawful, nor would withstand any scrutiny if I
was to bring her here and see you hurting the
way you are today. So I'm going to have to
say no to that. Main, and that's going to be
something that I'm not going to move on. So I apologize,
(44:31):
but that's my decision, and you're free to make decisions
you want to out there. And within a very short
period of time he moved on from it because I've
given him what he needed, which is a sense of control.
You can control things out there, and you are in control,
but so am I, and I'm here to support you.
So I guess to shortcut the answer. Instead of focusing
(44:53):
on what people want, you focus on what they need.
And most people, most human beings, need a sense of
control in their lives, how they're treated, how they make decisions,
and they need to feel supported when they do that,
and they need to feel supported in how they feel
and the complex emotions that are going on in their minds.
So I give people a sense of decision making. It's
your decision. What would you like to do? These are
(45:14):
your options, and I let them know that I'm not
going to leave their side. And for the better part,
it's infinitely better than me trying to run around dancing
to the beat of their drum like a good parent.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
In the way, isn't I reckon? There's a lot of
transferable skills here. But yeah, eight hundred plus negotiations over
fourteen years, so many lives intersected at critical moments. Do
you wonder what happens to the people that you negotiate
with once the siege or the moment is over.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
There's a few people that I think about from time
to time, and I allow myself a certain amount, but
I have to draw the line somewhere because whilst the
people are in sieges, the people who have been kidnapped,
the people who are a victim of hostage or that
are the hostage take. Yes, they deserve our very best
at the negotiation, but we need to reserve our absolute
(46:10):
best for the loved ones that we have at home.
And so, yes, there are a few people that I
allow myself time to think about. But for the most part,
when that person surrenders to us and we operate in
the team and in pairs at the very minimum, but
usually there's two or three of us, we encourage each
other to get out of dodge and go back to
(46:31):
the office, rehabilitate ourselves, reset and get ready to go
to the next one. Because that's eight hundred complex, stressful
situations that I can't have bouncing around in my head
because I'm just not going to be effective. And so
that's why I say, you don't need to be a psychologist,
you don't need to be a social worker, because you
(46:54):
need to be a police officer. And if you're asking
police officers to be social workers, I think that's unfair.
You know, the mental health system is so complex. We
need good police officers operate within their bounds to get
a successful outcome and then pass that person on to
the next phase of the Victorian system that may help them.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
This has really become a specialist job and in the
past people used to cycle through this job. As I
understand it from other roles. You've chosen to stay in it,
and you're also giving back a lot to the next
generation of officers in the divvans and so forth. How
long can you keep doing this that that's a lot
of stress, a lot of pressure, and a lot of
mental discipline required, not to think about particularly the failures
(47:37):
where you couldn't save somebody, where you couldn't get a
positive outcome.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, I agree with you. We have the most senior
negotiator cadre probably in the world in Victoria, and that
speaks of two things I believe. Number one, we have
a good set of systems in place that encourage retention
of our members. And number two, and this is I
think critical, is we have a really good culture within
the Negotiator Unit. It's an office within an office within
(48:03):
an office. Okay, so we're in a tactical team. We've
got all the different elements there, the critical Incident response team,
and then in the corner is us and we've got
our little room. We've got you know, the usual stuff
you see on a police station, the photoshop faces on
memes and given each other shit. But what I love
about it is when we were forming the unit, my
(48:24):
friend John Harley, who's my boss, I said, how do
we know if we're going to be successful? And he
says about what? And I said, our culture. How do
we know if it's good culture? And he goes, It's easy.
People will want to come and hang out with us,
that's it. They want to hear us, they want to
talk to us. And if we've done our job well
and if we've got a good culture, people will come
to us. And that's what we've created. And so I
(48:45):
have incredibly fond relationships with detectives, with a psychological unit
from Victoria Police. We had a psychologist, one of the
best in Australia, Nicole, who was with us. She's got
a lot on her plate of all her work for
Victoria Police and she came and spent eight months with
us and we just were like sponges learning from her.
(49:06):
The SOG will come and spend time with us, and
that didn't always happen, and it happened because we have
a good culture and we have a meritocracy. If you
are the best, if you are like Jake at the
start and everyone else that I work with, they are
the best and they are so good at their jobs.
And I think we've created that, not by accident but
(49:27):
by design.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
I think also you mentioned at the beginning of this
one of the best debris you have is cutting yourself
off from the day's work and talking to your daughter
or your wife.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Absolutely, and it's important that if I drag this stuff
home with me, that's not healthy. But there is enough
that I can give of the work that I do
to let them know when I'm struggling, So let them
know what I'm being vulnerable because in the last ten years,
particularly and especially post COVID, we may have misunderstood stress,
(50:01):
and so what I mean by that, And I've got
to tread carefully here because everyone's experience is unique. But
stress is a force just like heat is. And so
heat can cook your food, it can make you warm,
it can also burn you. And we get stress, and
we get a stress response from a critical incident. When
we get an adrenaline, we're getting cortisol, the stress hormone
(50:22):
in her brain. It is a stressful experience, and we
get a stress response, noise sensitivity, forgetful memory, the shaking
of the hands, the tremors, that's a normal human reaction,
and we need to know that that's just our body
healing from what happened. And so I freely will show
emotion when I'm talking about jobs, because that's a healthy
(50:43):
human reaction that I should feel something and to light
it out. When I think about stress, it's like you
injure your knee. People want to chuck ice packs on
it and get anti inflammatories. That sells rushing to the
area trying to heal your body. And we're very quick
to throw things and diagnoses at it instead of letting
it take its natural course. And so I encourage a
(51:04):
lot of the police that I deal with. To understand
that this is a bonker's job. You will experience more
in the first year of being a police officer than
most people will in their entire lifetime. And I don't
think that, but I don't think there's any other career
that can give you that. And you are seeing victorians
at the worst day of their lives and you get
to help them, and so understand that stress responses happen.
(51:28):
They happen for a reason and for the most part,
it's probably a good thing that they do. So with me,
I don't weaponize my stress response. I embrace it. I
learn how to control it, like you know, I like
I do combat breathing. I do some sense of mindfulness
unless that garden hoset kinks up just the wrong way
(51:48):
and then I lose my blood.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
Mate. But well, you've got a full head of hair,
a lot of it's great, but clearly clearly doing something right. Listen,
thank you so much for your service. And I think
it's an amazing job you do because you think of
how many situations before this capability became developed, things ended
in loss of life, injury, misery and tragedy. When you
can say, of those eight hundred jobs, the majority, I
(52:11):
would say, you've affected a peaceful outcome.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Yeah. I think our job as negotiators is to assist
the mission, and the mission usually almost always is the
safe resolution of the incident. And I am a very
small cog in a wonderful team of negotiators. And I
couldn't be more proud, adam of the work that we
do that especially the support that we get from our
command because we are There's less negotiators in this country
(52:38):
than there are professional football players or car races. It's scarce.
