Apoche production.

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 listened to.

When the cops are called to a crisis, the negotiators coordinate the car.

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.

In the last twelve months, police negotiators from the Critical Incident Response Team have been called to more than seven hundred jobs.

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 the skills and the experience of the negotiator.

It's a delicate balance of empathy and strategy, proving power lies in peaceful speech.

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.

Tell me what makes a good negotiator.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

Does that work at home?

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 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.

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.

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 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, 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 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, 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?

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 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 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.

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 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.

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?

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, 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, and you probably didn't understand the consequences of that.

But yeah, that sort of stuff was going on a little bit.

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.

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 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.

And the winds blowing, and can feel the bridge moving.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 I said, oh, you might not kill yourself.

You might not die.

Volllybridge is not that high.

People have sur by falls.

Yeah.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Typically one of the most challenging jobs you find negotiat when.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

This story, he's given you the close shave on the the number one to the side of your head.

I mean.

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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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.

Because it's designed to have always chocolates and lollies and toys position there to drive the mad and then they drive their parents.

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 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 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.

Was police, drop the toy.

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 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 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, 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 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.

We're not there to make friends.

But you talk to those people afterwards and you try and smooth things over.

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 at least when they cross the threshold, they have some sense of what to do.

What do you try to impart to them.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 life experience and the ability to prepare.

But they can certainly do it faster than I did.

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.

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.

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 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 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, 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.

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?

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 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 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.

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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 where you couldn't save somebody, where you couldn't get a positive outcome.

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 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 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 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.

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 by design.

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.

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, 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 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 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 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.

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 and then I lose my blood.

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 would say, you've affected a peaceful outcome.

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 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 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, but it has not been boring.

And you're about to start another shift and you have no idea what's coming, no idea at all.

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.

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 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.