(logo whooshing)
(logo thuds)
- A victim is a homicide-to-be.
(tense music)
The bad guy on the inside is on a k*lling journey,
and he's got a very specific destination in mind.
He's probably there to get himself k*lled.
(g*n bangs)
When you get into hostage negotiation,
you wanna save everybody.
(crowd cheering)
I'm there to save lives.
Hostage negotiators saving
lives when the sun comes up.
But if somebody's there with suicide by cop,
and he's got multiple hostages,
if you don't recognize the dynamic, and he says,
"k*ll me or I k*ll them."
- [Crowd] Let them go free.
- [Chris] Then he's gonna start k*lling them
until you get the idea.
- [Narrator] Were arraigned in court
on charges stemming from the siege.
- [Dispatcher] Okay, westbound, westbound,
I'm sorry, eastbound, eastbound 42, I think.
(speaking foreign language)
- [Chris] Anybody that wants to get into kidnapping
and murdering to make a point,
finds out very quickly how lucrative it is.
- [Narrator] Abu Sayyaf are notorious
for demanding huge ransoms,
then murdering those who don't pay.
- And then they become addicted
to the amount of money that they can make.
- It's money that they were asking. It's ridiculous.
- Even if they started out as some sort of
fundamental, as a zealot,
you start throwing money
at fundamental, as a zealots,
gonna become mercenaries real fast.
- Every week there is news
of more violence in Columbia.
- We have directed our armed forces
to take the appropriate action.
(bystander speaking foreign language)
- [Narrator] Military police
were patrolling the streets
looking for bombers.
- As a hostage negotiator,
empathy is what's gonna be applied
to communicate effectively with these people.
- All day long we've been in
touch with another individual
who the hostage negotiators were talking,
we're trying to reestablish the dialogue with them.
- It becomes a literally an unlimited ability
to influence people.
- People feel like their
autonomy is being infringed upon.
They're getting commanded to do things
that they don't want to do.
- [Narrator] Not complying now, uh-oh, oh no.
- [Narrator] We can avoid a lot of the conflict
that leads to violence.
(dramatic music)
- It's astonishing how quickly problems fall away
when you use empathy.
Was I born to be a hostage negotiator? I don't know.
(gentle music)
You know, I grew up in a small town in Iowa, you know,
Midwestern environment, very can do, blue collar,
figure it out environment.
Like if you needed something done,
my father might hand you the tools to do it,
but then say, go figure it out.
Which is very Midwestern, very Iowa, if you will.
And that ends up being the
attitude of a hostage negotiator
or a communicator or a consultant.
Figure it out.
Take the information that's in front of you,
you got a task, figure it out.
Everybody in the Midwest,
whenever they told me about
Kansas City, they all loved it.
They raved about what a great
town it was across the board.
I went to work
for the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.
I went down there and it turned
out to be a wonderful town,
a wonderful experience,
extremely well-run police department.
But at the same time, you know, I went down
and got a job that only required at the time
a high school diploma.
And my father had just got
done paying for a college degree.
You know, he funded my degree.
And I look back on that and I think, you know,
if I sent my son to college,
and he'd turn around
and got a job where he didn't need a college degree,
I'd probably ask for my money back.
- [Interviewer] Hey, what's your name?
- Brandon Voss.
- [Interviewer] How old are you?
- I'm two years old.
- [Interviewer] All right, who's that standing there.
(airplane engine roaring)
- So my father, he wanted to encourage me.
So he had a friend
that was with the Secret Service at the time,
introduced me to the guy,
and we started to talk about his experience
in federal law enforcement.
And he said to me, you know, Secret Service,
I've traveled all over the world.
And I remember thinking like, really?
Somebody paid for you to travel all over the world?
At that time, like I grew up in Iowa.
I'd seen Canada from a distance.
That was the extent of my international travel.
- [Officer] Two, one.
(expl*si*n booming)
- [Officer] Come in hot.
(g*nshots banging)
- [Officer] Get them out of here.
- [Officer] Step away from the wall,
keep it right back here, turn to your right.
(dramatic music)
- [Officer] Okay sir, kneel down.
- As fate would have it,
when I went to apply for the Secret Service,
they were not hiring, and the bureau was.
(helicopter blades whirring)
(dramatic music continues)
I went in and applied for the FBI.
They wanted you to have a minimum
of three years of work
experience, post four year degree.
I was just coming up on the three years,
and they were hiring a lot of people,
and I snuck in the door with the crowd.
(haunting music)
I was lucky enough to catch
on to the surveillance team
for the joint t*rror1st task force in New York City
right off the bat.
And it was a really, really dangerous time in New York,
mid '80s, there wasn't a safe street corner in the city,
which is if you're a FBI agent
on a joint t*rror1st task
force on a street all the time,
this is great.
You know, this is what you're getting paid to do.
You're up to your eyeballs in this all the time.
At that time you had to be prepared to be
in any neighborhood in New York City
by yourself at any time with
no communication with anybody.
I mean, be able to survive by yourself
in the toughest neighborhood in town.
And you got really street savvy.
And you know, the sort of, the interesting thing
is the bad guys are real good
at spotting cops right away.
Not in 10 million years are they gonna figure
you're all by yourself.
So knowing that,
as long as you don't rile them up unnecessarily,
they're gonna steer clear of you.
So I got really used
to going into really tough parts of town by myself.
As long as you don't look scared
or if somebody advances on you, you can't run,
you gotta meet them in the eye and just let them know
that they're gonna have their hands full with you,
and they figure out you're either crazy or you're a cop.
But either one, you're a little more to bite off
than they really want to chew at that point in time.
They're probably gonna take a pass on you.
- [Officer] All right, now gimme the pedigree.
- [Officer] All right, give a good,
we'll give a good toss and a half.
- [Officer] All right, yeah.