It's rare. And my dad said to me, and I'll
leave you with this that he said, no matter what
you do, because I'm an immigrant, I wasn't born in
this country and we moved here from Ireland, and my
mum and dad said, no matter what you do, serve
the community that has been so kind to us. But
(53:00):
don't live a boring life. It's not about money, it's
not about wins and successes. It's don't live a boring life.
And I can if I if I retired tomorrow, I
would be happy with everything that I've done. It's been
it's been exciting. My career has been interesting, violent, sad, thrilling,
(53:24):
but it has not been boring.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
And you're about to start another shift and you have
no idea what's coming, no idea at all.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
I tell you what, mate, I'm excited for what's coming.
Because the day you don't feel excitement is it's time
to stop and do something else. Because I love what
we do, I love the team I work with, and
I'm very proud to be a police officer, and especially
I'm very proud to be a police negotiator with Victory Police.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
That was leading Senior constab believe while I hand on
his job as a police negotiator, he sees people at
their very worst moments and affects a positive outcome. I'd
like to see Lee's face if I was ever in
that situation. We all get to those moments. Look after
each other. It's really important. But if you do get
to that moment, there is resources out there. Thank you
(54:13):
so much for listening today. If you've got stories for us,
actually you should call crime stoppers first if you've got
if you've got a case, call Crimestoppers first one le
under a triple three, triple zero. But you can also
give me an email. Adam Shanna writer at gmail dot com.
This has been real crime with Adam Shann Thank you
for listening.
Apoche production.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shann. I'm your host,
Adam Shand Somewhere right now across Australia, a crisis is unfolding.
It may be a siege, hostage drama, domestic violence incident,
person experiencing a mental health episode, or someone threatening to
take their own life. It may just be someone who's
reached the end of their tether and needs to be
(00:35):
listened to.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
When the cops are called to a crisis, the negotiators
coordinate the car.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
In each of these scenarios, a police negotiator will be
on the scene trying to move that person in crisis
from no to yes, to help them re engage their
rational thought process, to de escalate the situation, and to
give them another way out when all seems hopeless.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
In the last twelve months, police negotiators from the Critical
Incident Response Team have been called to more than seven
hundred jobs.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Most of these jobs you will never hear about. Some, sadly,
you hear about when negotiations break down or when force
is required to ensure public safety. At the Sydney siege
in quest today, negotiators described the immense pressure when talks
broke down, But the vast majority of these scenes are
peacefully resolved and everyone gets to go home because of
(01:29):
the skills and the experience of the negotiator.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
It's a delicate balance of empathy and strategy, proving power
lies in peaceful speech.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Today, it's my pleasure to speak to one of Australia's
most experienced police negotiators, leading Senior Constable Lee Wallahan of
Victoria Police. Lee is a specialist and is passing on
his skills to rank and file police who are the
first responders in these challenging moments. Thanks for chatting today, Lee,
Thank you for having me I for sire, it absolute pleasure. Mate.
(02:01):
Tell me what makes a good negotiator.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Probably the thing that makes negotiator successful is I'll start
with one of our students who's now graduated from the
most recent course. His name is Jake. Jake is kind,
he's professional, he's interesting, he's interested, he's a good communicator.
He's a worldly person despite his young age, and he
(02:26):
is able to make decisions under immense pressure and make
good decisions and back those decisions up with sound reasoning.
But it's probably better if I tell you what negotiator
is not a negotiator is not a psychologist. They're not
a guidance counselor. They're not a marriage counselor. They're not
a real estate agent. They're not an employment specialist. And
(02:48):
sometimes that's what people think a negotiator needs to be,
is someone who can talk that person through their issues
and through their problems. But when that person's in crisis,
and that person's got leverage and we'll talk about that later,
that person doesn't need counseling and psychology because it's not
the time. If you were to take a psychologist and
bring them to a siege situation, they take one look
(03:09):
at the person in crisis and say, this isn't the time.
They need a police officer. And what we are is
simply police officers with specialized skill set like Jake and
the world leading team that am part of. They possess
all of those skills in man man anymore.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
But you've chosen to specialize in this. Over the years,
I guess people have gone through this sort of a
role and they've gone to other jobs. You've chosen to specialize.
Why is that.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
The first experience I had with a police negotiator, I
was a young constable working in Fitzroy. It was two
thousand and two. I think petrol was about sixty cents
a lead. It was a different time and so we
didn't have a lot of the different levels of supervision
and support that we do today. And the job that
we had was a job in a small flat a
young man who was armed with a knife. We got
(03:56):
there on scene and without any backup, we went into
the apartment and I could hear distress from the other
side of the door. I always cautioned my students that
you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to the
lowest and best level of training that you have, and
that's what happened. I tried to kick in the door
and my foot went straight through it, and then my
partner then over the next minute or so, I had
(04:17):
to try and pull my leg out of the door,
and so the element of surprise was gone. I went
in and saw something and I'll never forget, which was
a young male with a knife to his throat. He
was naked and he was clearly in distress. And so
I fell to the lowest level of training I had,
which was I pulled out my weapon. My service pistol
was a smith and Western k frame revolver at the time,
(04:40):
because in my training, knife equals gone, and I didn't
think about the nuance of the situation and what that
person might actually be experiencing. I pulled out the revolver,
I pointed at him, and I just started shouting. After
a while, a tactical team arrived, and then they said
the negotiator was coming. And the whole time I just
kept shouting the police chawler and dropped the knife, dropped
the knife, and that wasn't working clearly. Soon after that,
(05:03):
a police negotiator turned up and the attack team we're
very respectful of him. They moved to the side. He
moved forward and I could hear him in a calm
and a slow voice. He said, look at him, he's terrified.
And I nodded, and my gun was shaking, and then
I felt the calm hand over the top of my
revolver and he lowered it and he said, I'm not
talking about him, I'm talking about you, mate. It's okay
(05:24):
to be scared. This is a scary day. It's not
a normal day for him, and it's not a normal
day for you. So I want everyone to take a
breath and take two steps back. Within ten minutes, he
had that person in a different state of mind and
the leverage was then easily and respectfully given to that
police negotiating And that was a moment in my mind
where I said, this is fascinating, this is something that
(05:45):
I aspire to. That was the start of my journey
towards becoming a police negotiator. But in Victoria we are
very different. We're not like other negotiating units. We're embedded
in the tactical team and we are where we have
all the same skill set, we have the same equipment,
and we have the same training. That makes us very
different from negotiating's pretty much around the world. Benefit of
(06:05):
that is that instead of being on a phone one
hundred meters away at a command post, you're front and
center making eye contact with the person who has the leverage,
whether that's on a ledge or with a person that
they've kidnapped, or a hostage situation or even a counter
terrorism event. And so because of that, as you and
I are sitting opposite each other here, I get to
(06:26):
see the blink rate, perspiration, what the hands are doing.
