Calm Down

One day, an unfortunate cop was sitting in the office with Sergeant Ian Angry when the phone rang.

The phone ringing was an unusual event. Sergeant Ian Angry stared at the phone for several rings before moving into action. He picked up the receiver and put it to his ear, "Hello, police, Sergeant Ian Angry speaking."

The cop later described the next few moments as surreal.

Sergeant Ian Angry had a short conversation with the caller on the other end then screamed, "FUCKING WHAT!"

He slammed the receiver down on the phone, so hard that the Bakelite simply shattered. He then grabbed the phone cord and pulled it with all his might causing the wall socket to dislodge itself.

Sergeant Ian Angry picked up what remained of the phone and threw it as hard as he could muster against the back wall of the office. The phone left an indentation where it had struck and smashed into pieces.

The vibrations of the impact caused a picture of Sergeant Ian Angry in full regalia to fall to the ground and crack.

"THE BASTARDS!"

The cop sat in dread of what might happen to himself, but curiosity overcame his fear, and he plucked up the courage to ask.

"What's the matter, Sarge?"

"THEY'VE ONLY FUCKING GONE AND CANCELLED MY ANGER MANAGEMENT COURSE AGAIN!"

Advice from an experienced police negotiator

Joe walked out with the highest pass ever recorded. The last test in the Hostage & Crisis Negotiation course involves a live scenario. These can go on for hours. Imagine a hostage situation where the police negotiator knocks off at 5 pm — it can’t and doesn’t happen.

It's a tough course. The failure rates are high. The instructors don’t care if no one passes. They have to be brutal, lives could depend on it. Those who make it through possess incredible amounts of stamina, patience, determination, and emotional intelligence.

They put Joe and his fellow students into a live scenario for their final assessment. Instructors played the part of captors and hostages. They pile the pressure on and the students forget they are in a mockup. The live scenario exhausted everyone, even the instructors. It lasted seven hours and by the end, they were a spent force. All of them.

When they wrapped up, Joe made a point of speaking to his colleagues. Concerned by their drained faces, he placed a hand on their shoulders and asked them how they were. He worried over their mental wellbeing.

He did the same with the instructors, the people who had put him through the toughest day of his life. He understood they had a hard task, and he shook their hands.

Joe went back to his job as a detective sergeant, taking with him the deepest respect from everyone involved.

The real-life situation as it happened

One balmy summer evening, I attended a potential hostage situation. Frankie Foster had a knife and was threatening to kill his girlfriend. I made my way to the scene.

Frankie stood at the top of an external flight of stairs, the only access to the two upper flats in the building. The stairs split the building in the middle, a metal handrail on either side. Frankie paced back and forth on the landing. The solid wood door to his flat lay open.

Frankie had a large kitchen knife in one hand and a litre bottle of cheap vodka in the other. He’d ripped off his shirt and stood topless, swigging from the vodka bottle and threatening to stab any cop who came within arm’s length.

His girlfriend made the call; she said she was inside the flat, barricaded in a back bedroom. My first concern was for her.

Had he stabbed her? Was she injured or dying? Did we need to force our way up the stairs past Frankie to save her?

I asked for a Public Order team to attend — the guys with helmets and shields.

If we needed to get in, we needed to get in quick. It was part of their training. You might have the biggest, baddest knife, but it won’t do you any good against six burly cops rushing you with a wall of shields.

The first cop to arrive stood at the bottom of the stairs and engaged Frankie in conversation — it wasn’t going well. Frankie swigged his vodka and threatened serious injury to anyone who came up the stairs. Everything the cop said riled him.

I asked for a police negotiator to attend.

The safest way was for us to keep our distance, but it was important to keep Frankie talking. I didn’t want him going back inside his flat where he might be a danger to his girlfriend.

Intense situations slow time. It seemed an age before the negotiator arrived, but I smiled when it was Joe who appeared. Joe assessed the situation, then strolled out from the side of the building into Frankie’s view. He dismissed the cop at the bottom of the stairs. Frankie went quiet, watching Joe from on high.

Joe avoided looking at Frankie. He sidled up to the bannister at the bottom of the stairs and leaned against it, getting himself comfortable. Still ignoring Frankie, he took out a packet of cigarettes. He extricated a single cigarette, tapped the end on the packet before inserting it in his mouth. Then he laid the packet on the bottom step.

Joe made an exaggerated search of his pockets, looking for a match. The cigarette dangled from his mouth. After a second pat-down, he looked up at Frankie for the first time.

“Got a light?”

Frankie put down his vodka, reached into his pocket, produced a disposable lighter and held it up as proof he had such a thing.

“Em, can I get one of those?” Frankie asked Joe.

“Sure,” Joe responded.

They traded by throwing the packet of cigarettes and the lighter between them. Joe went back to leaning on the bannister and blowing the occasional smoke ring before engaging Frankie once more.

“So, how did we get here, Frankie?”

And for the next half hour, they chatted.

Frankie drank his vodka and smoked Joe’s cigarettes. Joe listened and responded. Always appropriate, building rapport.

He extracted information from Frankie like a skilled surgeon. Engagement and empathy, building trust, only when there is trust can he use persuasion and suggestion.

