Jarrod Gilbert: Rugby great Glen Osborne gives insights into police negotiating skills

Constable Glen Osborne, sole charge at the police station in Waverley. Photo / Whanganui Chronicle / Bevan Conley

OPINION:

When dramatic crime incidents occur, news footage will often capture the imposingly dressed Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) responding. This is the embodiment of the police in the public mind; a response of hard power. But when the AOS is called out, so too is a lesser-known team, and to my mind this team is a better reflection of the New Zealand Police.

My introduction to the Police Negotiations Team came with a phone message that arrived one evening. It was 7.13pm. I usually stop answering the phone long before that time. No good news arrives from a number you don’t know after 5pm.

“Kia ora Jarrod, it’s Glen Osborne here. I’ll be picking you up from the airport tomorrow...”

Wait. That genuinely sounds like Glen Osborne. And it was.

For those who don’t read my column regularly, my name is Jarrod and I’m a nobody - but Glen Osborne is an All Black of that legendary era where they basically won every game.

Glen became a police officer when his professional sporting career came to an end in France and Japan. He is sole charge in a small town 25 minutes outside of Whanganui. As per his message, the following day he picked me up to go to the Police Training College, where I was set to give a presentation.

As somebody who played rugby at the highest level, Osborne is clearly a tough-as-nails bloke, but he’s also a quiet, considered man with a relaxed manner, and seemingly has not a jot of ego. It’s those latter traits that make him a valuable negotiator.

The negotiation team was established in New Zealand in the 1970s, following international trends. Aeroplane hijackings were as common as ram-raids, and law enforcement realised it didn’t have the skills to effectively deal with hijackers except with dramatic force. When a hijacker named George Giffe killed a pilot and his wife after botched interactions with the FBI, law enforcement agencies began to make negotiation skills and training a priority, including here in New Zealand.

While the role was initially solely about hostage situations, by the 1980s it had expanded greatly. The role of a police negotiator is to handle all manner of tricky situations, with unco-operative people, people likely to escalate situations and hurt those around them, and often those who are mentally unwell and seeking to self-harm.

There are 17 negotiation teams around the country and a national team. Like the AOS, members have other roles within the police and respond to jobs as they come up. In the larger districts, negotiators may respond to three or four calls a week. Each call is different and requires various sets of specialist skills, but the goal is always the same – make a human connection and bring the situation to a close without violence. Sometimes it’s over the phone, and sometimes face-to-face.

Often in policing situations, tensions have been ramped up on both sides. The nature of difficult or hostile encounters mean that emotions ramp up and situations escalate. The intervention of a negotiator, not dressed in police uniform, can just offer a reset of a situation. Then skills that are learned in a two-week initial training block and then multiple training sessions a month kick in. The AOS could be right there, but they are a back-up. Talking, de-escalating, bringing people back from the edge; these are the primary tools of a negotiator.

These under-reported efforts by police are utterly vital and speak to the best of how they operate. They are also, without question, soft skills and approaches. This is one of the reasons why, when people talk about being soft on crime, I see it as such a terrible, empty rhetoric.

Skills like those of the negotiations team are a vital part of modern, intelligent and effective policing.

Glen told me of a relatively minor situation he had dealt with recently. Following a domestic incident, a young man had climbed onto his roof and was refusing to come down to be questioned by police. It was squaring up to be a long event as he had become hostile, and police patience was wearing thin. Glen rolled up: “Kia ora, bro, why don’t we try and suss this out?” Osborne had to tell the guy he would be arrested when he got down, but within 15 minutes he was off the roof and in the back of the police car without resisting.

The alternative to this would have involved a large number of resources and a lot of time, and invariably at least some application of violence. The difference in outcomes, both in the short-term for police and in the longer-term for the young man, could scarcely be more different.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: what were Osborne’s views on the form of the current All Blacks, and have they lost their aura of invincibility? What’s his take on Razor Robertson? Could the 1995 All Blacks beat the current crop, like Zinzan Brooke recently said?

I asked him all of those things and more - but I’m terribly sorry, I can’t betray my new mate.

Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the Director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.