Is there any cognitive dissonance, Is there any difference between
what I'm seeing and what they're saying, and you get
to subconsciously take in that information and process it in
real time when you are face to face with someone.
And that's one of the big benefits that we have
in Victoria is we have negotiators who are part of
that tactical team. I'm absolutely thrilled to be part of it.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I know you're a disciple of eck car Toll The
Power of Now, and he talks about alert stillness being
rather than doing being in those moments. How does that
plan into these situations when you are so close to
someone who may harm themselves, you, somebody else. How do
you keep in mind in that alert stillness that you need.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
I please you ask that question, because my wife asked
it to me today. She said, I know the sort
of work you do, and I know the calmness that
you bring to a chaotic situation. But I just watch
you roll up a garden hose and lose your blob.
So there is something with you that is different to
a lot of people, and I cherish that. And I
think most of the negotiated team are a cut from
(07:33):
a similar cloth. And we always say to each other,
move slowly, be the slowest person in the room, because
if you go into a room and you try to
exert confidence and confidence and you try and show everyone
how big and how important you are, it has the
opposite effect because your brain is making ninety thousand plus
decisions every day and they're subconscious. And so what we
(07:56):
try and do when we get out on scene is
we try and move slowly. We speak softly, and that's
something that as a father I use with my children.
Speak softly, you will bring a calmness to a chaotic situation.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Does that work at home?
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I'm working on it. My father always said to me
that if you don't look back at the younger version
of yourself and think that you used to be an idiot,
then chances are you still are. So I'm working on
being a father, I'm working on being a police communicator
and a specialist. But I'm always saying to myself and
people that I work with, We're always saying we're not
good enough. We need to be better, and we need
(08:31):
to be learning more, and we need to be evolving.
And I think the day you say I've learned it
all and seen it all and done it all is
probably the time that you're fooling yourself or you need
to write encyclopedia.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Because this job is a leveler. You can have success
one day and the following day can be a horrible
failure and you can go away with a terrible memory,
a terrible trauma for everyone involved. And it's relentless too.
I mean, people have no idea how many jobs the
negotiators do. What's your routine schedule of your roster like,
so we.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Work a day, afternoon, and night shift, and so we
have a twenty four hour coverage. We've got a base
of eighteen negotiators, which is not many when you consider
the size of Victoria. We cover the whole state. There's
no regional negotiators, so we don't have negotiators in country spots.
It's us. And so when you go to a deployment
sometimes that can mean that everyone has to go without
(09:24):
so it means you can't go to everything. We have
a saying the negotiators sell that you can do anything
in a negotiation, but you can't do everything. And it's
the same thing with Victoria. We have to say no
sometimes to people. We have to say no, you've got this,
it's in your wheelhouse. Keep at it. And so to
your point, I have had what some would call failures,
(09:44):
and part of my evolution as a human being is
to learn that the process is what matters, not the outcome.
If we're outcome driven, and if we're caring constantly about
what the end state of a negotiation is is, we're
setting ourself up for a failure. I should say, and
I remember, I had a death that happened. Someone either
ended their life in front of me, or it was
death by MISSI adventure. We still don't know, but that
(10:08):
person died and I was the negotiator, talking to him
the whole time, and I saw it happen. And when
I came home, I was exhausted. I'd done a fourteen
hour shift. There's a lot of scrutiny that is attached
to this level of policing, and there should be. And
so when I had fulfilled all my obligations and the
scrutiniers had established that we had acted within the self test,
(10:31):
which is scrutiny, ethical, lawful, and fair, then I went
home and I was tired, but I was wired. And
I was sitting out on the deck with my then
seven year old daughter, and she said to me, and
I'll never forget it. Mummy said that something bad happened
at work today and I said, yeah, it did. And
she said, is the man okay? And I said no,
he's not. And she said did you talk to his mum?
(10:53):
And that I actually had before we started engaging with
this person, and I said yeah, and she goes, what
did you say to his mother? And I said I
told her we'd look after a boy. That's what I
said to her. And then she said to me, well,
that didn't happen, though I did it. And I said no, no,
I didn't. And she said is the mum sad? And
I said yeah, yeah she is. She's very sad. And
(11:14):
she said are you And I burst into tears and
I said, yeah, I am sad. And that for me
as part of the process. If you go home after
something like that and you don't let that emotion out
and you bottle it up or you disguise it with
something else, you are kicking that can down the road.
And so to speak, on the survivability of being a
(11:36):
negotiator for fourteen years, it is that vulnerability, being able
to say that I am having a human reaction from
something that is personal and it is emotional and there
was a sadness attached to it. What is absolutely unacceptable
is for me to start blaming myself or taking that
person's life as if it is my responsibility, because it's not.
(11:57):
And I say that's my students. I say it to
the police officers every day that you cannot operate with
the fear that that person's life is in your hands,
because it isn't. What is in your hands is the process,
your training, and the decisions that you make. And so
I've learned that by doing more than eight hundred critical
incidents in my career, where the process is what we
(12:19):
work towards. Yes, that person deserves our best, but we
are not at our best if we're operating on fear,
if we're operating on obligation, or if we're operating on guilt.
Whenever we go and do our communications.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And equally, if you do save somebody or it's a
positive outcome, the tendency would be to accept the term hero.
That's also double ed sword, isn't it absolutely?
Speaker 1 (12:41):
And I don't subscribe to that at all. I get
paid to do a job. I volunteer to do this job,
and it comes with consequences and if your ego gets
in the way and you start thinking that this is
your success, and then that's a folly. Because I work
with a world leading team at critical incident response, the
men and women there are I'm so proud of them,
(13:02):
But what I'm most proud is not the outcome, but
the processes that they follow every day, the training that
they have, and the professionalism that they conduct themselves with.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
One of my favorite stories that you've told me in
the past occurred on the Bolty Bridge. Was a double
negotiation in a sense, I think that story really encapsulates
a lot of what you're talking about. You want to
take us through that.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
It was a late night on a Saturday night and
we had the call out to go to the Bolty Bridge.
Back then, they didn't have the defensive barriers that prevented
people from scaling them, and there was a guy sitting
on the ledge. We didn't know who he was, which
is unusual. Usually we had to do some background checks
or we get to establish this person's identity and start
to get a feel of our strategy moving into this negotiation.
(13:44):
The traffic was still going was quite heavy. We moved
into position and approached him. I just want to touch
on a leverage first, because I think it's important that
people understand our relationship with leverage. Leverage is what's stopping
you from doing your job, either taking a person into
custody or preventing a suicide, or arresting a person for
(14:05):
a crime. If that person has leverage that prevents you
from doing that. That's why we get called because they
have leverage. If we focus on the leverage, then that
person then feels that that leverage holds way more value
than they did before. And unfortunately, because we get called
because police before us have been unsuccessful. We don't get
(14:26):
called by a triple zero. We get called by other
police units. So when we get there, oftentimes the police
are focusing on the leverage. Drop the knife, come down
from the ledge, let that person go, don't hurt anyone.
