Hostage negotiator Jerald Barnes on the art of difficult conversations

After almost 19 years as a hostage negotiator for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, Jerald Barnes moves through everyday life communicating far more adroitly than the rest of us. He’s ended life-threatening standoffs; taught Ivy League MBA students how to negotiate a salary or buy a company; practiced his skills on car lots, his buddies, and his sons. He’s also worked in intelligence, investigated fraud, protected dignitaries (including Tiger Woods, Janet Reno, Morris Dees, and the pope), and studied international law in The Netherlands. While there, he went to the international criminal court and watched the trial of Slobodan Milošević. “He blamed the atrocities on his generals,” Barnes says with disgust. “I sat there thinking of questions I wished I could ask him.”

You were so eager to be a police officer that you applied to departments in Chicago, Miami, and St. Louis—whichever answered first. And then your friends pranked you? They’d call and say it was Personnel. Then, on April 1, somebody called saying they were from HR in St. Louis. I said, “Hey, Mike, quit playing around” and hung up. They called again. “Would you quit?!” The third time, the guy said, “This is the last time I’m going to call you” and gave me his phone number—which had a 314 area code. “We have an opening at the academy,” he said. “Can you report on April 4?”

Why’d you want to be a police officer so badly? You’re figuring out who the bad guys are. You’re locking up criminals. You’re helping people who can’t help themselves.

Was the training hard? The hardest was the pull-ups—I was already 28, competing against 20-year-olds. I think the maturity part helped me though. I wasn’t all gung-ho about carrying a gun and shooting, and I could communicate better than any of those guys.

Where’d you learn? Being on the streets in Chicago, hangin’. I was not an angel. I saw some things I shouldn’t have seen. As a kid, you learn how to adapt to a situation; you’re like a chameleon. You try not to let anything get you excited or afraid or upset. You’re always thinking ahead: What is this person going to do or say next?

Did those years on the street make you a tough cop? [He shrugs.] Especially on the street, if people sense fear in your eyes or your voice, that’s a sign of weakness. Knowing that helped me. I wasn’t very authoritarian, though. I always tried to explain to people why I was stopping them. I had one “resisting arrest” in 20 years. It’s more important that you be able to talk to people. You have to come off that pedestal.

How did you become so easy with people of all kinds? My mom was just so open. At her parties were whites, blacks, gays, lesbians, Hispanics, and she used to tell me, “They are no different from you.” People say, “I don’t see black and white”—yeah, I see it, but that doesn’t define me. When I came here and drove to the South Side of the city, I went into culture shock: Where are the black people? I was told, “They don’t come over here.”

Yet you moved to South City. I convinced my wife, because there were no grocery stores in North St. Louis. I was coming home one day in full uniform, and I pulled into the Walgreens at Hampton Village and thought, Oh, man, I don’t have any money. I was heading home, and a police officer stopped me, saying, “You didn’t signal before you made a right turn.” I said, “I’m sorry, I thought I did.” And I’ve got my badge on. And he says to me, “What are you doing over here anyway?” “I said, ‘What did you say to me? I live down the street. He said, “You got some ID?” I didn’t show it. He made a smart comment and called for an assist car. I said, “You are going to need an assist car.”

You were working as the chief’s aide at the time. Then you decided to become a hostage negotiator. Why? “At first, I wanted to be a tactical guy. We’re out at a scene, and I see the tactical guys come out all macho. And then it starts to rain and snow, and they’re still out there holding their positions. We walk into the command van with the negotiators, and they have a microwave in there, and a popcorn popper, and coffee…”

Seriously, though, are you just naturally cool under stress? Every hostage negotiation I have done, I have been scared out of my wits. It’s not only that you want to save people. A successful situation is when you also get the hostage-taker out, with a peaceful resolution. I was always afraid that I was going to say the wrong thing.