- All right, well we are right across the street
from 26 Federal Plaza,
which is where the FBI office was housed
when I got assigned to New York,
and where I was as part of
the joint t*rror1st task force,
when I wanted to become a hostage negotiator,
and the head of the crisis negotiation team
told me to go volunteer on a suicide hotline.
- Simply put, negotiation is present
anytime the words I want or I need
are in the head of the counterpart or in your own head,
you are in fact negotiating.
There is a level of influence
that needs to be accomplished.
And of course collaboration is paramount for that.
(upbeat music)
- We had hostage negotiators,
I didn't know what they did,
you know, they were part of crisis response.
And I figured, how hard could it be.
You know then I just went
to the head of the hostage negotiation team,
FBI New York, Amy Bonderow.
I remember walking up to her one day,
she's sitting at her desk, and I kind of go like, ta-da,
I wanna be on the hostage negotiation team.
She kind of, she kind of
looked up at me over her glasses
and she's like, yeah, I know who you are.
She said everybody wants to be a hostage negotiator.
It sounds sexy and cool.
They wanna get the shirt, they want to do it.
Everybody wants to do it.
You got no credentials, no qualifications,
go away, it's a long line.
And what you do is on the
outside braces of the dormers.
So you know, I'm from a figure it out,
Midwestern work ethic.
Find out what you gotta do.
Ask the person who knows what you should do.
Listen to them when they tell
you and then go out and do it.
And she said, go and volunteer on a suicide hotline.
(phones ringing)
(volunteers chattering)
When you first get there they say, all right,
so there's a 20 minute time limit on every call,
and you know, you react, you say 20 minutes.
Like in the movies, they're on the phone
with people for hours, you know,
a movie about man on a ledge.
I mean, he's up there for days.
How are we gonna get this done in 20 minutes?
And they said, well, as a matter of fact,
if you're doing it right,
it's gonna take less time than that.
And I got shown how quickly you can get information,
establish a relationship,
and get somebody to take a positive step
with the application of empathy.
Just complete acceleration of everything.
- It's four o'clock in the morning,
and you get a call from somebody who is distraught,
is threatening to take his or her own life.
Critical moments where it is truly
a life and death kind of choice.
I can't think of any other context
that is as demanding as that.
And if you can go through that,
then you're bringing a lot to the table
in other kinds of negotiations.
- And it had a fantastic effect.
So it was just a natural progression
from the hotline to real
life, to hostage negotiation,
to business negotiation, back into real life.
(dramatic music)
And I came back to her about five or six months later.
'Cause you know, I wasn't gonna say right away,
but that I was doing a training, you know,
I wanted to have some of it under my belt.
And so I come back about five months later, I'm like, hey,
just wanted you to know I volunteered at a hotline.
And she's like, "You're kidding."
She said, "I tell everybody to do that. Nobody does it."
You know, I unofficially passed the test,
you know, do I have initiative?
Do I take instruction from the right people?
And so there were other people that were in line.
There was at least five, all of whom she had told
to go volunteer at the hotline,
none of whom had done it.
And so I got the very next
slot for training at Quantico.
(haunting music)
The experience at Quantico was really cool.
The negotiation unit
brings in hostage negotiators
from across the country and around the world.
And suddenly you're sitting
next to seasoned hostage negotiators,
and you're a member of a global fraternity
that's there to save lives.
And you're kind of blown away by it.
At the time the very first day they say
there's never been a hostage k*lled on deadline
in the history of the United States.
And so they kind of drill that into your head.
(g*nshots banging)
- [Officer] Get on the ground, get on the ground.
- [Reporter] We were pinned down
about 200 yards diagonally across
from the Security Trust Bank.
At least one b*llet struck the porch,
the police car belonging to
one of the injured officers.
- And the next day, they give you a presentation
where it looks like a hostage got k*lled on deadline
in Rochester, New York.
And the bad guy inside said, "If you don't come in
and get me by two o'clock, I'm gonna k*ll somebody."
And they said, well, "You know,
hostages don't get k*lled on deadline."
And at two o'clock he gets a
hostage outta the bank vault.
He walks her to the front door,
and he puts two shotgun blast in her back,
and blows her out the front door.
- [Reporter] At least one b*llet struck the porch.
(shotgun blasting)
(suspenseful music)
- Oh, I saw a young lady,
I don't know her name, but I know her.
She comes here all the time.
And saw her lying down, I said, she's dead.
'Cause the way she seemed, I said, my god, she's dead.
- And you're sitting there thinking like, wait a minute.
This is not what you guys told us was gonna happen.
But we're trying to make a point here.
She was never a hostage. She was a victim.
And that was the first thing
that they really wanted us to understand
in negotiation training,
'cause we're there to save everybody.
And they gotta teach you that
you're there to save everybody
that will allow you to save them.
And if there's somebody inside
that's not going to allow you to save them,
you've gotta recognize it,
because innocent people are gonna die until you do.
- See, the point I'm trying to make to you
is everything about the tobacco industry
is regulated by the government
of the United States of America.
It has always been since 1933,
and it's becoming more and more so now.
You know, you hear all about nicotine, nicotine,
but what you don't hear is
if they catch you planting tobacco
that won't produce the right
amount of nicotine under law,
you can be prosecuted and
can go to federal penitentiary.
- I want a way to the mall.
The DC Mall is this big grassy area,
originally sort of a park
that extends from the Capitol building
to the Lincoln Memorial.
This is where the tractor man Dwight Watson
siege took place back in 2003.
Started out on St. Patrick's Day of all days.
When he first came, he said he had four bombs with him,
and that he'd scattered four bombs
around the Washington metropolitan area.
So by the time that I'd got here,
and this had been going down for about 24 hours,
they were fairly satisfied at that point in time
that there were not four bombs around the area.
Now that doesn't mean
that he still doesn't have four bombs with him.
So there was actually a green
light on him the entire time,
the sn*pers could take him out.
