How’d I do?

The first rule of police negotiation. Brace for rejection. Nobody wants to talk to the police. Particularly on a crappy day and any day the police are parked outside your house, probably qualifies as a crappy day. This is how it started for Charles and me. I parked in the back seat of my Lieutenant’s suburban, phone pressed to my ear, around the corner from Charles’s modest suburban townhouse. And Charles, mood darkened as he fumed over the now incessantly ringing cell phone in his living room. 

It was a bad day before I arrived. Charles, in a bid to improve his finances, had rented out a room in his house. There was an argument and in a fit of frustration and dissatisfaction with his new living arrangements, Charles had drawn the loaded handgun he kept nearby for protection. He loudly threatened the new roommate for disturbing his peace and waved the weapon at him. The roommate promptly escaped the house and called the police. 

Charles was like most of the people I talked to in my career as a police negotiator. Not there by design. Charles had vented his anger momentarily and ended up somewhere he never intended to be. He hung up on me four, maybe five times. The sixth time he let me get out “Hello, this is Yve from the police department” before he hung up on me. The seventh time he snarled into the phone “I know who you are! Why won’t you leave me alone?” Now I was getting somewhere. 

“Sir, you sound angry.” Pause. Let him process what you just said. Don’t get uncomfortable with the silence and fill the space. Respect his process. “I am angry!” he blurted. “I’m sorry if I made you angry. It’s just, we have some people who are concerned about you.” I said. “Nobody is concerned about me!” he replied. His voice quickly shifted from angry to despondent. I didn’t miss the emotional shift, but it made me curious, so I mirrored his statement as a question “Nobody is concerned about you?” And that’s when the floodgates opened. 

He told me about the tension between him and his family and how they never visited him but routinely made decisions for him about his health. All of this was done without consulting him. He was older and battling some chronic health conditions. His legs bothered him. He didn’t move very fast anymore. But all of his agency had been stripped away with his mobility. The sicker he got, the more he suddenly found himself without independence or control.

The inability to control his new living arrangements irritated these emotional wounds and before he could register what was happening, he had drawn his gun. It was a desperate act to reestablish control. “I never intended to hurt him” Charles insisted before pausing to say a phrase I had heard before from others. “Thanks for listening to me,” he said. Followed quietly and sadly by “You’re the only person who has”.

Charles surrendered to us a short time later. I told him that we wouldn’t arrest him if he came out. I met him at the door and helped him down his front steps. We secured his gun for safety, and I explained to Charles that we would need to take him to the hospital to speak with a therapist. He told me he wasn’t happy with that. I acknowledged that he wasn’t. He told me he would go because he felt safe with me. 

Standing at the nurse’s station, waiting to find him a room, a handcuffed Charles turned to me and asked, “How’d I do Yve?” Somehow, through the hour and a half on the phone, my approval had become important to him. He wanted me to like him. “You did good Charles,” I said nodding my head. “You did good!”