How did you learn to deescalate tense, dangerous situations? For the first six months, they wouldn’t even let me get on the phone. I just watched my lieutenant, learned his patience. He always told me, “Just take your time, man. It’s a process.” Another guy was just so smooth in the way he talked to people—not over them, not below them, not at them, but to them. A third said, “You want to know how to practice? Go to a suicide hotline and work the phones.” I did that for almost a year.”

You also trained at Quantico, with the FBI. What was that like? They made everything come together. There’s a place called Hogan’s Alley, a makeshift town with a working pharmacy, diner, motel. Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, you’re in the classroom, and then everybody goes to the Board Room, which is a bar. At 2 a.m. we get a knock on our door: “You have a hostage situation over in the motel.” You don’t have all the information; you’re getting it piecemeal as the intelligence division gathers it. They make it real.

Where are you usually positioned in that kind of situation? Sometimes we are taking over somebody’s house or apartment; other times we’re in a command van or in the street on a bullhorn. Three people in the van, usually, and people outside with headsets listening to the conversation, and the commander listening to see if we need to change negotiators. The primary negotiator does all the talking, and there’s a secondary negotiator who’s listening for the inflection of the voice, patterns, if the person gets upset or depressed at certain questions. The negotiators slide notes back and forth.

Are you basically just trying to wear someone down? That’s not the only thing we try to do. We try to figure out what happened in the person’s life in the last 24 to 48 hours. Loss of a job, divorce, a death of someone close, depression, mental illness? But yeah, we do also keep them talking, and with the passage of time, expectations get diminished. Ever see the movie The Negotiator? It’s based on a situation that happened here in St. Louis. Anthony Daniele was found guilty in federal court of robbing our pension fund. Before the sentencing, he holds Colonel John Frank, president of the police board, hostage, makes three demands. Daniele was a hostage negotiator, so he knew everything the negotiator was going to say to him. But with the passage of time, in the end, he got nothing.

How do you get below the surface? One case, the guy was suffering from mental illness, but he was usually fine as long as he took his medication. He’d been fine that day, until a neighbor threw something into his yard as he was mowing, and they got into a heated discussion. He pulled out a shotgun and shot at the neighbor, then barricaded himself in the house holding his mom and little nephew hostage. He wouldn’t talk to me at all until I mentioned his neighbor, and that’s when he exploded. I hit that nerve deliberately. And as soon as we talked and talked about the history of his situation with this neighbor, he calmed down and gave up the mom and nephew and surrendered.

Doesn’t the pressure of those marathons burn you out? While you are involved in one of these very intense negotiations, you don’t really realize how intense it is. You’re relying on your training; you’re paying attention to how the conversation is flowing and to the information you’re getting from intelligence. And when you successfully talk somebody out or something—I could never sleep for six or seven hours afterward. And then you’re ready for the next one. We’d have something at least once a month, and always at ungodly hours. I kept a bag packed with clean underwear, toothbrush, Aleve.

What was your toughest case? There was a guy who met a woman at a roller-skating rink. They went out on a date. Three or four days later, he comes over and knocks on the door. She says, “You have to call me and let me know you’re coming.” He says, “You don’t understand. I’m moving in.” He pushes her back, ties her up with cords from the lamps, sexually assaults her. Repeatedly. Her daughter calls and says, “Mom, what are you doing?” She says, “I can’t talk right now. I’m having sex.” That doesn’t sound like her mother, so the daughter goes over. He brings the mother to the door with a knife at her neck and says, “If you don’t leave, I’m going to kill her.” They are on the top floor of a two-family flat. We move everybody out downstairs and also across the hall from him and take over. He’d covered all the windows with comforters. I talked to him for 14 or 15 hours. We talked about him being unemployed. He said, “You know, I’ve done this before.” He’d been in prison for the same exact thing, had just gotten out six months earlier. He was troubled because he had no place to live and no job, so I said, “I can find you a job and a place to live”—“in prison” was what I was thinking—“but you have to come out.” I actually think he wanted to go back to prison. He was more comfortable there.