(officers chattering)
And when I first came outta hostage negotiation,
I thought it was principally gonna
revolve around asking great
questions, open-ended questions,
calibrated to get somebody to think in a certain way,
not necessarily get an answer,
trigger thinking in the other side.
But you can't focus completely on questions.
Like if I say, what are you thinking?
You're probably gonna stop and think,
and give me an in-depth answer.
Which means that you thought about the answer
before you gave it to me.
But if I say instead,
seems like you're thinking about something,
that's a label, you are much more likely to begin
to immediately blurt out what you're saying.
I'm gonna get your thoughts
in a very unvarnished fashion.
So start labeling the emotional dynamics.
You sound angry, you sound frustrated, you sound hurt.
It seems like this situation
has really, really hurt you personally.
- It's not about you and where you want to end up.
Your goal and objective is what it is.
Put it on the back burner, we'll get to it later.
You'll be able to present your case at a later time.
Let's hear from the other side first.
- Look where all the money's going.
The money's going to everywhere
except where it needs to go.
It needs to go back to the tobacco industry,
to the farmers, so they can have enough resources
to grow this stuff organically.
But it goes to fix every problem under the sun.
- He had protested on the
Mall previously, several times,
had gotten permits to protest legally on the Mall
about the tobacco settlement
crushing his family's finances
because they were tobacco farmers.
And the tobacco settlement
put restrictions on how much you could grow.
And his family lost their
business based on a settlement.
And he'd been here legitimately several times,
and nobody cared.
- But see, you got to be able to talk to each other.
You got to have a free, free exchange of ideas
so people can feel free to
talk about the problems to solve.
But when everybody's scared,
and they're afraid, they won't talk about it,
- As soon as we saw this is a guy, you know,
had something to say,
giving people a chance to
have their say is transformative.
We think that this guy doesn't deserve to get k*lled
over not being able to have his say.
A negotiation operation center, a NOC,
should have no less than five to seven people
breaking down every aspect of the conversation.
- The reason a negotiator
like Chris is very successful
is because it's not merely
talking to the perpetrators.
You have to manage others involved in the case.
- There should be as much activity
and as many personnel in a
negotiation operations center
as there is in a command post.
Somebody should be recording the conversation.
Somebody should just be keeping the times.
What time are they on? What time are they off?
There should be two or three people
on what we call situation boards.
One would have predicted dialogue.
If he says this, you say this.
Another one would have keeping
track of every negative thing
that he said that might be perceived as a threat.
You write each one of those
down, you begin to see a trend,
how much profanity is being used.
Another one is keeping track of information
we need to get out of them.
And a negotiator's gotta be sitting
where they can see all this stuff.
There's gotta be a coach next to the negotiator,
because everybody's gonna have notes and ideas
that are gonna come in the spur of the moment.
It's overwhelming for the negotiator.
So the coach is really the barrier for all the notes.
You know, everything is done
to keep the negotiator on track.
The FBI's job in a major siege is really to support.
Let us throw as many resources
into your game as possible.
You guys are still in charge.
We'll stand up all the support that you need.
(dramatic music)
So they get the entire surrender ritual
worked out with them.
But of course they don't use the word surrender,
because coming out with dignity
and being treated with respect
is paramount to get somebody to come out.
So you just stay away from wards like surrender.
He's agreed to come out, he feels heard.
And while SWAT wants to
handle him with complete respect,
they also need to make sure
that he doesn't hurt anybody,
and he surrenders peacefully, and comes out,
and nobody gets k*lled.
- Great negotiators are agile, strategically,
and quick on their feet moment-to-moment.
And that really defines Chris and his approach.
You can't script negotiation.
There's somebody else's hands on the wheel.
And you have to, I would say,
negotiate how you negotiate.
- Making the decision upfront
that you are gonna make a conscious effort
to approach persuasion, influence, motivation,
however you want to define it,
differently than the average bear.
- When you're dominating the conversation
saying what you wanna say,
you're not really learning anything.
The objective is to learn about the other person.
Sympathy is, I feel sorry for you.
Empathy is, I understand how you feel about that.
There's a difference.
So we're not teaching sympathy,
we're teaching empathy.
- We all know of situations
where people run into buildings with a g*n,
they sh**t everybody up, never talk to the police,
and then they k*ll themselves.
That person planned on dying when they got there.
If they're engaged with us,
it's actually in an effort to save their own skin.
They actually want an amicable solution.
That mindset, that narrative,
is also part of the communication process with them.
- Yeah, empathy is a tool and not even need to liking
or agreeing the other side.
I mean that's the way I learned it in the FBI.
Because we had to be able
to apply empathy effectively
with people that wanted to k*ll us personally.
(chanting in foreign language)
How am I gonna agree with somebody from Al Qaeda
or somebody from a
Palestinian t*rror1st organization?
You know, how am I gonna agree with those guys?
- It's a situation where you're really not sympathetic.
You may in fact even feel angry with them,
but where you nonetheless try to demonstrate
a willingness to understand their perspective.
- You know, how am I gonna agree with those guys,
that isn't gonna happen.
But as a hostage negotiator,
the American people are gonna expect me
to communicate effectively with these people
or find somebody who will.
(traffic whooshing)
Was assigned here for a long time, from 1986 to 2000.
So as I'm learning all this, and he's growing up,
and watching me learn
crisis negotiation, (thunder booming)
emotional intelligence.
He's picking it up on the side.
He was also very aware
of the work that I was doing in terrorism.
And he just, he absorbed that stuff.
You know, when I was at home,
I guess I talked about it a lot.
- As you all know, when you're sitting in the hot seat
and the pressure's on, spotlight's on you,
it's difficult to come up with the words in the moment.
It's hard. This is a stress test.
This is designed to put you under pressure.
Now how it's gonna work.
You're gonna be working two person teams.
You are gonna be his coach.
I'm a bank robber trapped in a bank.
I have an unknown number of hostages,
and I have an unknown number of accomplices.
