Hostage negotiations

DEFINITION: Law-enforcement attempts to resolve peacefully situations in which persons are holding others against their will in barricaded locations.

SIGNIFICANCE: When lawbreakers take hostages, law-enforcement personnel must take the safety of the hostages into account in attempting to apprehend the perpetrators. The field of forensic psychology has been influential in the development of techniques that can improve the ways in which law-enforcement officers communicate with hostage takers.

In ancient usage, the term “hostage” referred to a person who was given by one of the parties in an antagonistic situation to be held by the other party to ensure the carrying out of an agreement between the parties. In modern times, hostages are generally individuals whom lawbreakers seize and hold captive to force others to do something under the threat of death or serious harm to the hostages. Occasionally, the persons held are semivoluntary participants in the lawbreakers’ actions—in those cases, the hostage takers are more properly referred to as the “hosts.”

The taking of hostages may occur in the course of another crime, but it is also itself a crime; depending on the situation, it may be classified as kidnapping or as a terrorist act. Hostages may be taken to be held for ransom or for some political purpose, as when hostage takers seek the release of persons held prisoner by others.

Early History

Prior to 1970, the typical law-enforcement response to hostage situations in the United States was simply to demand that the hostage takers surrender. If the hostage takers did not give up immediately, then the police would kill the hostage takers. Unfortunately, this usually resulted in the deaths of the hostages as well, and sometimes in the deaths of police officers. In the early 1970s, Captain Frank Bolz of the New York Police Department and Dr. Harvey Schlossberg started to develop the first formalized hostage negotiation process for use by law enforcement. Widespread criticism of the disastrous outcome of the hostage situation that took place at the Olympic Village during the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, provided a major impetus to law-enforcement attempts to apply advanced behavioral science-based techniques to such events. In what became known as the Munich Massacre, eleven Israeli athlete hostages died, as well as five of their Palestinian hostage takers and one German police officer.

In 1983, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created its Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). Although the FBI stated that the HRT was trained in the most advanced negotiating techniques, the team’s initial approach relied heavily on the rapid use of lethal force. In this, the HRT apparently sought to duplicate the relative success of the Israeli commandos who carried out a raid to rescue hostages held by Palestinian hostage takers at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. In the Israeli raid on Entebbe, three hostages and one Israeli commando were killed, but more than one hundred hostages were successfully liberated. The hostage takers and dozens of Ugandan soldiers acting in support of them were killed.

False Beginnings

The FBI’s use of HRT tactics modeled on those of Israeli commandos had disastrous results in the hostage situations in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993, in which, altogether, dozens of innocent women and children died. Critics have maintained that in these incidents, the FBI lacked patience and put a high priority on the quick use of lethal force.

The behavior of local police forces in hostage situations has paralleled that of the FBI. One incident that took place in Sacramento, California, in 1991 provides an example. Four men robbed a retail electronics store, but before they could leave the store, the police arrived, and the robbers took customers and store employees hostage. Critics of the actions of the police in this incident later argued that initially the police were negotiating successfully, and the crisis might have ended without any loss of life. The police soon decided to use force, however; they authorized a sniper to signal the onset of a lethal attack by firing if he had a “clear shot” at any one of the hostage takers. Believing he had such an opportunity, the sniper fired at one of the perpetrators. The shot missed its target, possibly because a glass door swung closed at an inopportune moment and deflected the bullet. When the sniper’s shot was fired, the hostage takers began shooting hostages and the police attacked. Altogether, three of the hostages and three of the hostage takers died and several more persons were wounded. The police defended themselves by pointing out that most of the hostages were liberated, but some observers criticized what they perceived to be an overly aggressive use of force by the police.

In part as a result of events such as this one, from the early 1990s onward law-enforcement agencies have placed emphasis on doing everything they can to resolve hostage crises peacefully. Given this change in emphasis, and given that many situations that appear to be hostage crises might more properly be described as situations in which the perpetrators are determined to commit “suicide by cop,” many law-enforcement agencies refer to the teams that deal with hostage situations as crisis negotiation teams (CNTs) rather than as hostage rescue or hostage negotiation teams.

Equipment and Techniques

Law-enforcement agencies have increasingly criticized the news media for interfering with crisis negotiations; in some cases, this interference has taken the form of the media’s gaining access to the telephone lines police are using to communicate with hostage takers. Because of this, CNTs often use “throw phones,” self-contained communication devices that provide hard-line communications between the hostage taker and the negotiators (they are called throw phones because they are generally thrown by the police into hostage takers’ barricaded locations). By disconnecting any telephone landline and using a throw phone, a crisis negotiator can block any third party from tapping into the line and listening in. If throw phones cannot be used, CNTs use bullhorns, telephone landlines, or cellular phones to communicate with hostage takers, as such communication is critical to the negotiation process.

The development of the application of forensic psychology to hostage negotiations came out of the FBI’s efforts to construct psychological profiles for the various types of personalities its agents might confront in barricade situations. Negotiators attempt to profile hostage takers so that they can determine the best ways to communicate with them to secure the safety of all persons involved, hostages and hostage takers alike. Much that is included in the manuals and training for law-enforcement crisis negotiators, however, is based on science that is still being developed. The success of crisis negotiations relies to a considerable degree on the practical experience of those involved in these endeavors. As an alternative to violent resolution to a crisis, FBI hostage negotiators follow a program called the Behavioral Change Stairway. This process involves slowly building a positive rapport with the hostage taker, eventually convincing the hostage taker to acquiesce to the FBI's demands.

In 2024, the fiftieth anniversary of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Program, the FBI released a new version of its Hostage Barricade Database System (HOBAS). Created after the Branch Davidian siege, the database is a collection of law enforcement's critical incidents and hostage negotiations. By 2024, the database contained details on nearly eleven thousand crisis incidents and served as an important reference for law enforcement.

Bibliography

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