And so unfortunately, what that does is it's kind of
like a dog with a tennis ball. If you show
that beautiful animal that you want that tennis ball, you
know it's over before it's even begun. And so there's
(14:49):
a freedom to that that we have in the legs
that I would like every police officer to learn about.
And a person in Victoria and Australia is if you
focus on the leverage, you'll push that person towards it.
You can't let the fear of what they might do
with that leverage cloud your decision making. So we started
engaging with him. I was working with a guy called
Ben Fantastic Negotiator, and we were both engaging with this
(15:12):
mail and he kept trying to dictate the terms of
where we were and weren't able to stand and that's
quite common. It's a person who is in a crisis
point trying to reach out for some sense of control.
Eventually we had to shut down the bolty because buses
full of Bucks parties were going past saying jump. And
you know, very very harden to hear that kind things.
(15:36):
You hear that sort of stuff a lot, and it's disappointing.
But if I'm being honest, I had a similar incident
on a ledge above a train station and there was
hundreds of people just standing watching and one or two
people said jump. But when this guy, after hours and
hours of negotiation, came down in the cherry Picka, they
opened up the doors and the fire it fighters led
(15:58):
him out. Everyone heared hundreds and hundreds of people and
patted him on the back and clapped him on the back.
And so the humanity that I see victorians have, I'm
reminded of it every day that more often than not
people are kind, and more often than not people say things.
And it's like saying something on the internet that it's gone,
but you can't take it back. You just said it,
(16:19):
and you probably didn't understand the consequences of that. But yeah,
that sort of stuff was going on a little bit.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
But set the scene here because I think I've undersold
the atmosphere where he was, what he was doing the moment.
It was quite something, and he was laboring under a
misapprehension that his life had gone to a place where
there was no return from.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, so there was information that we didn't know at
the time which was very significant in relation to what
his motivation was. And I'll tell you that at the
time when I found it out, But at the time
we just thought it was, for want of a better term,
someone who was at in crisis and wanted to end
their own life. He was standing on the decline slope
(17:02):
of the bridge, which just is a drop into probably
undred and fifty feet into water, at that height is
like concrete. And he was standing on that leaning out
with his belt tied around a light post. The tiny
piece of leather was the only thing holding him up
over that abyss.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
And the winds blowing, and can feel the bridge moving.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
And yeah, I didn't realize that, but the bridge does move,
and it's meant to move. But it is really disconcerting
when that, you know, thousands of tons of concrete and
steel moving underneath you. And I thought stopping the traffic
would make it less eerie and more safe, but it
made it feel even more. You feel alone because we
don't want to stimulate someone or over stimulate them, I
(17:42):
should say. So it was suddenly now Ben and I
alone on the bridge with this guy. And because we
had given an assessment, we'd made a decision. This is
a negotiation we will take as long as it takes.
And there is no opportunity here, nor do we want
to put ourselves at risk of grabbing this person. So
everyone else moved back, so then we didn't have any backup.
He was angry, he was emotional, knowing now what I do.
(18:07):
He was antisocial. He started to link out bits of
information to us, and we started to enter into the
basis of the negotiation where the dialogue happens. And we
found out and it was a shock when we did
that he had stabbed his girlfriend and thrown her out
of a moving vehicle because he thought we knew that information.
And the moment he said it, I felt Ben grabbed
(18:29):
my arm and let's push back a little bit, because
this is now not suicide intervention. This is now someone
who was trying to not face up to a crime
that has been committed, a significant crime, and so we
now found ourselves in a position where he might be armed.
He had a knife before he stabbed somebody. This is
(18:49):
now a secondary crime scene. This is starting to become
beyond our span of control. And I was writing notes
that He turned around and said, what are you writing
in that day book? And we said, it's just notes.
We write notes about everything, mate, and he said, give
me that. Give me then. Now. I made a mistake
back then, because I would not do that today. And
(19:12):
someone might say, well, is a twenty cent book worth
someone's life. That's not the way it works, because that's
operating under fear, and that's operating where you're afraid of consequences.
But he gets to make decisions, and we get to
make decisions. And so I made a decision and I
gave him the day book. He started writing something in
(19:32):
the day book and I only found out later what
it was. At the time, I thought it was a
suicide note, where I thought, I've made a mistake here.
I've given him an opportunity to put his last thoughts
onto there. I then started running out of ideas, and
that can happen in a negotiation, and that's why we
operate in pairs. I looked down at the ledge and
(19:53):
I said, oh, you might not kill yourself. You might
not die.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Volllybridge is not that high.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
People have sur by falls.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah, We've had some people that I've even spoken to
after the fact who have gone off the Boulty Bridge
and survived and been able to tell their story. So
I utilized that information and I said, this might put
you in a wheelchair, or he might have significant injuries.
He might not die. And he looked down and I
could see him processing it, and the younger, stupid me thought,
while I'm making progress here, and I moved towards him.
(20:21):
He said, so, you don't think I'll die? And I said, no,
I think he might not. And then as I was
coming up to him, he looked like he was moving
back to my side, and he did, and then he
pulled a knife from his right pocket and then he
held it up and said, well, now you're going to
have to shoot me, and he started moving towards Ben
and I and Ben pulled out his firearm. I pulled
out my taser, and we nearly ended up in a
(20:44):
position of where we had a police shooting with very
little backup on the top of the bolty bridge in
the middle of the CBD. So we backed up and
very very calmly, because you fall to the lowest level
of training that you have, and the level of training
that we have at CERT is very good. We were
able to then switch into a tactical mode where we
got inside we called the Udu loup, and the loop
(21:07):
is observe, orientate yourself, decide on what you're going to do,
and then act. And so we moved into into a
position where we interrupted his udul loop. So he has
an ability to observe, orient aside and act, and so
we interrupted that by giving him too many things to
worry about all at once. He realized that he was
beaten in that moment, so he went back to the
(21:27):
bridge again and kept the knife in his pocket. And
it was at that moment that the strangest thing happened.
A vehicle comes up on the other side of the
empty road and stops at the top of the apex
of the bridge, and a young girl with blonde hair
gets out, and I'm looking over, thinking, this can't be serious.
What is happening. There is a police blockade down there.
(21:48):
She's just driven through. I didn't know. And suddenly she
got inside my udeloup. So I looked out, and she
gets out of her car and she looked and then
I realized when I saw her face, I've seen that
face before, that stoic, very vacant stare of someone who
was in crisis. And then I went, oh, oh no.