Then they ran out of cigarettes.

Joe motioned to me, I gave him the thumbs up and I walked into view of Frankie to hand Johnny another packet of cigarettes. Frankie, now sitting on the top step, saw me and stood up. Volatile again.

“WHO THE FUCK IS THAT?” he shouted to Joe

“This is Sergeant McEwan,” Joe replied, unfazed.

“WELL, HE’S A FUCKING ARSEHOLE!”

Frankie shouted at the top of his voice, straining every sinew in his neck in the process and putting as much effort into the emphasis of the word ‘arsehole’ as he could.

Joe remained expressionless. He turned, looked me up and down, before turning back to Frankie and replying.

“So you’ve met him then?”

I raised an eyebrow, but kept quiet and walked back out of sight. I heard Frankie snort a chuckle behind me.

In one innocuous comment from Joe, Frankie switched from volatile and angry to amused and calm. Joe’s shared joke with Frankie made them co-conspirators against the big bad police officer.

Twenty minutes later Frankie finished his vodka

Struggling to stay awake, he stood up to shake himself off. He staggered, put his hand out to stop himself from falling, forgetting he still held a large kitchen knife.

The knife struck the bannister and caused him to lose his grip. As the knife tumbled from his hand, Frankie made to grab it and missed. In doing so, he spun around losing his balance, teetered over the top step and slumped backwards, falling head over heels and crash-landed at Joe’s feet.

Out for the count, Frankie woke up in his cell a full thirty-six hours later.

Reason, logic, and commands rarely work

In the annals of human history, never has anyone calmed down by being told to calm down.

I’ve heard this said in jest, and it got me thinking. I have some experience in calming people down. I spent thirty years in the Scottish police where I dealt with many angry, psychotic, and emotionally disturbed people — and those were just my senior officers.

When people get angry, the limbic system takes over — the part of the brain that processes our powerful emotions. It rules our flight or flight response. It’s our ancient survival system and it doesn’t listen to reason or logic. You may have heard it called an amygdala hijack. It’s when the red mist descends.

Getting someone to calm down can be difficult. Commanding them to calm down can have the opposite effect. Some take it as direct a challenge — it ups the ante. Picture the angry man explode when his friends intervene, they end up in a physical struggle to hold him back.

Try using a distraction technique instead.

Distracters

The mere presence of a police officer in uniform is a distracter, although it wasn’t always enough to calm people down. In my experience, telling people to calm down often had the opposite effect.

Educators use distracters in their multiple-choice questions. An effective distracter is one that attracts students with misconceptions over the question, errors in thinking or careless reasoning. They design these to distract the student’s attention and introduce doubt.

The same distraction technique can switch the focus of someone’s concentration. Saying something unrelated, confusing, or out of context diverts the thinking. It snaps the brain out of its bottleneck.

Mind control expert Derren Brown did it late one night when confronted by a mugger who demanded his wallet.

Derren simply kept repeating, “The wall outside my house isn’t 4ft high,” which confused the mugger so much that he broke into tears and left the scene.

Next time something upsets your buddy, show your concern and ask:

“Would you like me to get you some sand?”

“Sand?”

Now they are thinking, “Sand? What the fuck do I want sand for?”

The question dislodges the upsetting thoughts in their head. It takes away the pain and replaces it with puzzlement. The moment they think of sand, they have put what’s troubling them to the back of their mind — from there is it easier to come back to the issue from a different angle.

Joe and Frankie Foster

Joe is an experienced police negotiator. He had a relaxed demeanour when he walked out to speak to Frankie— the opposite of the anxious cop he relieved at the bottom of the stairs. It was not what Frankie expected. Frankie expected Joe to be authoritarian, instead, he was friendly.

His exaggerated search for a lighter was also a distracter. Imagine Frankie’s thought process. Why is he so calm? What is he looking for? Does he have a lighter? Will he give me a cigarette? The questions appearing in Frankie’s head help to squeeze out his anger and angst.

Joe’s comment about me was another distracter. You can’t be angry if you are laughing. Feelings come and go, but you only hold one to the fore at a time.

An interview with Joe

I called Joe and asked if I could pick his brain over a coffee. He’s retired now but, Joe being Joe, was happy to share his knowledge.

I reminded him of the Frankie Foster incident.

“Yeah, we got lucky there.”

“Lucky, what do you mean.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly follow the training manual.”

“Again, what do you mean?”

“Frankie was drunk as a skunk. We don’t negotiate with people who are drunk. Alcohol can make people act in irrational ways. They are almost impossible to predict. Remember what happened when you walked out with the cigarettes? It set him off again. Technically I should have kept out of it and recommended you use the public order team.”

My jaw dropped.

“Why did you go out there then?”

“Oh, I dunno, I just had a feeling.”

Takeaways

• Distracters divert emotions and replace them with curiosity.
• The presence of someone in authority can work as a distracter, but not always.
• Distracters are useful for momentarily replacing thoughts, and sometimes that is enough to shift a mood.
• Distracters can have the opposite effect of calming — in some circumstances they can incite.
• Distracters are less useful when dealing with someone under the influence of drink or drugs.
• Sometimes the best option is to walk away.