You're the primary negotiator
on the outside with the police,
got the bank completely surrounded.
You're gonna have four
restrictions when you speak to me.
These are the same restrictions
that crisis negotiators get on scene.
You cannot provide me with transportation.
(sirens wailing)
You cannot provide me with drugs or alcohol.
You can't gimme weapons.
(g*n bangs)
And there's no hostage exchange.
People only come out. Nobody goes in.
(clears throat)
I need a car in 60 seconds or she dies.
- I'm here to help you by getting a car.
- If you want to help me, then bring me a vehicle.
I'm trapped in here.
Give me my car. I need to get away, 55 seconds.
- [Participant] That's not something
I'm gonna be able to do for you.
- 50 seconds.
- Come on.
There's gotta be something
else that we could talk about.
I can't.
- Nah, the only thing that I want to talk about
is when my car is gonna pull up, and me driving away.
- You start k*lling people, that's not gonna end well.
- And you know what, it looks like that's the only way
I'm gonna be able to make my point.
- Tactics are chosen in the moment.
They're extremely practical,
and they are actionable.
- [Brandon] Where's my car? Where is it?
- What do you need the car for?
- To get away.
What else would I need the
car for? I gotta get outta here.
How long is it gonna take to get a car?
- [Participant] You gonna have,
you're gonna have to build some time with me.
We gotta collaborate.
- I'll give you an hour. Call me back in an hour.
If you don't have my car, somebody's dying, click.
- It's basically taking the lovely idea of empathy
and it's turning it into something
that is super action oriented on the ground.
Boots on the ground.
- Ring, ring, ring. Where's my car? You got it?
- It's still on the way, sir.
I need some kind of reassurance
that everyone in there is fine.
- How do I know my car is on the way?
How do I know you're not blowing smoke up my skirt?
- It's on its way. It's stuck in traffic.
You know how city traffic is.
- Car's on its way. You're gonna have my car?
Call me when my car gets here, click.
- We do a lot of work in law enforcement
where we have to calm people down.
- I don't need to do anything.
And you need to save the lives
of these people in this building,
- You know, maybe they're mentally disturbed.
- I bring out a couple of shots,
you can hear them scream if you like that.
Your profession is to serve the community,
and I need to be served a vehicle, where is it?
- If we could just lower that adrenaline level
by using simple communication techniques,
I think that's the way to go
to reduce the number of
resisting arrest situations,
to reduce the violence.
Even if it's incremental, it's worth doing.
- All right. It's tough.
I mean spotlight's on you, you're getting screamed at,
and all of you at least managed
to try to maintain that even keel.
Now that doesn't change the fact
that internally you just
feel the adrenaline rushing.
Like man, if it was just me and him in this room,
it'd just be a little bit different, right?
Like you can feel that coming, and that's the trigger.
That feeling is actually what gets in the way
of our ability to think.
That cognitive ability dropping,
that buzz at the bottom of the skull, right?
That nervousness or that adrenaline pumping,
like that's what that feeling is.
That's what actually causes us to drop.
(police sirens wailing)
- In law enforcement, we now know that one incident
can affect the entire country.
- [Crowd] Say his name.
- [Crowd] George Floyd.
- [Crowd] Say his name.
- [Crowd] George Floyd.
- When we look at the Minneapolis incident
with Derek Chauvin in eight minutes and 43 seconds.
He looked into the camera with a cavalier attitude,
and people assigned law enforcement
to have that same attitude.
- A cop, you a cop, ain't you?
- I'm a police officer here in Detroit.
- Okay, you was a police officer too.
- Here in Detroit.
- A decision that a police officer makes
no matter how long they have
on the job, and where they are,
if it's a decision that tears apart the trust factor
between police and the
community and race relations,
everybody pays the price.
(protesters shouting and screaming)
- People wanna work with people they like and respect
and feel they like and respect them.
So honesty, integrity, sincerity, genuineness,
your tone of voice.
You know, many times we would resolve situations,
and we would ask the hostage taker,
what did we say that made you come out?
And the answer was always the same.
"I don't remember what you said,
but I liked the way you said it."
- So when are you, when are you bargaining
instead of influencing the individual?
- [Participant] When they're in the cell, right?
- Yeah, when they're in the cell. Yeah.
That's probably could be considered a bargain.
Yeah, that's probably true.
When you're on the street
and you're dealing with them
before they get in handcuffs,
before you get them back to the precinct,
there isn't anything about bargaining
that contains understanding.
That's why we negotiate.
Key word I love there is understanding. I love that.
That's a great word.
When people feel understood,
they're willing to be influenced.
And everybody in the New York City area
feels like the NYPD doesn't understand them.
This is the world we live in, right?
It's not necessarily your fault or their fault.
It just kind of, this is how we got here.
And so changing that narrative starts in this room.
It starts with you eight,
and the knowledge that you pass on
to the individuals that you're working with.
- I was part of the joint t*rror1st task force,
a couple of years after that,
I got on the crisis negotiation team.
Those are two separate
entities with overlapping missions.
(dramatic music)
The critical incident negotiation team
deploys internationally on the kidnappings.
I've been dying to get on with these guys all along.
Invitation only.
(helicopter blades chattering)
But they're waiting to see
do you have self-initiative?
Do you also follow direction?
'Cause if you're gonna drop a
negotiator in another country
and expect them to do the right thing,
they're kind of not hardwired anymore.
They're kind of on their own.
And they gotta represent the best interests
of the US government and
the hostages simultaneously.
Interesting balancing act.
(plane engine roaring)
Lufthansa plane gets hijacked overseas.
It's on it's way to JFK in New York with a hijacker.
I don't think we'd had a hijacking in the US
in like 17 years.
We deploy for that. I stick
with the t*rror1st task force.
I don't become part of the negotiation team,
'cause I didn't explicitly get
sent over to the negotiators.