(22:08):
And she got up and stood on the opposite side
of the bridge and poised in position, ready to jump,
And it was just it was totally unrelated. But she
saw an opportunity and moved into that position. And I
like to think that she saw an opportunity where there
was someone already up there trying to negotiate, and maybe
that person might be able to help her one of
the police sergeants from the city said, oh, can one
(22:30):
of you guys just jump across and just jump across
in and help her out. Now, the distance is about
the distance between you and I at this desk today.
It's only about a meter and a bit and I
would happily jump that, but not at one hundred and
fifty feet off the ground. So we called in some
other negotiators and they came in and took over from
that situation. But it was bonkers, to say the least,
(22:51):
that we've got two of those at the same time
in the same place in Victoria. So we went through
the process, we went through our training, and we went
through a good strategy, which was that almost to allow
this person to make his own decisions. How you feel
in this moment with whatever's happened with your girlfriend. That's
occupying your mind, and that's understandable. But what you're doing
(23:14):
with those emotions is not healthy and it's not okay.
It's not acceptable. So if you want to throw yourself
from this bridge, we are not going to stop you,
and that is your decision. And that's a very difficult
thing to say to someone because you're giving them permission
and I said to him at the time, and I
said this three days ago to someone, it is not
a crime to end your own life. It is sad
(23:36):
and it has loss and has consequences. But saying that
to him it almost put a full stop at the
end of it, and his behavior changed. And so eventually
we went through the process and he surrendered to Ben
and I. We took him into custody and he moved
on to the rest of his life to face the
consequences of that action. But eight hundred and fifty odd
(24:00):
jobs like that, you make mistakes and you learn from it.
And I remember as he left, I picked up the
day book and I opened it up, and instead of
a suicide note, it said I'm cold, I'm tired, I'm
in a lot of trouble, and I've got to listen
to this fuck with talk on and on and on
and on. I'm starting to get bored. And so sometimes
your hypothesis is right that this is not a suicide
(24:22):
atteam to this is someone looking for options. And when
your brain is in crisis, and I can talk about
brain states all day, but when your brain is in
the limbic system, which is where the emotions come from.
You don't make good informed decisions, you don't make good
informed communications. Almost every bit of your decision making comes
from the desire to connect. It's your emotions. And so
(24:46):
I've over the years and since that job, and that
was more than eight years ago, I've learned how to
recognize brain states when I'm working at a negotiation and
I'm always trying to learn and test those hypotheses that
you get with people.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Typically one of the most challenging jobs you find negotiat when.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You're dealing with someone who is antisocial. So you're dealing
with someone whose brain is online. So when you and
I right now are using the core tex part of
our brain, So that is the most evolved part of
our brain. That's where you find motor skills come from.
It's where your ability to communicate, your ability to make
informed decisions, that's where that comes from. If we put
more and more stress on people, they go into the
(25:28):
limbic system, which I talked about, and then even more
stress you go into the brain stand which is fire
flight and freeze. But if you get someone who's not
in crisis, but they've got leverage, so they've got something
that can either hurt you or hurt themselves. But they're
not doing it because they're emotional. They're doing it because
they're looking to extract an opportunity out of the situation.
You know, think someone with a hostage or someone who
(25:50):
is even saying a terror event. Their brain is online
and they're making rational, informed decisions and they're deciding that
they can outwit you. That can be the most difficult
thing to do. And I'll give you a very quick example.
I was at the Commission Flats in the city. There
was an aggravated so someone had broken into someone else's flat.
They were trashing it up, and I remember when we
(26:10):
finally got in there, he had drawn swastikas on the
wall and it was a horrible scene. But he was
trying to outwit us the entire time. So everything we
said he had an answer for. Everything we offered he
had a response to. And so he tricked me, and
I remember and it nearly cost me my life. He
was screaming and yelling, and all of a sudden, he
started to whisper. And when someone starts to whisper, your
(26:34):
brain is naturally evolved to attached to that frequency because
you're hearing something that is either forbidden something that is
different from the norm and something you want, you want
to pay attention to. And so he started to whisper,
and I leaned up against the door and I put
my ear right up. And then I heard a battery
powered circular saw fire up and he shot it through
(26:55):
the door, and it had cut a bit of my hair,
and he drove it straight down where my face had
been just moments before. So I made a mistake. And
I've always found there are people like that that they
will goad you into a sense of comfort or I've
got something that you want, and then if you get
too close, suddenly they might lash out or throw something
at you, or in some cases, which just happened to
(27:16):
some of our negotiators, they've been shot at. So they're
the tricky ones. If I've answered your question at the
end of.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
This story, he's given you the close shave on the
the number one to the side of your head. I mean.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Well, so, eventually, we have a number of different jobs
as negotiators, and that is to negotiate the peaceful surrender
of our subject. For the most part, oftentimes we have
to provide information and intelligence to our tactical commander or
the arrest team who are supporting us in achieving their mission.
And so if you believe negotiations have stalled, failed, or
(27:48):
you're at an impass, you can then affect things around
the stronghold to get that person to re engage. And
so what they did was they conducted it's called a
breach and hold, and that's where they breached the door,
and then we hold with significant options, ready to defend
ourselves to see what happens next, and then you try
and engage. It was an empty corridor, there was graffiti everywhere,
(28:11):
there was stuff all over the floor. We moved with
purpose through the stronghold, slow, methodical, and he wasn't in
this place at all, gone, completely gone. We were on
level eighteen of the Commission Flats and we opened up
a window and I remember looking out and I looked
right and I could see the eastern suburbs and the
Dan Andongs, and then I looked to the left and
(28:32):
I could see on about I'm not hitting about an
inch of concrete. I could see a person shimming across
the wall on the outside of the top of the
Commission Flat tower. He was trying to escape and he
was in very real danger of falling or death by
misadventure at that stage, and so my options then to
negotiate with him are almost non existent. He's moving away
(28:54):
from me. He's driven and determined, and his brain's are online.
He's making you know, Alex Hanold, the free solo climber,
he'd make him look silly by compar Harrison. It was
pretty phenomenal how he was moving across that tiny piece
of masonry. But eventually he moved into what he thought
was another flat, but it wasn't. And standing there hiding
(29:17):
behind a door was five of the toughest guys that
I know waiting for him, and they waited until he
got comfortable and then arrested him without any force, which
is the outcome we're always going for.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Every job is different, isn't it. But I guess the
skills overarch all these jobs. And I hear about this
seventy thirty. You've got to be listing seventy percent, talking
thirty percent. Take us through how that works in practice.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
We say you have two ears in one mouth, and
that's about the ratio. You should be listening twice as
much as you speak. And the reason is that you
want to invite that person to tell you what the
main issue is. And if you're too busy talking you're
going to try and solve that problem for them, then
problem solving is never going to work because now is
not the time. Now is the time for them venting
(30:05):
them letting out what the issues is. And if you
listen enough, you will find a good appropriate question to
put it back to them and ask them what their
decision is. And I'll give you an example of my daughter.
