The Elements of Police Hostage and Crisis Negotiations: Critical Incidents and How to Respond to Them

Run a safe and successful crisis negotiation—from start to finish!

The Elements of Police Hostage and Crisis Negotiations: Critical Incidents and How to Respond to Them reduces the negotiation procedures for hostage, barricaded, and suicide incidents to their basic elements, providing quick and easy access to the information you need-from the initial call-out to the final debriefing. Based on field-tested principles proven to work, the book also includes newly developed and highly specialized techniques for more experienced negotiators. Author James L. Greenstone provides a user-friendly, step-by-step guide to the intervention and negotiation process that will help you get the job done—right.

Designed for day-to-day, on-the-scene use, The Elements of Police Hostage and Crisis Negotiations is a practical handbook for experienced professionals and novices that can also be used as a supplementary textbook for criminal justice, crisis intervention, and psychology coursework. Each chapter contains useful checklists, procedural notes, tables, strategy worksheets, and forms, and the book includes special indices for quick reference in addition to a traditional index. Dr. Greenstone, a police mental health consultant and psychologist who served as Director of the Psychological Services Unit of the Fort Worth Police Department in Texas, uses a simple and direct format that emphasizes procedures, action and results, leaving theoretical discussions for another time and place. The book examines the negotiation process from start to finish, including preincident preparations, first response responsibilities, responding to the call-out, arriving at the scene, preparing to negotiate, making contact, preparing for the surrender, post-incident tasks, preparing equipment, and more.

Topics covered in The Elements of Police Hostage and Crisis Negotiations include:

• legal considerations
• telephone surveillance guidelines
• the Stockholm Syndrome
• working with S.W.A.T. and Tactical Emergency Medical Support
• dealing with the media
• recognizing “red flags”
• the issues of suicide
• debriefing the hostage team
• the 150 laws of hostage and crisis negotiation
• and the 10 most serious errors a negotiator can make

The Elements of Police Hostage and Crisis Negotiations: Critical Incidents and How to Respond to Them is a practical guide that’s equally effective in the field, in training, and in the office.