And afterwards Amy says,
"Don't wait for somebody to call you, show up."
So I take that to heart,
and I start taking some initiative,
myself and another colleague show up uninvited
to a barricade in Dobbs Ferry, New York,
end up being critical in
supporting the local negotiation team
of getting the guy to
surrender without getting k*lled.
Another instance, I'm on the t*rror1st task force.
I'm sitting there waiting to do an interview that day.
A friend of mine on the
negotiation team, Charlie, says,
there's a bank robbery in Brooklyn with hostages.
Let's go.
I'm like, all right, I'm not waiting till I get called.
We show up, they throw together a team
that's a combination of NYPD and FBI,
puts me in as a first coach.
A few hours later on he takes
the phone from the primary,
and says you're up next.
(sirens blaring)
(helicopter whirring)
He gets me on the phone.
I negotiate one of the bank robbers to come out.
- The individual who just surrendered
was one of those voices
who the hostage negotiators were talking to.
- Which then sets in motion
everybody coming out unharmed.
(dramatic music)
(energetic music)
Quantico, the negotiation guys
invite me to join the sim team.
They take me out on some overseas training
to see how I perform overseas.
Can I get along in a foreign
environment and make friends
and not offend people?
Not be the heavy-handed FBI agent
who's there to tell people what to do.
I pass the test, I get along with some other people.
The next thing I know, they got openings in Columbia.
And that's how I ended up down there.
- [Reporter] Their eavesdropping led them to believe
Koresh was becoming more violent.
- [Reporter] Not injured,
according to police and is being.
- [Reporter] They were abducted by the revolutionary
armed forces of Columbia.
(officer speaking foreign language)
- Chris ran the International
Kidnap Response program,
that meant anytime an American citizen
was kidnapped anywhere in the world,
with the permission of the host country,
we'd deploy FBI negotiators
to help resolve the situation.
(rebels speaking foreign language)
(dramatic music)
- So I start working international
kidnappings in Columbia.
You know, they sent me down as a ride along, so to speak,
sidekick, copilot, you know,
with somebody with much more
experience to show me the ropes
again to see if I pay attention.
Cases in Columbia tended to last months if not years.
And so you would go through a 21-day rotation
and do the best you could
to try to move things forward
and not let it get worse.
So I worked a couple cases in Columbia,
and you know, then I got transferred
to be a full-time negotiator.
South America was slowing down at the time,
the dynamics in Columbia were changing,
where there were fewer kidnappings.
The government was trying to come
to an accommodation with the t*rrorists, the FARC.
Kidnapping destroys human capital.
- A list was found with over a hundred names,
that these people had in mind to kidnap.
- Ultimately where kidnapping is rampant,
only two people remain,
really rich, the people who have enough money
to buy their own security to protect them,
to have their own army.
And the really poor, everybody else leaves.
You know, it destroys the professional class.
People with college degrees, doctors, lawyers,
but they don't make enough
money to hire their own army.
They gotta go or they're gonna get kidnapped.
(haunting music)
So there was fewer resources from kidnapping
for the guerillas in Columbia to lean on.
You know, they got more into drug dealing
'cause that's where the money
was, protecting drug dealers.
- [Reporter] From the
beginning the Bush administration
has declared that drugs
are America's greatest threat
and the enemy is in Columbia.
- So the business in South America slowed down
at about the same time,
things were starting to pick up in the Philippines.
(birds calling)
(haunting music)
First of all, if you're a
hostage negotiator long enough,
something's gonna go bad, somebody's gonna get k*lled.
That's just, we're not a hundred percent effective.
Now you can either not have
the appetite for that and quit,
or you can decide you gotta get better.
(haunting music continues)
I had just worked a case in the Philippines.
The Schilling case went really well.
I turn around about a month
later, Dos Palmas goes down.
- I deliver the message to the Kalahi government.
- Another faction of the Abu Sayyaf goes out
and hits another dive resort.
Martin and Gracia Burnham, Guillermo Sobero,
get scooped up with a bunch of other Filipinos.
- The reports that we have a state that three females
and five males were abducted by Commander Moin
and ESG nephew of Commander Radulan.
- And it was this massive
circus of ransoms being stolen,
money being dropped outta helicopters,
government couriers delivering the money.
And a bad guy saying that you're short.
And it just turns into one mess after another.
Shortly after I get into the Philippines,
that Guillermo Sobero is m*rder*d
less than three weeks into it.
The bad guys are on the run.
They're being chased by the Filipino army.
Supposedly they were cornered
in this hospital in Lamitan.
And there's a firefight going on.
And I remember thinking at the time, like our rules is
you can't negotiate in the
middle of a firefight or a riot.
I mean I'll go, but until this begins to settle out,
I don't know that there's much I could do.
We get down there, the very first briefing we get
in the military camp that we're in
is what to do in case our position
is overrun by the t*rrorists.
You know, how do you bug out?
Which is actually kind of
standard operating procedure.
I mean if you get into a bad situation,
the first thing you gotta
figure out is how you get out.
So we think this thing is gonna go down
in an ugly way overnight.
And one of the negotiator that I'm coaching
who I end up being very good friends with,
he's the head of the special
action force with the police,
the SAF, their special forces.
He's like, "I'm gonna go be with my guys.
'Cause I'm pretty sure some of them
are gonna get k*lled tonight."
So we figure this thing's
gonna go down ugly overnight.
I figure I'm gonna get woken
up in the middle of the night.
There's gonna be bodies.
At some point in time, there's gonna be chaos.
We go to sleep.
I wake up the next morning, birds are chirping,
sun is shining, and nobody's around.
I mean nobody's around.
I start walking around looking for people, you know,
I find Susan and the negotiators with me.
We start looking around like silence.
Bad guys walked away in the middle of the night,
walked away.
Supposedly they walked away
when the people having the
rear perimeter on the hospital
were called away to a briefing.
