Police add texting to use in crisis negotiation

Associated Press

Police negotiator Andres Wells was doing all he could to keep a suspect from committing suicide after a gas station robbery and 100 mph chase. But the man kept cutting phone calls short and pointing his handgun to his head.

About 10 minutes after the last hang up, Wells’ cellphone chimed. It was a text from the suspect. “Please call Amie,” the message said, with the number of the man’s girlfriend.

Wells was taken aback. In three years as a negotiator with the Kalamazoo, Mich., police, he’d always relied on spoken give-and-take, taking cues from a person’s tone of voice, the inflections, emotions. He’d never thought about negotiating via text.

With 6 billion text messages exchanged daily in the U.S. alone, law enforcement officers are increasingly being called upon to defuse violent, unpredictable situations through the typed word. Experts say it’s happened enough in the last five years to warrant new, specialized training.

But in Wells’ case, he had to adapt on the fly.

While Wells ordinarily would rely on a skill called “active listening,” he couldn’t hear Cook’s voice. Cook couldn’t hear his. Was he yelling? Crying?

Outside Buffalo, N.Y., in March, a suspect who’d shot at Erie County Sheriff’s deputies responding to a domestic call was carrying on text exchanges with several relatives when law-enforcement negotiators got involved in the electronic conversations, eventually persuading him to surrender.

“He didn’t want to talk as much as he wanted to text,” Sheriff’s Capt. Gregory Savage said. “It wasn’t part of the training I got when I went through the crisis negotiator school put on by the FBI, but it’s something that they are incorporating into any new training.”