Munich Crisis Gave Rise to Hostage Teams

With the 18th Winter Olympics set to get underway next month in Nagano, Japan, all eyes will be on the world’s athletes as they prepare to ski, skate and sled their way to gold medals and a chance at sporting immortality.

But a quarter-century ago, those watching the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, came away with a far different recollection of the games than pageantry and athletic competition.

Burned in the memories of American law enforcement officials were the masked Arab terrorists who stormed the Olympic village and took 11 Israeli athletes hostage.

Two Israelis were gunned down in the predawn attack, a tragedy compounded when, 20 hours later, German authorities opened fire after the hostages and their captors had boarded a Cairo-bound jetliner. When the smoke cleared, the 11 Israelis, a German police officer and five terrorists were dead.

Crisis negotiation experts contend that as tragic as the outcome of the Munich crisis was, it proved instructive for police, profoundly influencing how departments in Los Angeles and the rest of the country respond to these incidents.

“At the time we didn’t know much about hostage negotiations,” said Dr. Barry Perrou, head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s crisis negotiating team.

A key lesson of Munich, he said, is the need to remove high-ranking officials from hostage negotiations.

“The Munich incident showed some of the efforts had good intent but were made by the wrong people,” said Perrou. “It showed those [powerful] individuals need to be in the background of the event in a command position.”

The first to take heed was the New York City Police Department, which put together a negotiating team in the early 1970s. In their model, department officials divided the operation into those who command overall operations and the negotiators. Another change was a new emphasis on communication--instead of “knocking down doors and killing the bad guys,” Perrou said.

The L.A. Sheriff’s Department set up crisis teams in the late 1970s, in time for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. And while the games passed without incident, there have been more than enough crises since in which the department has dealt with hostage-takers or suicidal, barricaded suspects.

Sheriff’s deputies responded to 125 such incidents in 1996 and 140 in 1995.

The sheriff’s crisis team is made up of sworn law enforcement personnel but also employs other specialists, including psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

“I try to get people who meet the criteria of the incident and live geographically close,” said Perrou. Team members are ethnically diverse and fluent in several languages, he said.

In the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, for example--far from the downtown headquarters--the sheriff’s team has four people who can respond rapidly to a local crisis while the rest of the team travels to the scene.

Typically, Perrou said, the crisis is handled by a primary negotiator, working with an assistant. While they are in charge of talking to the subject, others record and review the conversation. Still others work up intelligence information that could later help in negotiations.

But ultimately the aim is to defuse violence by wearing down a suspect. “In the final analysis, it’s a delicate relationship that is developed through time and a demonstration of good faith efforts between suspect and negotiator that in most cases brings the situation to a peaceful resolution.”