A Texas police department is drawing criticism after a negotiator was caught on camera insulting a man standing on the edge of an overpass.
San Antonio police closed Loop 410 last Thursday while they worked to bring the man back down unharmed, but many were disturbed by the department’s negotiation tactics, outlets reported.
“We’re talking to you about your son and you’d rather smoke a cigarette under a bridge like a New York rat. That’s pathetic, you’re pathetic,” the negotiator is heard saying in video shared to social media.
In other videos of the incident that have since been removed, the negotiator again calls the man a rat, tells him he’s not being a man and that he doesn’t care about his son, TV station KENS reported.
“You’re going to let him down like you did before,” the officer said. “I don’t see why he cares about you.”
McClatchy News reached out to the San Antonio Police Department for comment.
“It literally made my stomach turn,” the man’s sister told KENS. “He does have mental health issues. He’s been having a couple breakdowns recently.”
“This officer needs to be fired,” a user commented on an SAPD Twitter post. “You don’t talk to someone in this situation like this.”
“Do better SAPD … let’s hope this man doesn’t believe all the horrible things being said to him by one of yours,” another user commented.
“We can see the way the cop is talking to the man so disgusting SAPD,” wrote another.
Police eventually shot the man with a beanbag round and brought him down, his sister told the San Antonio Express-News. According to the outlet, it was 18 1/2 hours from the time police arrived to when they said the “situation was resolved.”
Despite backlash, the department is standing by its negotiator.
“Negotiators use all different types of tactics … anything to get someone down from a situation that could cause them to harm themselves,” spokesman Nicholas Soliz told the newspaper.
Crisis negotiation experts say treating an individual with respect is critical, as is keeping them calm, according to Harvard Law School. However, adaptability is also important, and “crisis and hostage negotiation is not a ‘cookie-cutter’ design where the same approach and actions are used each time in an identical way.”
In other words, it’s up to negotiators to do what they think is best given the circumstances and the specific individual they’re talking with.
“It’s really hard to judge, in retrospect,” Mike Lawlor, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven told KENS. “It just seems like some of the language is maybe not appropriate. But if that officer felt, in the moment, that that’s something that needed to be said to get the guy back grounded ... that might be appropriate.”
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