You did negotiations for almost 19 years, and you’ve since given presentations at Cornell, Yale, Duke, and other top universities. When you’re teaching negotiation skills to, say, MBA students, what don’t they understand? How to communicate with people. How to build a rapport. That’s one of the things missing in our relationships today. We are so busy trying to say what we want to say instead of being able to listen. And we don’t talk to each other; we’d rather send a text. In my opinion, we’re on a downward spiral. We don’t want to take the time. We’re in such a hurry to move on to the next project.

How do you keep your skills sharp? I try to listen for the meaning behind what someone’s saying. To keep up my skills, I’ll go into car dealerships or furniture stores and try to get the price down, or I’ll apply for different jobs and try to negotiate salary. I even practice when I talk to my friends.

What mistakes do negotiators make? Some negotiators want to tell people what to do from the start, and that’s not going to work. You have to build a rapport before you can influence their behavior. One of the biggest mistakes is not allowing a person to vent, to have their say. A hostage situation is just like in any argument where it becomes heated: If that person is not allowed to say what they want to say, you’re not going to be able to get a compromise or even talk. A lot of guys are in such a hurry to ask people to surrender. “You gotta come out”—they’ll just harp on that. But the person is not coming out until they’ve vented. Some of the things they say may be illogical, but it’s their way of expressing themselves, so let them.

If their picture of reality seems distorted, do you correct it? No. If you say, “My name is Tom,” I’m going to call you Tom. They’re going through something traumatic, so they’re not thinking right. I’m not a mental health professional; I’m just trying to get them to come out and then get them help. But whatever is bothering them to the point of rage and fear, it’s an emotional imbalance, and it can spiral way out of control.

You’re remembering something. I can see it in your face. There was a young black male sitting on top of the elevator shaft on the roof of a parking garage across from the old Famous-Barr building downtown. Coming home from school, he’d set down his book bag and decided he was going to jump. I found his notebook and stood inside the stairwell reading it before I went up. He wrote poetry. His feet were dangling over the side. I was up there with him but standing on the ground, so he was another 5 or 10 feet over me, his feet dangling over the side. His poetry was good, and I said so. He said the kids were making fun of him at school because they thought he was gay. Just then the uniformed police decide they’re going to try to trick the kid, so they offer him a cigarette. I told him, “Don’t accept that, because once you take it, they’re going to try to pull you down. You have to come down on your own terms.” I told the captain, “They’ve gotta go. I want them out of here.” I talked to that kid for three or four hours. Finally he said, “I’ll come down if you make me one promise: that I won’t have to go to one of those psych wards.” I said OK.

Are you authorized to promise that? I thought I was. He comes down, and the captain says, “Take him to Malcolm Bliss.” I said, “No. I promised.” He said, “That’s your promise, not mine.” I felt so bad about it that I went to the bookstore and bought a couple of Stephen King books—he liked Stephen King—and took them to him in the hospital. He said, “Oh yeah, I remember you. You’re the guy who said I wasn’t going to be taken to a psych ward.”

What has this work taught you? Not to make promises! Being a better communicator has decreased my anger and made me more patient. It’s taught me how to have difficult conversations without being antagonistic. Sometimes you have to slow down and think about what you want to say before you say it. I think if we spent more time teaching people with ADHD, any kind of impulsivity, how to communicate, it would make a huge difference. And definitely police officers. Lawyers. Business people. Journalists. Teachers. Once you learn how to talk to people and how to structure what you want to say, set that scenario up in your mind and then put yourself on the other side of the table and see where you would get defensive. I will practice—I know how sensitive my sons are, for example, so I’ll practice for a difficult conversation. Watch your body language; make it inviting. Instead of using harsh words, try to find soft words that have the same meaning. You don’t have to sit somebody over the head with a brick to have them understand. Well, every once in a while, you do. But the majority of the time, it’s how you set up the scenario before you even give them that difficult message.