And coincidentally, when the people in the rear
were called away to a briefing,
the bad guys stepped out,
and just walked away.
Hearing from the hostages afterwards
as they're exiting the hospital,
they think they're gonna walk into a firefight.
And they're walking down
empty streets in this little town.
Nobody's around, and they can't believe
that the military is nowhere to be found,
and they just walk away.
And that was one of the many just
ridiculously bizarre things.
That was gonna happen time after time after time
over the course of those 13 months.
(helicopter engine roaring)
(birds calling)
About 13 months in,
ransom had been negotiated with the bad guys
for release of the hostages
by representatives of the family, bad guys reneged.
And then it just got even worse.
The negotiator that was representing the bad guys
was embarrassed
because he thought he was negotiating a release,
and the people on the other side
of the table were not coordinated.
They got double crossed by their own people.
And finally a patrol of Philippine scout rangers
stumbled over the encampment,
that the last three remaining hostages were in,
Ediborah Yap and Martin and Gracia Burnham.
And they didn't know the hostages were there
and they opened fire.
(g*nshots booming)
Martin was shot and k*lled and Gracia was wounded.
Ediborah Yap was k*lled as well.
And that was the end of that train wreck.
(tense music)
And afterwards, you know,
we did our own internal after action.
Did we miss anything?
Is there anything we should
have done that we didn't do?
And collectively with my
boss and my other colleagues,
we're like, no, we did everything we knew how to do.
And my response to that was, all right,
so if we're inadequate, we gotta get better.
If we've applied
all the hostage negotiation knowledge that we have,
and it's inadequate, we gotta look to other sources.
(upbeat music)
And that's when I started looking at
business negotiation books,
going on inside a hostage negotiation.
I found Jim Camp's book "Start With No."
And that was what really began my collaboration
with the people at Harvard.
(upbeat music continues)
Bob Bordone, one of the instructors up there,
brilliant professor, one of his opening slides
was active listening is the stealth weapon
of effective negotiation.
And I went, ooh, I like that.
I wanna hear some more from this guy.
- See if there's some way that
with the use of some kind of facilitation,
actually identifying a joint problem to work on,
then you can really get parties brainstorming
around the joint problem.
- [Chris] And when they were putting that stuff up,
I realized they were about
the same things we were about,
effectiveness, and good relationships.
No matter who's on the other side of the table.
- Interesting, the research shows
that people think there's a trade off
between being assertive, of being strong,
and at the same time, you know, being empathetic
with the person you're dealing with.
- You know what, in any exchange of feedback
between giver and receiver,
it's the receiver who's in charge.
I mean it's the receiver who decides
what they're gonna let in,
what sense they're gonna make of it,
and whether and how they choose to change.
I specialize in particularly
difficult conversations
where there's a lot of uncertainty in many cases,
where there's relationship history,
where there's strong feelings, resentment.
To understand what's going on between two people
or in a difficult situation,
you have to look beneath the surface.
You have to negotiate with not with what people say,
you have to negotiate
with what they're really thinking and feeling.
(upbeat music continues)
- So getting started with them, you know,
we're thinking the same things
in two completely different environments.
It was really more validation as opposed to change.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of validation
for how this stuff applied
and everything else besides hostage negotiation.
- Exactly, yeah, that's one of the cool things,
especially about you getting in here
and doing the work that you did.
Not only was I very proud,
but it was the first place
with this level of notoriety
where the proof of concept really came to fruition
in a lot of ways.
Right. You knew it worked in hostage.
- All right, so first question I pose to you guys,
the difference between
negotiating and bargaining?
- Is that the difference
bargaining is you want something,
negotiating as we both want something?
- Interesting. Bargaining is you want something.
- [Participant] That is an interesting way to look at it.
- That's a really interesting thought.
- So just follow up question for the group
in regards to money.
So does that mean like every time money is involved
you are in fact bargaining?
- Principally, the Black Swan method
has been designed and built by my son and I, Brandon.
You know, he kind of picked it up growing up by osmosis,
then he started using the skills
to get himself out of trouble
in high school and in college
and stuff that I still don't know about to this day.
- Brandon's talents is that since three years old,
he's been negotiating with Chris.
He's got more time in the seat with Chris
than any hostage taker on the planet.
- When we started working together, I was at a sales job
where I was doing B2B sales
for software and technology with Verizon,
and he was basically a one-man show, right?
He had started this business,
he was still going to Harvard
and finishing up his masters.
So like for the first year,
Black Swan didn't actually do any business.
And in 2009 I started slowly
being involved with networking events,
and helping him strategize with the content.
- Chris clearly was an FBI hostage negotiator,
and Brandon came from the commercial world.
- When I was in FBI.
And then when I started teaching it,
first at Georgetown at business schools, you know,
I had him there to give me feedback, you know,
let's talk about it, does it make sense to you.
- And that's kind of where we figured out like,
ah, you know, this might work, this isn't too bad.
We argue some, but we don't completely hate each other,
so maybe we can actually turn this
into a bit of a business relationship.
And in 2010, January, January 1 of that year
is when I came on to Black Swan full time,
and it's been a heck of a ride ever since.
(dramatic music)
Yeah, Black Swan is the
discovery of innocuous information.
And a lot of times Black Swans
are like unknown unknowns.
And so for example, you're in a negotiation.
There is information
that the other side might not have shared,
or might not been willing to share
because they don't
understand the significance of it.
- The default goal of a conversation
is to get your way, right,
to have the other person like be convinced
of your viewpoint.
Strangely, you try to put that in practice,
and you find that it doesn't work.
- You know, the real key to empathy is it's not about you.
It's not about what your reaction,
it's about what the other person's reaction is.
- The urge to correct is so overpowering
that people will compromise
their position unintentionally,
just to correct you.
- You know, a really smart negotiator
loves to be embarrassed
when they're getting corrected
'cause the other side is
really giving them good stuff.