She was at cross country training and she wanted to
go to the car and sit down because it was
cold and it was wet and they were having to run.
And she goes, I don't want to do this, and
I said, and I just listened, and I heard, and
(30:27):
I asked a few questions, and I made sure I listened.
And I said, what's the best thing about doing cross country?
She goes, I like the medals at the end of
the year and the party. And I said, okay, well,
how do we get that? She says, by doing races?
And I said do we get them by winning races?
She goes, no, just by doing our best. And I said, okay,
now I'm going to give you a choice. You can
go to the car, and I'll sit there with you
(30:48):
and we'll listen to music and we'll have fun. Or
you can choose to go back and you can choose
to train, learn and grow and do your best. But
it's your decision. What would you like to do? I
involved her in the process, and I didn't say you're
going to do this, or there's going to be no McDonald's,
or you're not going to get that's not going to work.
It might work in the short term. But someone once
said parenting is making tough decisions now, easy life later,
(31:12):
and negotiating is the same thing. And so we make
tough decisions as soon as we start talking to people
and we listen, but we always give them an option.
What is your decision, what would you like to do?
The last thing we do is stand there and threaten people.
If you don't do this, there's going to be these consequences,
and there are real consequences, but we don't lay it
out like a scolding parent. You have to involve that
(31:33):
person in the process, and that's what we try and do.
I was asked recently where do kids act up the
most in the supermarket? And it's at the register, right.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Because it's designed to have always chocolates and lollies and
toys position there to drive the mad and then they
drive their parents.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Man, that's right, But there is a psychological solution to everything,
and there is a practical solution. And the practical solution
is to give your kid that lollipop or the magazine
with a toy on the front. And so what I
started doing with my children was as we shopped, I
have said, you know, you go pick three pieces of fruit,
because I have a hypothesis that kids act up at
the supermarket at the register, not just because the actions
(32:14):
of the supermarkets, but because they see you out there
making decisions, putting things in the shopping trolley. They see
you making decisions and choosing things, and that is ultimately
very exciting for a young growing mind. And they know
that that register, if you look at it like it's
a gated system, it's the last part of the gate
where you get to make a decision, and that's what
(32:35):
all the stuff they want is. So what I started
doing was I noticed that if I involved them in
the process, by the time it got to the register,
they might ask once, but there was no screaming and
dropping of the toys or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Was police, drop the toy.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah that's right, Yeah, yeah, get down off the couch.
And so I applied that to my policing as a negotiator.
Is I involved that person in the process instead of
just giving them ultimatums. You're not allowed this, you're not
allowed that. That's not going to happen. You're going to
do what I say now is the time we're at
the end of the register or I need you to
get into the divisional van. No. I include them in
(33:12):
the process, and it might seem like it will take longer,
but it's difficult decisions at the beginning and an easy
life later. And that's what we do at a siege situation.
Is the first thing I say to anybody is has
anyone explained to you exactly why I'm here? And the
answer is usually no, Okay, Well let me explain that
to you. And if you've got any questions, you ask
(33:32):
them please, because I don't want them to be a misunderstanding.
And so you know, we build up that sense of
trust and it's trust and it's rapport and you don't
always need one or the other. Remember, you can do
anything in a negotiation which you can't do everything. People
always think, oh, I've got one of my coppers talking
to this guy and they've got great rapport. That's good,
(33:54):
But you've been there for four hours. Is this now
a successful negotiation? And why have you called the negotiator capability?
We might then have to come up and okay, let's
put report to the side. Let's focus on trust because
at the moment, he's enjoying rapport and he's liking the
control that that brings him. And yes, he might like
that detective or seeing you comfortable, but we have a
(34:15):
job to do and we have people that we serve
in Victoria, and so I've noticed people are fascinated about negotiations,
but a lot of people misunderstand it what it actually is.
And sometimes that means we don't make friends at jobs
because you're tapping someone on the shoulder who's working their
butt off and saying sorry, we need to take over now.
(34:37):
We're not there to make friends. But you talk to
those people afterwards and you try and smooth things over.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
I've got the greatest respect for people who are on
the divisional van. I think seventy five percent of their
jobs and their domestic violence related Yes, they're going into
scenes where they're telling people older than them how to
solve problems in their relationships and so forth, and a
lot of your work does come out of those situations.
You're also skilling the frontline officers in those principles, but
(35:04):
at least when they cross the threshold, they have some
sense of what to do. What do you try to
impart to them.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
So one of the biggest things I try and say
with any policing is you need to justify your decision making.
And we have a thing called the tactical options model,
and there's all sorts of things in the tactical options
model that most people would be familiar with, but they're
things that we can use in our skill set to
respond to people. And one of them that I think
(35:33):
is criminally undersold is presence. I do a lot of
study and I read a lot of books. And there
was a study in New York that they had done
based on the serial killer Ted Bundy. What they had found.
When he was finally convicted, he spoke with psychologists and
a lot of them wanted to know what made him
the villain that he was. But the psychologists that went
(35:56):
to the front of the queue were the ones who
wanted to know how did he choose his victims, what
did victims selection look like? And so when they interviewed him,
he said, well, it's a whole bunch of things. It
was their gait, it was the way they moved. They
looked like a fish out of water. They looked like
they didn't belong, like they would be missed. But it
was hundreds of different things that when I put it
(36:17):
all together in my mind, I had a red button
and I just hit that red button and said, that's
my victim. But that's just a hypothesis, right, and so
you've got to test it. So what they did was
they drove around in a van and they filmed random
people just for moments walking down the street. They showed
those footage to criminals and people with a criminal history
and gave them a red button and said you just
(36:39):
all you have to do is watch, and when you
see someone that you were determined to be your victim,
you hit that red button. When they collated all the
red button hits, there was men, women, children, police officers, teachers,
but they all shared the same qualities, and those qualities
were they looked like there was a chaos in their movement,
like they didn't belong, like they wouldn't be missed, like
(37:00):
they were frustrated, like they were flustered, looking at their watch,
walking the wrong direct, turning back, making second guessing themselves.
And so what I learned from that is what's the
opposite of that look like? And how can we get
police officers or anyone listening to this to use those
principles so that you don't become a victim. And so
(37:21):
whenever I'm teaching our students and with our negotiation team,
the work starts long before you get out of that
car at the incident. The work starts in your planning,
The work starts in your presence, The work starts in
your body language. Be the slowest person in the room,
not the fastest. Don't command attention, don't command respect, Earn
(37:46):
it and it will come freely if you're confident. And
if you're confident, and there's a difference between confidence and bravado.
And I find that if I was being honest about
myself as a young police officer, I was chopped full
of bravado. Because you graduate and you get this uniform
and you do the marching out, and it's a phenomenal
experience and I wouldn't change it for anything in the world.
