00:00You saw TV everyone has the view of that negotiator standing out there by
00:03themselves with the loud hailer talking to someone up on a ledge and it's quite
00:08fast-paced and high-octane. In reality though it's much more planned and
00:13deliberate. Generally if we're heading to an incident in the ACT we'll take out this
00:17van. The fantastic thing about it is that it's got a lot of space for our
00:21members to operate out of so if we're going to be making a phone call we want to have the
00:26team
00:27isolated from the noise and the distraction that's going on in a police
00:31operation. A mental health intervention, a suicide intervention, barricaded offenders,
00:36sieges or hostage incidents that's when they'll call in negotiators to come and
00:39assist. That's what you would think of in the movies the negotiators sitting there
00:43with headphones and headsets on. The old kit had a throw phone capability where we
00:47could take this on one of our rooms of wire and tactical response to deliver it to the
00:52house and then we could ring and call through the MCCC that I just showed you.
00:57And the person in the house would just literally have to pick up and talk on the phone.
01:01These days with the advances in technology we're literally just a mobile phone now.
01:06A road kit like a lot of podcasters use but it means that the primary can be on the
01:10phone and the team leader can be outside the car listening to the
01:15conversation as it's happening. Probably late last year in the south of Canberra we
01:18had a barricaded offender who was in his residence and was threatening to blow up the
01:24house with some gas canisters he had inside. What made that one memorable for
01:27me was that that person had had a number of previous interactions with police that
01:31hadn't been positive and that was putting up a lot of roadblocks. My
01:34negotiators attended to remove some of the emotion from the situation to really
01:39listen to what his core issue was and what was stopping him from exiting the
01:43house. After about two to three hours on the phone to him he peacefully surrendered to
01:47police and we were able to get him up to the hospital for some mental health
01:49treatment. Anytime we can resolve an incident without the need to use force
01:54without anyone being injured or any damage to property that's always the best
01:58case scenario.