And the great thing about that
is if you get them blurting stuff out
as a result of a correction on a label or a mirror,
it felt so good to correct
you that they never regret it.
You know, the cliche people
don't remember what you said,
they remember how they feel,
or they felt great correcting you.
- It automatically makes you feel smarter,
strokes your ego, gives you those dopamine hits.
- So they're not gonna have communicator's remorse
from giving up information
that they shouldn't have given up
because they just remember
how good it felt in the moment.
And then one day somebody
started doing labels accidentally
and triggering information much to the point where,
you know, we called it mislabels.
We saw that when people
labeled wrong intentionally,
the other side was really blurting out information.
I mean we get people giving
up stuff in business deals
that they would normally never give up otherwise.
(dramatic music)
- You know, in the business world,
what can we learn from hostage negotiations?
Well, if in the high 90 percentile
we get people with a g*n
who've already committed some violence
to surrender peacefully.
- [Officer] See the driver, he is out,
there is 11-year-old child in the car,
and he's just reaching for the child very carefully.
- Then maybe these skills will work pretty well
in less threatening situations in life
and at home and at work.
- When you are trying to get somebody to agree with you
on whatever level, you're trying to get them to comply.
Hostage negotiators
are the ultimate compliance
professionals on the planet
because we sold jail time,
and we got people to buy it all of the time.
- And they were dealing with people at their worst,
in their most stressed moments.
These are exceptional use cases.
- There's no tougher conversation on the planet
than a hostage negotiator
talking to a hostage taker.
- The only stuff that we've really been surprised by
and the differences between hostage negotiation
and business negotiation
is really the stuff that we didn't think applied
has direct application.
Like proof of life in a kidnapping negotiation.
Does the bad guy have your hostage,
and does he have any
intention of releasing him to you?
This building right over here, which is now Corcoran,
then was the Chase Manhattan Bank.
The bank right here that says Chase,
back then was the chemical bank
where the command post was.
And across the street is where the trucks are set up.
The NYPD SWAT trucks, that's the inner perimeter.
Everybody's guard is down a little bit at the time
because we heard from the very beginning
that the bank robbers wanted to surrender.
Now what we don't know is
this is actually a really shrewd escape plan
by the ringleader who is putting out
all sorts of misinformation
from the very beginning.
The main bad guy on the
inside has got all the earmarks
of a great business negotiator.
This guy doesn't lose his poise.
Now we got hostages inside, we figured we got,
there's two females, and a male bank guard,
and we haven't heard boo from any of these people.
We got no idea what kind of condition they're in.
Our guy, the manipulative
guy's been telling us all along
that he's taking care of them.
They got to eat, they gotta go to the bathroom.
All this was a lie.
But he knew that if he sounded like
he was taking care of the hostages,
the threat level would stay
low, and we're not coming in.
- We're here.
This is me, I'm Joey, you know what I look like,
I can't see you.
But we made at least a good faith gesture to him.
- I think many times.
- So we switch out negotiators unannounced,
and the next thing you know,
I hear a female voice on the phone, and she goes, I'm okay.
And I'm like, what, who is this? Tell me your name.
She says, I'm okay again. And then she's off the phone.
Now our manipulative bad guy now comes on the phone
acting like nothing happened.
So he reminds us that he's got hostages,
provides us with proof of life
without raising the threat level.
It never occurred to me
that would be a problem in business negotiation.
But we start kicking around this proof of life idea,
and we are gaining a sense that, you know,
there's some business deals
out there that people engage
and they have no intention of consummating the deal
with the people that they're talking to.
I bring it up with one company
that we're doing some
training for their salespeople,
and a guy says, oh yeah, that's in the challenger sale,
what we call the favorite of the fool.
If you don't know who the fool in the game is,
it's probably you.
And they basically say,
how often do you engage in a business negotiation
where you have no intention
of engaging the other side?
You're either doing your own due diligence, you know,
you've been told to get three bids,
to get three proposals from three companies,
but you know who you want.
You got a favorite going in.
The other two are the fools.
Or they're only there
to drive the price down on the favorite.
You just need them to cut their price
so you can go back to the favorite and say,
company B'll do it for this.
If you don't do it for that, we're going with them.
Having no intention of going with that company.
We start coaching people
on how to look for proof of life.
Early on, is there a deal, is the deal with you?
And the people that fully adopt our methodology,
are finding out that the percentages
of time when there's no deal to be had ever
range as high as 80% of the time.
Ignore human nature at your peril.
Which means if you don't find
out why they're talking to you
and you start making your sales pitch,
the odds are that your pitch
is not gonna match what they want.
One executive in real estate told us
that over a year of applying
favorite of the fool methodology,
she went out on 80% fewer listing presentations,
worked 20% as much, and made the same amount of money,
got 80% of her life back, more time with her family,
happier than she'd ever been.
And is this just real estate?
No, it's wherever human beings are involved.
(suspenseful music)
- I observed a male with a hood on,
and he was holding a female,
and a male with a duct tape around their eyes,
and he was holding them down.
- You know, what makes labeling and mirroring
so effective in negotiation?
A lot of it is
tapping straight into people's
stream of consciousness
without causing them to raise their guard.
Hostage negotiator's mirror is just repeating
the last one to three words
of what somebody's just said,
word for word with only tiny adjustments.
I hate you, you hate me. That's a mirror.
They're great connectors. People go on, people reword.
But a lot of times if you say to somebody,
what did you mean by that?
They're gonna repeat it. The
same words again, only louder.
That doesn't help anybody.
But if you mirror, they're gonna reword.
Plus they're gonna, they're
probably gonna blurt stuff out
that they didn't mean to blurt out.
And when I was at the Chase Bank in New York,
when Lieutenant McGowan
hands the phone off to me, he says,
first chance you get,
I want you to brace this guy with his name.
He'd been concealing his name from us for hours,
wouldn't tell us even what his first name was.