(38:08):
But the young, stupid me was full of bravado. You
will do what I say because the law is there,
and I work for that institution and I respect it,
and so should you. Life doesn't work that way, and
people are complex and they're interesting and they're very different.
And if you walk into a room and you demand
people respect you, it's not going to work very well.
(38:28):
And so what I try to teach people is is
like you would have done today. You did preparation, and
you're very good. I know your history, Adam, and you're
very good at and researching and building relationships that doesn't
happen overnight. There's a funny story about I think it
was Pablo Picasso. He used to sit in a cafe
(38:51):
and do sketches for people for money. And there was
a woman lined up and she gave him a you
know at the time, a large sum of money, and
he did this thing and a minute and a half
and gave it to her. And she said, that took
you a minute and a half, and he said, no,
it didn't matter. It took me my whole life. And
it's kind of like the same thing with negotiating it.
We will go to a job and we'll deal with
(39:12):
someone and they will go We did all the hard work,
we talked for five hours and you just turned up
and in three minutes, you guys solved it. And it
didn't come in three minutes, it happened. It took me
fourteen years of negotiation. It took me twenty five years
of being a police officer. And so I wish mate
that I had this fast forward button to give people
(39:34):
life experience and the ability to prepare. But they can
certainly do it faster than I did.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
The negotiator is part of a technical hierarchy of options.
Eventually you have to step aside and let the next
option take place, which may be forced. Yes, how do
you know when you're losing the battle, but the negotiation
is over.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
There's an old saying that when someone tells you who
they are, believe them the first time. It's not always
the case. When you get someone who's scared, who's frightened,
who's emotional, whose brain is offline, and get away from here,
or I'll do this aba and see. After a bit
of experience, it's quite easy to spot someone who's just
lashing out of the world because they're stalling for time.
(40:21):
But if you get someone who says to me, I
will never ever listen to a thing you say or
do what you want, and then they go ahead and
continue to prove it. You can trial and build all
the trust and report you want. But if that person
is highly motivated with the desire to foil your plans
(40:42):
for one of a better word. And I wasn't at
these jobs, but you take, like Binson Laguancio, those sorts
of characters very intent on what happened, then well, you
know you're testing me here. But we had multiple day
sieges with both of those characters. One of them men
did in a fatality with the so OG, and then
(41:02):
another one ended up with options used then and arrest
by the SOG being made. But you're dealing with someone
who gets given all the time in the world, but
instead of breaking down what their reason for being in
that situation is and dealing with the emotion, they instead
increase their leverage and they increase their desire to take
on police in an armed confrontation. And it's not ideal,
(41:26):
but that's why we have specialist teams like the cur team,
and that's why we have the sogs, is to take
that seriously and take the fight to that person who's
ultimately as anti social and violent as they come. And
there are those people in our community. They're rare, but
we need to have a capability to answer that force
with force.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
We also see in the movies negotiators are talking to
a criminal, someone in a siege or something, and the
subject will say, get my wife down here, I want
to talk to my wife, or someone else's bring the
girlfriend in or the friend in. Does that ever happen?
Do you ever addicate your role like that?
Speaker 1 (42:02):
So the answer to the first part, yes, it happens
all the time. We get I want this, I want this,
give me this. I've had. I want a seven four
seven laden with fuel, ready to take me to the
Cayman Islands, to a non extradition country where I'm going
to live out my days on a marijuana plantation. I've
had all that. Ultimately, what you need to do is
throw those demands we call them or once through a
(42:25):
prison in your mind and go what do they really need?
And so, like my daughter are picking up the magazine
at the front of Coal's she doesn't want that little
toy in the magazine. She wants to make decisions and
put things in the trolley and watch them and scan
them and be part of the process. What she needs
is to feel heard and feel instead of me just
(42:45):
you sit there and be quiet and we'll get this done.
But if you involve the person in the process, the
once go away quite quickly. And so I had someone
very recently. He was on the outside of a building
and you know, like the lethal weapon on the right
on the ledge. I opened up the door of the
room so I could talk to him, and he said,
close that door, I'll jump. So that's what he wants.
(43:06):
Close the door, I'll jump. And he wanted the AFP.
Go get the AFP. And I said, okay, you can jump.
I'm not going to stop you. I don't have any
safety equipment and that would be that would be very reckless.
But you can jump. Well, then get the AFP. He said.
I said, oh, look, they don't have authority or jurisdiction here,
it's me. And he started counting up, not down, started
(43:28):
counting up. So I don't even know where he's going
to with this one. And he did the old fake
You know, I'm going to jump now unless you do
what I want. And I just stood there and held
my ground, and a younger me wouldn't have done that.
And I said, well, that's okay, mate, you can, but
I just need to let you know the boundaries. You're
allowed to make decisions out there, and there are consequences
for that, but I'm allowed to make decisions in here too,
(43:49):
And I'm deciding that you need help. You're in crisis.
And he goes, we'll bring my mom down here, and
I said, what would you say to her if she
was here? And his voice broke and he started talking,
and then I realized he doesn't need his mom down here.
He wants his mommy down here, but he doesn't need it.
What he needs is a sense of support. And he
goes back to the one that he trusts the most,
(44:10):
which is his mother. And I said, I can't bring
your monmy down here, mate. He goes, do it or
I'll jump, and I said, well, I don't think it's ethical,
fair or lawful, nor would withstand any scrutiny if I
was to bring her here and see you hurting the
way you are today. So I'm going to have to
say no to that. Main, and that's going to be
something that I'm not going to move on. So I apologize,
(44:31):
but that's my decision, and you're free to make decisions
you want to out there. And within a very short
period of time he moved on from it because I've
given him what he needed, which is a sense of control.
You can control things out there, and you are in control,
but so am I, and I'm here to support you.
So I guess to shortcut the answer. Instead of focusing
(44:53):
on what people want, you focus on what they need.
And most people, most human beings, need a sense of
control in their lives, how they're treated, how they make decisions,
and they need to feel supported when they do that,
and they need to feel supported in how they feel
and the complex emotions that are going on in their minds.
So I give people a sense of decision making. It's
your decision. What would you like to do? These are
(45:14):
your options, and I let them know that I'm not
going to leave their side. And for the better part,
it's infinitely better than me trying to run around dancing
to the beat of their drum like a good parent.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
In the way, isn't I reckon? There's a lot of
transferable skills here. But yeah, eight hundred plus negotiations over
fourteen years, so many lives intersected at critical moments. Do
you wonder what happens to the people that you negotiate
with once the siege or the moment is over.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
There's a few people that I think about from time
to time, and I allow myself a certain amount, but
I have to draw the line somewhere because whilst the
people are in sieges, the people who have been kidnapped,
the people who are a victim of hostage or that
are the hostage take. Yes, they deserve our very best
at the negotiation, but we need to reserve our absolute
(46:10):
best for the loved ones that we have at home.
