By Masaaki Harada, The Associated Press
FORT WAYNE, Ind. - Police cars and an ambulance approached a Bluffton Road motel without lights and sirens and slipped into a parking lot in front of a room to which they were called.
An intoxicated man with a knife had barricaded himself inside.
While the Fort Wayne Police Department’s Emergency Services Team, better known as the SWAT team, surrounded the building, a team of hostage negotiators who make up the police department’s Crisis Response Team continued a painstaking conversation with the man inside.
The 32-year-old Fort Wayne man was threatening over the phone to kill himself, said Sgt. Paul Shrawder who leads the hostage negotiators. The man wanted to talk with his girlfriend, who he said was leaving him.
This standoff, one of five handled by Fort Wayne police this year, is typical of what hostage negotiators go through.
Eight officers of the Crisis Response Team are trained to talk a barricaded person out of a building and are on call 24 hours a day. They try to resolve such situations without using the Emergency Services Team, which includes sharpshooters.
The case on Bluffton Road ended 90 minutes after officers got the call. Negotiators persuaded the man to come out with promises to let him talk to his girlfriend and smoke a cigarette. The man surrendered.
Onlookers at any standoff likely see a large white truck labeled “Tactical Operation Center.”
During a brief meeting after arriving, the team decides who will be the primary negotiator.
The primary negotiator is accompanied by a second negotiator, often called a coach, who listens to the conversation and advises the primary negotiator. The other negotiators are in charge of record keeping, gathering information from police records and interviewing relatives and friends.
The division of labor enables police to accomplish what might seem like contradicting goals to some people, Shrawder said.
“We want to let them know even though they may see all the police with guns surrounding them, there are people who are trying to give them a way to settle it peacefully,” he said. “From a negotiator’s point of view, you want to talk to them, give them options and let time go by while we talk so that, eventually, they will calm down.”
Opening a channel of communication with the person inside is critical. The Crisis Response Team has “throw phones” that can be connected with a 1,000-foot line and loudspeakers.
“Just actively talking to somebody makes you think,” Shrawder said. “We try to make them calm down and go back to thinking mode and hopefully reason with them.”
If a barricaded person is demanding certain conditions, that can be a good sign. No demands indicate the person has no interest in dealing with the outside, Shrawder said.
When a cloistered person has nothing to demand and won’t come out, police have to find something they can negotiate.
A person who barricaded himself in a Riverhaven home told negotiators he just wanted to sleep.
“We made noise so he could not go to sleep,” said Allen County SWAT Team Commander Lt. Kenneth C. Fries. “He agreed to put all the guns outside if we just stop making all the noise.”
The county SWAT team also dealt with an Albion man holed up in a pickup truck with rifles near the Allen-Whitley county line in January. Randall Katz was on the run from Noble County police on warrants.
Police got Katz’s cell phone number from a relative, but he refused to talk. An armored vehicle drove up to his pickup truck and police talked to him by loudspeaker.
A decision to force Katz out was made when he fired a shot into the truck’s roof that made police believe he was threatening to kill himself. Police fired beanbag rounds at the pickup to distract Katz. The SWAT team broke the glass and pulled him out.
“People often think the SWAT team is a bunch of thugs just busting doors and shooting people,” Fries said. “That’s not our function. We are there to save lives.”
The Fort Wayne Emergency Service Team’s only fatal standoff occurred in 1992, when 26-year-old Leroy Ross-Church was shot after lunging at officers with a knife.
Ross-Church had barricaded himself in a closet in an apartment, threatening to commit suicide. Three negotiators went into the room, trying to talk.
With negotiations failed and Ross-Church’s suicide threat imminent, police used tear gas to force him out. Ross-Church came toward officers brandishing a knife instead of surrendering, and officers shot him.
Ross-Church’s death spurred arguments about how police handle people with possible mental problems.
The answer was the creation of yet another team - the Crisis Intervention Team consisting of officers trained by mental health professionals. The team includes patrol officers who are spread out in three working shifts. As first responders, they try to prevent people with mental illnesses from creating situations that might require the hostage negotiators and SWAT team.
“People with mental illness deserve treatment, not a jail,” said Park Center CEO Paul Wilson, who advises officers who undergo Crisis Intervention Team training. “If somebody is truly psychotic and cannot make a rational choice, committed a petty crime or whatever, it makes much more sense to get them appropriate treatment than giving them jail time.”
Six people were arrested in 955 cases Crisis Intervention Team officers responded to from Aug. 1, 2003, to July 31, according to police records. In 52 of those cases, a person was armed. Without the Crisis Intervention Team, some of those cases could have been worse, Wilson said.
Shrawder believes the program may reduce the number of standoffs or hostage situations.
“Officers who recognize how and why those things happen to people,” he said, “can effectively intervene with a lot of people and prevent situations from developing into a serious crisis.”