(suspenseful music continues)
You know, we find his vehicle,
we finally figure out who he is.
So I'm gonna back into this. Tell him about the van.
And he starts blurting stuff out about the van,
that he says, well, you chased my driver away.
I go, you chased your driver away.
Like, I don't know what he's talking about.
I mean, I am completely confused.
(suspenseful music continues)
Now this is a very controlled guy
who's controlling everything that he says.
And the mirrors caused him
to begin to give us information on a co-conspirator
that we didn't even know was there.
We didn't know there was a
getaway driver that got away.
- [Reporter] But the plan soon went awry.
The alleged getaway driver was later arrested.
- The spontaneous admissions,
the truth that he blurted out,
not meaning to do.
- [Reporter] And at eight o'clock,
the g*nman apparently
sensed no way out, surrendered.
It was an end to an exhausting ordeal,
another victory for the NYPD.
- Now this happens in all situations.
It's just not a bank robber.
It's people in all negotiations,
and labels and mirrors can trigger that in ways
that other things won't.
Jihadi John has a limbic system and an amygdala.
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the head of !sis,
has a limbic system and an amygdala.
And they all function in the same ways.
The only people that don't have an emotional makeup
that doesn't react like else's
are the people that are
actually paranoid schizophrenic,
when their wiring is actually wrong.
- I first heard about Chris and
Brandon from YouTube videos
and I immediately got interested
and saw how it could be
applicable to law enforcement.
(dramatic music)
- You all got a really good feel
for what's going on in people's heads
when you show up on scene.
- It's a great thing about teaching in law enforcement,
very blue collar, very practical audience.
And if you're not bringing it in a practical way,
you get booed off the stage.
- You're experienced, you're intuitive.
You wouldn't even be in this room
if you'd didn't already have a high skillset.
Anyway, use those intuitive
senses and those gut reactions
to help you work through the communication process
with this person.
- Empathy really starts with tone of voice.
As hostage negotiators, they drilled into us
the late night FM DJ,
you know, the downward inflecting soothing voice,
and officers on the street in law enforcement
are taught to have a commanding presence.
- [Officer] Get on the ground.
Dude, you're gonna get tased, or you gonna get sprayed.
Get on the ground now.
- Issue commands loudly and directly
so that everyone can hear them.
- And then as a police officer, if I'm screaming at you.
- That's an aggressive voice.
And unfortunately the
neuroscience reaction to that
is both the user and the listener's IQ is diminishing
because you both go into survival mode,
and that's where the downward spiral begins.
Because a police officer is
following his or her training.
- And that's where an officer has to have good judgment,
good discernment, good wisdom,
whatever decision you make,
whether it's going hands on.
But more importantly, when you pull that trigger,
you're making a decision
that's impacting law enforcement
around the nation, you better be right.
- Now, yes, there are situations
of an improper application of force.
- [Witness] Look at this.
- [Officer] Ah, f*ck, put your hands on me again.
- Where people are engaging in things
that they know is not in their training,
but the majority of the interactions
that are going down badly are training issues
versus hearts being in the wrong place.
- [Dispatcher] Four, John Young and Hardwood.
- [Officer] Get on the ground. Get on the ground.
- Chris has the advantage of sitting at the junction
of a number of different populations.
So he was a beat cop, right?
Then he starts working
on international challenges,
then he marries a Black woman,
and has a son who grows
up understanding what it's like
to be on the street with law enforcement
that takes a glance at you
and assume a bunch of things about you.
- Well, let me touch on a couple things
that you guys did really well.
Dill, you introduced yourself at the very beginning.
You're just a faceless NYPD officer,
that coincides with knock yo punk a*s down
prior to introducing yourself.
It is amazing how much ground we can start to gain
when a counterpart knows our name.
- As an elected official of the people,
there is a responsibility that I have.
And on May 30th, 2020, we
decided to listen to the people,
not fight against them.
- [Reporter] Across the nation,
we're seeing police officers doing what they can
to ease the tension.
- [Reporter] In Flint, Michigan,
the sheriff put down his
baton and listened to protestors.
- That's where we as law
enforcement need to step forward
and say, listen, we're gonna do things right.
- People situated
with insight into these different communities
that sometimes have a hard time understanding
what is going wrong and what
would help to fix this system
that produces such tragic outcomes.
We have to have people who can bridge those gaps
and who have insight into and genuine empathy
for being on all sides of conflicts like that.
- People feel threatened
by you because they're afraid
that you want to take something away from them.
And that's all negotiation.
And it gets much worse
when you got a reputation
that's following you around
whether or not you caused it doesn't matter,
it's still following you.
And just trying to interact with them
at a human level first.
(dramatic music)
My hope is that they are safer day in and day out
because they interact with community better,
and as a result the community wants to harm them less.
Coming into this, I was super excited about it
because I know this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Like what this could potentially
involve into, you know,
the sky's almost a limit.
And so I feel a tremendous amount of pressure
coming in to kind of be the
spark that helps get that going.
(energetic music)
- Our credibility is important.
We wanna establish some
truths, and the most important truth
is that we want everyone to come out safe.
(hopeful music) (singers vocalizing)
- I remember in my early days as a cop,
I read an article that said,
if you encounter a problem, don't just solve it,
but solve it in a way
where it doesn't come back on you again.
Empathy is about solving problems
'cause you've established a great relationship.
You've gotten to the heart of the matter
by the way you approach it with empathy.
(hopeful music continues)
Tactical Empathy applies
in all of our interactions
where we want to have better relationships.
(dramatic music)
You know, family, friends, colleagues.
If you don't want a better relationship,
I mean, you're asking for trouble.
(dramatic music continues)
If you're not focused on relationships,
you are in a downward spiral.
Whether you realize that or not.
Empathy works
because all human beings want to be understood.
(dramatic music continues)
(haunting music)
(haunting music continues)
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Tactical Empathy (2024)
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