[MUSIC PLAYING]
Here's a case study from my first real hostage negotiation,
where I learned a lot about honing
my skills as a negotiator.
REPORTER: Well, David, at about 8:30 this morning,
four people at least, two believed to be armed,
attempted to hold up the Chase Manhattan branch in the Park
Slope section of Brooklyn.
This is a nice section of New York City, by the way.
I'm in New York City one morning,
getting ready to do an interview.
One of my hostage negotiation compadres, one of my colleagues
comes up to my desk and says, there's
a bank robbery with hostages in Brooklyn.
Let's go.
We pull the car up.
We're right on top of the inner perimeter.
We bail out of the car, low crawl
over to the bank across the street
that's got the command post in it.
Everyone has been seduced at the very beginning
to assume that this is going to be a short, sweet operation.
Apparently, they tried to enter the bank
as three employees were getting ready to open the branch.
That resulted in the bank alarm going off,
and the hostage drama began.
Hundreds of police officers from the 78th Precinct
arrived at the scene, cordoning off about four city blocks.
No one's been moving in or out of this area
except for the police since 8:30 this morning, which
is about 5 and 1/2 hours now.
A police tactical squad is on the scene, as well as a police
chopper.
The FBI and the NYPD have established contact
with the alleged robbers.
The three bank employees are OK as far as we know.
Police are looking for a peaceful resolution
to this hostage drama unfolding right now.
Reporting live in New York.
We got the actual recordings from the Chase Manhattan Bank
robbery hostage taking.
We're going to go through when I came onto the phone.
I was the second negotiator on the phone.
I'd been given some guidance-- some guidelines to follow,
and I was ready with my process--
I was ready with the process.
And this is what happened.
So what I've just started with is
I'm already using a version of the late night FM DJ voice.
I'm making a point to downward inflect
with everything that I say.
The other thing I've just done is I've created my identity.
All I did was said, this is Chris,
you're going to be talking to me now.
Joe's gone.
Now, our control-oriented negotiator
over on the other side, his voice
has just come up a little bit.
He's a little rattled and he doesn't know
exactly what to do with it.
Now, what he's done is this is the first time that we've heard
from a hostage the entire day.
Now, he's not out of moves yet.
This is a control-oriented negotiator himself.
He's gone and gotten one of the hostages.
He's going to put her on the phone
just long enough to confirm that she's alive without actually
raising the threat level.
So at this point again, notice, I'm
not really trying to hammer him a lot with his name.
As a matter of fact, Billy is not his name.
He wouldn't give us a name.
That's just a name we came up with earlier
to try to personalize him to us, and vise versa.
And what we've got at this point in time,
we've narrowed down that the van outside is probably his.
We've gone to his neighborhood, we
found somebody that knew him.
We brought him to the scene, listened to him
talk on the phone and said, is this the same guy
that you know to own this van?
So we got a voice identification on him.
We already know who's inside.
What I want to do is brace him with this
in a way that doesn't cause a volatile reaction because he's
still got hostages inside.
As far as we know, he's still got guns inside.
We don't know for sure what's going on yet.
Now, he is all over the place right now.
I am being completely surprised by most of the things
that he's saying at this point in time.
And the majority of what I'm doing
is mirroring, which, again, this is how it's so useful to you
if you've got this as a skill in your repertoire
because you can be caught off guard by what
the other person is saying.
And you just start repeating what they're saying,
mirroring it, and they keep talking.
Now, this is a control freak negotiator.
He's been completely control-oriented
from the very beginning.
And he catches himself babbling all over the place,
and these are the critical issues
that end up getting the getaway driver identified, arrested,
and convicted because he's blurting this stuff out
uncontrollably because the mirroring is bringing it out
of him.
I did something really good and then something really stupid
right after.
I said it's registered to a Chris Watts.
And he says, OK.
That was just a statement.
That was just an observation.
In sum and substance, he's almost completely
admitted to who he is at this point in time.
And I had him on the ropes and if I had just said to him,
I know this is you, with a downward inflecting voice,
I think the chances are very good that he would admit it.
Now we got a brand new bad guy on the phone.
Our first bank robber is rattled just enough,
and as a control freak guy, he hasn't erupted in anger,
but he's smart enough to know that he's out of control.
And to this day, I don't know exactly why they handed
the phone off, but he has handed the phone off
to his only other colleague on the inside,
his cohort, his fellow bad guy.
And his fellow bank robber, who actually
didn't expect to be robbing a bank today,
he went out thinking they were going to burglarize a cash
machine, suddenly he found himself
in the middle of a bank robbery with hostages
when he thought they were just going to steal some money.
And they find themselves surrounded
by the seventh largest standing army in the world, the NYPD.
And this guy's got a genuine concern
about getting out of here alive.
But he's got a whole different set of concerns,
and it's up to me to hear what he's actually saying.
Here's the guy begging to make a deal.
Now, I'm trying to label him as much as I
can as we're going on here.
I'm not hitting the labels in the exact form, and I'm still--
this is still early enough in my career,
I'm still a little yes-addicted, this
is very frustrating, isn't it?
But he doesn't know how to get out.
It's a legitimate question.
How do I get out of this?
He wants to show that he hasn't hurt anybody.
Boom.
He just agreed to come out.
So we go into a bit of a scramble at this point in time
because, by and large, face to face surrenders are dangerous.
When I got on the phone as a second negotiator,
we'd already been stalemated for about five hours.
Once I take another approach, some tact
is given to me by my colleagues--
downward inflecting voice, controlling
the end in a positive way, and genuinely
understanding the other side.
We've got a surrender about 90 minutes later.
These sorts of approaches, the willingness
to make mistakes but have an overall approach that you
know is sound gets you to the outcome as soon as possible.
So ultimately, how does this all get resolved?
I get the second bank robber out.
He comes out, tells us everything that's
going on inside the bank.
Our control freak negotiator is still inside.
He's determined not to do what we want, but also doesn't want
to get into any more trouble.
So our next negotiator comes on the phone, starts talking
about getting him to surrender.
Eventually, he starts releasing hostages.
We finally get down to it's just him
and one other hostage on the inside.
And since he's determined to not give us
what we want while we're trying to get the last hostage out,
he volunteers to come out.
This was long enough ago that by this point in time,
he's had the opportunity to serve his time in jail.
I have no idea what's happened to him.
I do know that they found all the money in the walls
and he didn't get any of it.
And our bank robber was, in fact, Chris Watts.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
One of the key factors in the Chase Manhattan Bank robbery
hostage-taking was the use of pronouns
by our first hostage-taker.
He wanted to use plural pronouns all the time.
He was always talking about we, they, and them, us.
He made it seem like he didn't have any power.
That was intentional on his part because he was the decision
maker.
And he didn't want to be backed into a corner.
And if he were to admit that he had as much influence
as he did, then we could try to force him into a deal.
And he knew that, so he kept putting responsibility
for what was going on on they and them
and the other guys and how dangerous they were.
We see that a lot in the business world
among shrewd, powerful negotiators.
If somebody is at the negotiating table
and they keep talking about their board and the rest
of their team and they even say they're not the decision maker,
they're important, they're hiding that from us.
Conversely, the person who's at the table and he's
in love with singular pronouns--
I, me, my-- that's the only time they get to use those words.
They don't get to use those words
when they're back in the office because nobody listens to them.
So if they're in love with singular pronouns--
I, me, and my--
they're not that influential on their side of the table.