Table Of Content“Words matter during a crisis. This book is critically important for
hostage negotiators, emergency dispatchers and mental health
professionals. Through extensive research and analysis, the authors
provide a fresh concept of communications theory for handling
emergency calls and it provides tools to enhance the vital skills needed
when a life is on the line.”
—C. Blair Sutherland, Ret. Director of
Telecommunications and 911 Commission member,
Massachusetts State Police, USA
“This book will save lives! After seventeen years of crisis and hostage
negotiation I thought I knew what I was doing... How I wish this had
been available when I started out. It tells me what I should have been
saying and where, by chance, I stumbled on just the right words I
know why they worked. If people or lives depend on you, then this is
the book for you.”
—Chula Rupasinha, Former UK Hostage Negotiator, UK
“Finally! A book devoted to the “art” of emergency call taking, the
authors take an in-depth analysis of the technical and subjective
aspects of a call for help and teach us to communicate better for the
person in crisis. This book should be on any must-read list for every
emergency telecommunicator, supervisor, and executive worldwide.”
—Rich Lindfors, NRP, EMD Quality Improvement
Manager, Richmond Ambulance Authority, Richmond,
VA, USA
“This book explores how police crisis negotiators and emergency
dispatchers talk and interact in life-or-death situations. The reader
is presented with real-life examples of distressing and emotional
situations where lives are at stake and where every moment, word
and turn of talk counts. With the detailed yet accessible analyses,
the book is a compelling example of using conversation analysis
to analyse real-time talk and interaction with an aim to develop
and improve professional practices. It shows how formulating and
delivering words in this or that way can lead to different outcomes;
choosing and formulating the words correctly solves crisis situations
and saves lives. The book provides practical and useful advice on how
to interact in high stakes situations. The book is an excellent read for
professionals who encounter people in crisis situations (e.g., police
hostage and crisis negotiator and emergency dispatchers). It is also a
fascinating read for academics who are interested in talk, language,
grammar and social interaction. More generally, the book may fnd
readers in people interested in crisis communication and the work of
crisis professionals.”
—Pentti Haddington, Professor of English language
and interaction, University of Oulu, Finland
“This book manages to identify, quantify and put into words the
practical skills of an experienced negotiator in a way that has never
been done before. Their contributions have been integral in shaping
and developing the language and tactics for overcoming resistance
in particular, taught and deployed operationally by students and
experienced negotiators alike. I would recommend anyone who wants
to truly understand infuential language through the eyes, ears and
mouth of a negotiator to read this book.”
—Inspector Laura Burns, Training Lead, Hostage and
Crisis Negotiator Unit, Police Scotland (2017–2020),
Scotland
Crisis Talk
Based on extensive analysis of real-time, authentic crisis encounters
collected in the UK and US, Crisis Talk: Negotiating with Individuals
in Crisis sheds light on the relatively hidden world of communication
between people in crisis and the professionals whose job it is to
help them.
The crisis situations explored in this book involve police hostage
and crisis negotiators and emergency dispatchers interacting
with individuals in crisis who threaten suicide or self-harm. The
practitioners face various communicative challenges in these
encounters, including managing strong emotions, resistance, hostility,
and unresponsiveness. Using conversation analysis, Crisis Talk
presents evidence of how practitioners deal with the interactional
challenge of negotiating with people in crisis and how what they say
shapes outcomes. Each chapter includes recommendations based on
the detailed analysis of numerous cases of actual negotiation.
Crisis Talk shows readers how every turn taken by negotiators can
exacerbate or solve the communicative challenges created by crisis
situations, making it a unique and invaluable text for academics in
psychology, sociology, linguistic sciences, and related felds, as well as
for practitioners engaging in crisis negotiation training or feldwork.
Rein Ove Sikveland is an Associate Professor at the Centre for
Academic and Professional Communication at NTNU, Norway. His
expertise is in conversation analysis and phonetics. Rein researches
the linguistic and interactional practices that underpin practitioners’
management of conversations in education, health services and crisis
negotiations.
Heidi Kevoe-Feldman is an Associate Professor in the Department
of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, USA. She
uses conversation analysis to examine communication patterns and
problems that arise in institutional settings. Recent research projects
include working with emergency medical dispatch call centres with a
focus on identifying various barriers (e.g. physical, psychological, and
communication) that interfere with helping callers in a
time of crisis.
Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Discourse and
Rhetoric Group at Loughborough University, UK. Her current research
interests are in conversation analysis, membership categorization,
and social interaction in various ordinary and institutional settings,
including neighbour mediation, police interrogation, role-play, and
simulated interaction.
Crisis Talk
Negotiating with
Individuals in Crisis
Rein Ove Sikveland
Heidi Kevoe-Feldman
Elizabeth Stokoe
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Rein Ove Sikveland, Heidi Kevoe-Feldman, and Elizabeth Stokoe
The right of Rein Ove Sikveland, Heidi Kevoe-Feldman, and
Elizabeth Stokoe to be identifed as authors of this work has been
asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-37531-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-37529-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35489-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429354892
Typeset in Calvert
by codeMantra
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Crisis talk, from practice to training 1
Getting the conversation started 31
How words reduce resistance towards
the negotiation 54
Managing emotion 75
Overcoming resistance 103
‘Coming down’: Scaffolding a resolution
to the crisis 128
Backstage/frontstage and the negotiation team 152
From practice to training 174
Index 207
vii
Acknowledgments
We express our deepest gratitude to the crisis negotiators,
emergency dispatchers, and trainers for being calm and
compassionate voices for those who want to end their life.
Professionals have tremendous skill in working with anxious,
terrifed, and often angry people in crisis, walking them through
the interactional steps to choose life. Crisis negotiators and
emergency dispatchers save lives and it has been our privilege
to analyse their expertise and experience.
This book would not have been possible without being granted
access to the recordings of crisis negotiations and emergency
calls that constitute its research material. We are grateful to
the police offcers in the UK, including some of the world’s
most experienced negotiators, who decided to become early
adopters of conversation analytic research and took the rare
step of releasing negotiation tapes. Similarly, we want to thank
supervisors and coordinators at the emergency call center in the
USA. As part of our research, we were also invited to participate
in and observe hostage and crisis negotiation training, which
became an invaluable part of our journey.
We would also like to thank Loughborough University’s
Institute of Advanced Studies and Northeastern University
for, respectively, sponsoring Heidi Kevoe-Feldman’s visiting
fellowship and funding travel so that we could write together.
Finally, we are grateful to the wonderful wider conversation
analytic community, many of whom joined us at data sessions
around the world, and reviewed our journal articles, helping us to
consolidate the valuable analytic insights we present in this book.
viii
Crisis talk,
from practice
to training
Chapter 1
DOI: 10.4324/9780429354892-1
