Hostage incident response and officer patrol procedures during armed robbery

Hostage Situation

The main difference between a hostage situation and a non-hostage situation is the threat to human life. "In most hostage incidents, the explicit threat is to the hostage's life. It is not the loss of property, status, or belonging to a community that is at stake. Life itself is at stake" (McMains & Mullins, 2010, p.12). The threat to human life gives the hostage-taker an advantage in the bargaining process, because it increases the press associated with an incident and increases the stakes of the negotiation.

A bank robber goes into the bank, but the police are alerted before he can leave. The bank robber takes one of the bank's customers and holds her at gunpoint, until the robber can reach the getaway vehicle. This is a hostage situation. The life of the teller has been threatened by the bank robber. The bank robber does not have to say that he will kill the teller if he is apprehended; the fact that he has a gun to the teller's head is sufficient to serve as an explicit threat to the teller's life. The bank robber has also taken all of the money that was in the bank's vault. Because a human life is at stake, the goal of the negotiator is to negotiate the release of the hostage without concern for the money. In hostage situations, the goal is always the release of the human hostage and not preservation of property. Therefore, the negotiator may be willing to agree to terms and conditions, such as providing safe getaway transportation for the criminal, which would not be available in a property scenario.

A bank robber goes into a bank with a weapon and orders all of the people out of the bank. He locks the doors and, when contacted by the negotiator, he says that he has wired the vault with explosives and that he will blow up the vault if anyone approaches the bank. This is not a hostage situation. No one's life has been threatened by the robber. Therefore, the negotiator does not have to worry about securing the release of any people during the negotiations.

2.

The incident is a hostage incident. The two suspects have the clerk and a customer held inside a store. They have threatened the lives of the clerks. Moreover, those threats are credible; because the exchange of gunfire with law enforcement reinforces that the suspects are armed. One of the hallmarks of a true hostage scenario, as opposed to a family-violence type hostage scenario, is that the "hostage has no value to the hostage taker as a person" (McMains & Mullins, 2010, p.13). The negotiator can help transform this into a negotiable situation by personalizing the hostages for the hostage takers. This is a critical step in helping transform hostages from commodities to people in the eyes of the hostage-takers.

The negotiator also needs to find out what the hostage takers want in order to release the hostages. This involves finding out who the hostage takers are and what they want (McMains & Mullins, 2010, p.13). However, it is critical to keep in mind that negotiators cannot always provide the hostage takers with what they are seeking in a hostage situation. While the negotiator has to consider the safety and security of the hostages, he has to balance those considerations against the safety and security of the community, as a whole.