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The Ashley Smith story circulated throughout the national late night new programs during May of 2009 (http://www.cbn.com/700club/Guests/Interviews/Ashley_Smith100705.aspx). The widowed mother of a five year old daughter unwillingly entered a hostage situation when a convicted rapist and accused murderer followed her home. She did not panic, but instead shared personal stories and God’s love with her abductor. She managed to convince him to confess which may have helped save several lives. Fortunately, most Americans will never face this situation. However, knowing how to handle these situations is important for law enforcement officers whose specialty is hostage situations. Role playing is a valuable behavior assessment method that is now applied in law enforcement situations. Behavior Modification recently posted an article which aims to discuss how different role play types are utilized as law enforcement strategies according to conducted studies (http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/32/2/248.full.pdf+htm).
In America, someone is taken hostage almost every week. A captive is defined as someone who is taken against their will for any number of reasons. A hostage can be taken to extract money or other valuables, or to receive physical and emotional damage from the captor, also called the subject. Force is often used in hostage situations, but can be implied instead of used. To resolve a hostage situation, the best way to keep everyone safe is to attempt to bargain or influence the subject’s behavior. In recent years a field of hostage negotiation and crisis management has emerged within law enforcement. Hostage negotiation hopes to resolve hostage situations without violence if at all possible. Statistics on hostage situations prove that they are being resolved with more success lately, giving validity to the role play movement.
The first law enforcement workers to take steps toward role playing as training were from the New York City Police Department. They created the first soft negotiation strategy, which is geared towards slowing the action down so that the subject can think about their feelings and the best possible course of action while being reasonable. This method proves helpful because buying time is important in hostage situations as it allows for reality to set in and rashness to exit.
Active listening skills are key to managing any hostage situation. The Behavioral Influence Stairway Model (BISM) is a diagram of how active listening is used to successfully survive a hostage situation. A foundation of active listening is established first on which the hostage can climb from stage 1, empathy, onto stages 2 and 3, rapport and influence respectively. Over time a relationship is forged that gives the hostage the necessary amount of influence over the subject. This method of using role play to train individuals and prepare how they should react in a hostage situation was developed because role plays have been used for quite some time as a means for improving interpersonal skills.
Role plays have been used for several decades now to help people of different genders, ages, ethnicities and backgrounds develop interpersonal skills with one another. Role playing has grown in popularity among law enforcement as it continues to prove its use. One key advantage or role play training is that it allows for trainees to practice handling a variety of crisis situations while being supervised by experts. They learn by doing real life crises without the possibility of injuring others.
There are three different types of role plays used in law enforcement: tabletop, functional, and partial and full-scale. Tabletop exercises are discussions that are used for the executives and department heads. Functional exercises are very specific in the area of emergency that they cover and assess problem-solving and resolution skills. Partial and full-scale exercises are what most people think of as a role play. There are multiple key role players and the scenarios are designed to test the skills of all main players. One of the most important aspects of keeping all of the exercises honest is that participants are not informed ahead of time and given time to prepare for the exercise. The scenarios are also kept secret and progress naturally, one piece at a time, as they would in real life.
The CNU, a part of the FBI, has developed role play scenarios for training negotiation and conflict management skills. They base their role play scenarios on events that really took place so that the training accurately imitates reality. The CNU delivered these scenarios in audiotapes where a narrator read out the details of the role play. They created role plays in three basic categories: family domestic, workplace, and suicide. Each trainee needed a role play partner, called a confederate, that made the role play more similar to a real life experience. The trainees responses were taped and then reviewed and analyzed for negotiation skills. The times that trainees demonstrated active listening skills were also tallied. The results of these audiotaped role plays showed that nonexperts, those agents that never received negotiation training, scored lower than the experts. The only category that did not differentiate between the two groups was response duration. Measures of empathy and active listening were found to show a moderate correlation.
Another study focused on empirical, or observational, evaluation of training negotiation skills in law enforcement. Forty-five FBI agents were tested with the audiotaped role plays before they took a two week course designed to teach them the desired skills. At the end of this course they were tested again and administrators found significant improvement. Three of the four specific active listening skills this training was geared at improved after the course: paraphrasing, emotional labeling, and mirroring. The results of this study provided support for the FBI’s training program by demonstrating the improvements it caused.
Role play researchers have been moving towards performing these exercises online since nearly everyone has internet access and many people use the web for almost everything. Two undergraduate criminology courses offered chat room role plays to students. Students got immediate feedback on their chat room role plays because the instructor was able to enter comments into the chat room so that students could re-read the role play and see what improvements they can make. Problem solving skills were further developed through reading assignments, online lectures, and student discussions.
This paper lists some limitations and possible solutions of role playing as training in the law enforcement field. It is important to consider these limitations before implementing a training system designed around role playing because there are some downfalls of this method. The first limitation is that observational research in negotiation is incomplete and somewhat inadequate. Several groups have yet to be observed at all, for instance non-FBI personnel. Secondly, these studies focused on active listening skills, whereas other crisis negotiation agencies choose to emphasize other skills. Finally, a correlation between role playing and effectively using such skills in real life situations is yet to be discovered. Some suggested solutions for these limitations are: using longer role plays, reviewing crisis negotiations that actually happened and were videotaped, and studying the reports from actual incidents.
The findings of the studies discussed in this paper have helped to prove the overall effectiveness of role playing in the training and developing of active listening skills in the law enforcement field. More research will have to be done for a correlation to be found, but hopefully everyone will realize the importance of role playing in furthering negotiation skills. Maybe once law enforcement embraces role pying, the same methods can be applied to average citizens. Perhaps in the future role play classes will be offered just like self-defense classes, so that people can be prepared in case they find themselves in a situation like Ashley Smith.
Works Cited
Branson, Tim, and Cheryl Wilcox. "Ashley Smith: An 'Unlikely Angel'." The 700 Club. The 700 Club, n.d. Web. 20 Mar 2012. <http://www.cbn.com/700club/Guests/Interviews/Ashley_Smith100705.asp&xgt>.
Van Hasselt, Vincent B., Stephen J. Romano, and Gregory M. Vecchi. "Role Playing: Applications in Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Skills Training." Behavior Modification. 32.248 (2008): 249-264. Web. 20 Mar. 2012. <http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/32/2/248.full.pdf html>.
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