The year 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the FBI’s Crisis (formerly Hostage) Negotiation Program. This impactful and important discipline has proved crucial in keeping police officers out of harm’s way and in rescuing hostages and victims. While accurate statistics are unknown, anecdotal and impressionistic evidence clearly reflects that this methodical approach to managing crisis events has saved thousands.

Successful FBI Program

Implementation and Growth

In 1974, recognizing the significant benefit trained negotiators could bring to resolving hostage situations, the FBI adopted the NYPD model. Early FBI profiling and negotiation pioneers began to gather increasing amounts of experiential data from around the country and abroad to expand and enhance the NYPD approach.

Improved incident outcomes validated this innovative approach. Most important, the peaceful resolution of more incidents resulted in FBI agents and police officers not having to put themselves in harm's way by making high-risk entries and arrests during crisis events.

A more expansive curriculum developed by the FBI was instituted in its field office training program as well as in-service training at Quantico, Virginia. It quickly spread across the United States and overseas.

I received my initial hostage negotiation training in 1980 and came to the FBI’s Special Operations and Research Unit (SOARU) as a full-time negotiator in 1990. At that time, as with the NYPD, the FBI’s negotiation curriculum heavily focused on quid pro quo bargaining. We taught that when confronting a hostage taker, never give them anything without getting something in return. For example, if a bank robber holding customers and bank employees as hostages wanted food sent in, we would insist they release someone in exchange. This basic approach continued to achieve positive results. Buying time, lowering high emotion, and making perpetrators work for everything they got proved successful in most hostage situations.

Shortly after my assignment to SOARU, with the collection of more data, we began to realize that most incidents police officers and FBI agents responded to were not technically hostage situations but events involving expressive or highly emotional grievances. These included domestic partner disputes, fugitive barricades, child custody arguments, incidents involving alcohol or other drug abuse, mental health episodes, employee disputes, suicides, and more.

Examining the motivation in such scenarios, it became clear that the perpetrators were not engaged in a purposeful activity with the intent of bargaining. Rather, they often did not know what they wanted. Such individuals were manifesting their sense of rage or frustration. We often encountered impulsive persons with poor coping skills reacting to challenging life events violently. Most often, they simply demanded for the police to “go away and leave me/us alone.” Such a demand is not substantive and does not allow law enforcement negotiators to influence behavior using a quid pro quo approach model.

Active Listening Skills

Later in 1990, based on this realization, we implemented a major change in the FBI Hostage Negotiation Program to focus on active listening skills (ALS), copied from the mental health counseling field pioneered by American psychotherapist Dr. Carl Rogers.² ALS armed FBI and police negotiators with clearly identified tools to use in their communications with a wide range of hostage takers and other highly expressive and emotional perpetrators.

The positive results were overwhelming. Being responsible for the FBI’s nationwide negotiation curriculum, I made ALS the centerpiece of our instruction and provided uniform guidance and training materials to all FBI field negotiation trainers to use across the country. This approach quickly caught on, and it soon became standard practice throughout the United States and abroad. Since that time, ALS has even become a key training component for new agents learning interview and interrogation techniques.

To better illustrate the crisis intervention approach, I created the Behavioral Change Stairway Model to demonstrate that the influence we sought as negotiators to gain the cooperation of perpetrators required sincere and genuine empathic engagement. It did not come automatically because of our rank or authority. ALS allowed us to better understand the emotion driving the dangerous behavior we were confronting and eventually earned us the right to present alternatives to violence based on the positive relationship created. This adaptation further enhanced our success rate, which we soon statistically determined to be in the mid- to high-90th percentile.³ Few things in law enforcement achieve such a rate of success.

Crisis Negotiation Unit

After the tragic event at Waco, Texas, in 1993,⁴ the FBI created the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) and turned the negotiation program into the Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU) within this new division. I was proud to be named the CNU’s first chief. In addition to responding to bank robberies, right-wing militia standoffs, prison riots, skyjackings, religious zealot sieges, embassy takeovers, and the kidnapping for ransom of American citizens abroad, the CNU has continued to teach these lifesaving skills around the world. Negotiation training has often been the most sought-after specialty in the FBI’s instructional repertoire.

Some of the major FBI crisis events over my career and beyond have included the:

• Sperryville, Virginia, hostage incident.⁵
• Raleigh, North Carolina, Amtrak hostage siege.⁶
• Japanese ambassador’s residence terrorist siege in Peru.⁷
• Vieques Island standoff.⁸
• Atlanta, Georgia;⁹ Oakdale, Louisiana;¹⁰ Talladega, Alabama;¹¹ and St. Martin Parish, Louisiana,¹² prison riots.
• Montana Freemen¹³ and Republic of Texas¹⁴ sieges.
• Alabama bunker hostage crisis.¹⁵
• Negotiated release of 17 Christian Aid Ministries workers in Haiti.¹⁶
• Resolution of hostages at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.¹⁷

Additionally, over the past 50 years, FBI crisis negotiators have secured the safe release of thousands of kidnap-for-ransom victims through the sound application of ransom negotiation strategies.

In the past year, I had the opportunity to speak at the annual FBI Crisis Negotiation Coordinator’s Conference. I learned the often-experienced historical conflict between tactical and negotiation components has been largely eliminated through closer coordination, refined policy guidance, expanded training interaction, and enhanced procedures.

Today, the CNU continues its triad of responsibilities: operations, instruction, and research. Showing leadership in creating the National Council of Negotiation Associations (NCNA) for police and the International Negotiators’ Working Group (INWG) for its many international colleagues, the CNU and its best-in-the-world National Crisis Negotiation Course (NCNC) remain in the forefront of this vital law enforcement specialty.

Additionally, the CNU has significantly expanded its training courses into an array of advanced training for its crisis negotiators. Further, the unit has stayed at the forefront of negotiations broadly, lending its expertise to resolving ransomware extortions and virtual kidnappings.

Conclusion

Clearly, the FBI’s efforts have had a dramatic lifesaving impact on resolving a wide range of crisis standoffs. The Crisis Negotiation Unit’s motto, Pax per conloquium, means “resolution through dialogue.” I believe that negotiation is the most noble of law enforcement endeavors. Without question, it has long been clear that sincere, genuine, patient, and thoughtful engagement saves lives. The CNU remains committed to its partners in teaching these lifesaving skills around the world.