And so, yes, there are a few people that I
allow myself time to think about. But for the most part,
when that person surrenders to us and we operate in
the team and in pairs at the very minimum, but
usually there's two or three of us, we encourage each
other to get out of dodge and go back to
(46:31):
the office, rehabilitate ourselves, reset and get ready to go
to the next one. Because that's eight hundred complex, stressful
situations that I can't have bouncing around in my head
because I'm just not going to be effective. And so
that's why I say, you don't need to be a psychologist,
you don't need to be a social worker, because you
(46:54):
need to be a police officer. And if you're asking
police officers to be social workers, I think that's unfair.
You know, the mental health system is so complex. We
need good police officers operate within their bounds to get
a successful outcome and then pass that person on to
the next phase of the Victorian system that may help them.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
This has really become a specialist job and in the
past people used to cycle through this job. As I
understand it from other roles. You've chosen to stay in it,
and you're also giving back a lot to the next
generation of officers in the divvans and so forth. How
long can you keep doing this that that's a lot
of stress, a lot of pressure, and a lot of
mental discipline required, not to think about particularly the failures
(47:37):
where you couldn't save somebody, where you couldn't get a
positive outcome.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, I agree with you. We have the most senior
negotiator cadre probably in the world in Victoria, and that
speaks of two things I believe. Number one, we have
a good set of systems in place that encourage retention
of our members. And number two, and this is I
think critical, is we have a really good culture within
the Negotiator Unit. It's an office within an office within
(48:03):
an office. Okay, so we're in a tactical team. We've
got all the different elements there, the critical Incident response team,
and then in the corner is us and we've got
our little room. We've got you know, the usual stuff
you see on a police station, the photoshop faces on
memes and given each other shit. But what I love
about it is when we were forming the unit, my
(48:24):
friend John Harley, who's my boss, I said, how do
we know if we're going to be successful? And he
says about what? And I said, our culture. How do
we know if it's good culture? And he goes, It's easy.
People will want to come and hang out with us,
that's it. They want to hear us, they want to
talk to us. And if we've done our job well
and if we've got a good culture, people will come
to us. And that's what we've created. And so I
(48:45):
have incredibly fond relationships with detectives, with a psychological unit
from Victoria Police. We had a psychologist, one of the
best in Australia, Nicole, who was with us. She's got
a lot on her plate of all her work for
Victoria Police and she came and spent eight months with
us and we just were like sponges learning from her.
(49:06):
The SOG will come and spend time with us, and
that didn't always happen, and it happened because we have
a good culture and we have a meritocracy. If you
are the best, if you are like Jake at the
start and everyone else that I work with, they are
the best and they are so good at their jobs.
And I think we've created that, not by accident but
(49:27):
by design.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
I think also you mentioned at the beginning of this
one of the best debris you have is cutting yourself
off from the day's work and talking to your daughter
or your wife.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Absolutely, and it's important that if I drag this stuff
home with me, that's not healthy. But there is enough
that I can give of the work that I do
to let them know when I'm struggling, So let them
know what I'm being vulnerable because in the last ten years,
particularly and especially post COVID, we may have misunderstood stress,
(50:01):
and so what I mean by that, And I've got
to tread carefully here because everyone's experience is unique. But
stress is a force just like heat is. And so
heat can cook your food, it can make you warm,
it can also burn you. And we get stress, and
we get a stress response from a critical incident. When
we get an adrenaline, we're getting cortisol, the stress hormone
(50:22):
in her brain. It is a stressful experience, and we
get a stress response, noise sensitivity, forgetful memory, the shaking
of the hands, the tremors, that's a normal human reaction,
and we need to know that that's just our body
healing from what happened. And so I freely will show
emotion when I'm talking about jobs, because that's a healthy
(50:43):
human reaction that I should feel something and to light
it out. When I think about stress, it's like you
injure your knee. People want to chuck ice packs on
it and get anti inflammatories. That sells rushing to the
area trying to heal your body. And we're very quick
to throw things and diagnoses at it instead of letting
it take its natural course. And so I encourage a
(51:04):
lot of the police that I deal with. To understand
that this is a bonker's job. You will experience more
in the first year of being a police officer than
most people will in their entire lifetime. And I don't
think that, but I don't think there's any other career
that can give you that. And you are seeing victorians
at the worst day of their lives and you get
to help them, and so understand that stress responses happen.
(51:28):
They happen for a reason and for the most part,
it's probably a good thing that they do. So with me,
I don't weaponize my stress response. I embrace it. I
learn how to control it, like you know, I like
I do combat breathing. I do some sense of mindfulness
unless that garden hoset kinks up just the wrong way
(51:48):
and then I lose my blood.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
Mate. But well, you've got a full head of hair,
a lot of it's great, but clearly clearly doing something right. Listen,
thank you so much for your service. And I think
it's an amazing job you do because you think of
how many situations before this capability became developed, things ended
in loss of life, injury, misery and tragedy. When you
can say, of those eight hundred jobs, the majority, I
(52:11):
would say, you've affected a peaceful outcome.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Yeah. I think our job as negotiators is to assist
the mission, and the mission usually almost always is the
safe resolution of the incident. And I am a very
small cog in a wonderful team of negotiators. And I
couldn't be more proud, adam of the work that we
do that especially the support that we get from our
command because we are There's less negotiators in this country
(52:38):
than there are professional football players or car races. It's scarce.
It's rare. And my dad said to me, and I'll
leave you with this that he said, no matter what
you do, because I'm an immigrant, I wasn't born in
this country and we moved here from Ireland, and my
mum and dad said, no matter what you do, serve
the community that has been so kind to us. But
(53:00):
don't live a boring life. It's not about money, it's
not about wins and successes. It's don't live a boring life.
And I can if I if I retired tomorrow, I
would be happy with everything that I've done. It's been
it's been exciting. My career has been interesting, violent, sad, thrilling,
(53:24):
but it has not been boring.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
And you're about to start another shift and you have
no idea what's coming, no idea at all.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
I tell you what, mate, I'm excited for what's coming.
Because the day you don't feel excitement is it's time
to stop and do something else. Because I love what
we do, I love the team I work with, and
I'm very proud to be a police officer, and especially
I'm very proud to be a police negotiator with Victory Police.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
That was leading Senior constab believe while I hand on
his job as a police negotiator, he sees people at
their very worst moments and affects a positive outcome. I'd
like to see Lee's face if I was ever in
that situation. We all get to those moments. Look after
each other. It's really important. But if you do get
to that moment, there is resources out there. Thank you
(54:13):
so much for listening today. If you've got stories for us,
actually you should call crime stoppers first if you've got
if you've got a case, call Crimestoppers first one le
under a triple three, triple zero. But you can also
give me an email. Adam Shanna writer at gmail dot com.
This has been real crime with Adam Shann Thank you
for listening.
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