Chapter 1: What is the secret life of a hostage negotiator like?
This conversation includes content that may be sensitive for some listeners. Please take care when listening.
This is an ABC podcast.
Vince Hurley is here today. For 29 years, Vince was an operational police officer working in the outer burbs, investigating domestic homicides, assaults, home invasions and drug trafficking. In that time, Vince was shot at, stabbed in the hand and even pushed off a building.
But perhaps the most challenging and often rewarding work he did was as a hostage negotiator, trying to literally talk people off the ledge or from crossing some kind of awful, disastrous, violent threshold by trying to make a human connection without knowing anything about that person. Today, Vince Hurley is an academic.
He teaches at Macquarie University's Department of Security Studies and Criminology, where he brings his real-world experience to the job. And Vince is also a passionate advocate for policy reform on domestic violence. And just a heads up, Vince's story will have a great many things in it that you might not want the kids to hear if they're in the car with you or in the house at the moment.
Hello, Vince.
Hello, Richard.
Where did life begin for you?
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Chapter 2: How did Vince Hurley's early life shape his career?
In the Blue Mountains in a place called Springwood. So I'm one of four boys. We're all a year apart and I'm the oldest. Four boys. Four boys, yeah. Is that house still standing or did you tear it to pieces? Seriously. Oh, poor mum. We laugh about it now and when mum was alive, but she had two nervous breakdowns trying to manage us four boys.
Seriously, she had... Seriously, or are you joking?
Yeah, no, no, I'm serious. We didn't realise that at the time, but life for us, amongst us four boys, was either arguing or getting along exceptionally well. My four brothers and I, we all were quite close, and we still are very close to this day. We talk to each other, you know, weekly at least.
So we all grew up in this small town, Springwood, and then there's only two schools in the local area, the Catholics and the public school, and we were the Catholics, and I was terrified of the public school kids...
Really? I went to the public school. I was terrified of the Catholic school kids. Where I went to school, the Catholic school kids used to beat us up on the bus.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Vince face as a police officer?
They were hard because they were all like you guys. They were all used to fighting with their 14 brothers.
I deny having ever been there, Richard.
This is a different part of the world I'm talking about here, but nonetheless, it was pretty intense. How rough did the play get between you and your brothers?
Oh, look, there's a couple of vivid incidents that come back to memory. We were in the backyard one day. We had an air rifle. It's now illegal, but it was a legitimate air rifle. And in the backyard one day, my brother Patrick walked up to me behind my back in a point-blank range, fired a slug into my calf muscle, and it's still there to this day. Oh, my God.
Mum, I told Mum, and Mum at the time didn't believe us, but many years later, I had an X-ray. I broke my leg, and the doctor said, there's a foreign object in your calf muscle. And I told Mum, she says, oh, yeah, I vaguely recall something like that. That's amazing.
Tell me about the cubby house you had too, Vince.
Yeah, we had a cubby house. Dad used to bring home old timber boxes and we'd put them all together and strapped it to the wooden fence at home and my other brother Bernard and Patrick and me, we'd put metho all through it. And we lit it and we're like, whoosh!
And the next door neighbour, Mrs Seddon, who was about 80 years of age then, yells out, Molly, Molly, it's the boys, it's the boys, and caught the fire brigade. It didn't totally burn down the fence, but it certainly damaged the structure rather severely.
Is there a kind of close... Is there a kind of an odd kind of closeness that does get formed from that kind of...
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Chapter 4: What is the role of empathy in hostage negotiation?
..rough sort of... Jocularity. ..that goes on between brothers, since you go through all that together?
Yeah. I want to think back now, we really got along either really well or we just hated each other, as you do when you grow up. But I remember my brother Bernard got into a fight with a local bully and we all ran into the house and said, Dad, Dad, Bernard's in a fight with Colin. And Dad said... well, don't just stand there, go and help him.
So Dad was, you're all in together, you know, to look after each other. But Mum came good. She was lovely, very compassionate, really compassionate. She saved us from many a belting from Dad.
Where was Dad in all of this?
Yeah, Dad worked long hours at a local butcher shop. He owned a family butcher shop, which is still there today. But Dad worked long hours. Like, he would be up at 4am and would go three times a week down to the Homebush abattoirs where the Sydney Olympic Park is now. and buy meat and bring it back. So he worked really long hours. Needless to say, his patience was sometimes right on the edge.
I was going to say, you do all those long hours and you come home and you say, what have those bloody boys done now? And then if we were mucking at the dinner table, And Dad had a long day, as he normally would. He would rip off his belt and he'd get it out.
And Mum saved us from many a belting below the waist, I want to stress, which she would gently put her hand on Dad's knee under the kitchen table and Dad would take a pause rather than belt it. So, yeah, it was... Look, it was... We were lucky. Fantastic environment. Loved it. Dad was a very good work ethic person.
What's your academic title these days? Are you Dr Vince Hurley these days? Yeah, I am. So how was Dr Vince Hurley PhD at school back in the day?
This is going to be somewhat embarrassing. I met on national radio, but I didn't do very well at school at all. In primary school, I was never a big achiever. I just didn't have the academic ability.
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Chapter 5: How does Vince handle high-stress negotiations?
Did you nonetheless think you had some kind of potential, though? No, not really, to be honest, Richard. No, it was more of a day-to-day struggle. It wasn't until much later in the police that I started thinking, I wonder what it would be like to go to university.
So what was your plan once you got out of high school?
I wanted to join the police straight away. Why? Because Mum and Dad thought it would suit my personality.
LAUGHTER
Nothing to do with academia or anything like that.
The kind of guy who sets fire to cubby houses.
I went straight to the arson squad.
So a pageant gamekeeper, right? That's the idea, was it? Putting the monkey in charge of the machine gun. Definitely for the New South Wales Police Force, this fella in those days. Seriously, though, why did you want to do it?
Because it was outdoors and it was exciting and that's the only two criteria I had. And honestly, Mum and Dad thought it suited my personality.
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Chapter 6: What methods does Vince use to connect with individuals in crisis?
Everything was by buses or they had to work. People didn't own many cars or the cars that they did own, they stole from neighbours and things like that. I remember clearly I was working at Mount Druitt one morning, it was the middle of summer and and it was a stinking hot Sunday and this bloke's walked in and I'm the constable at the station and he said, I want to report a stealing.
I said, yes, sir, what's your name? I put the paper in the typewriter, started typing out. What's your name? Blah, blah, blah. Where you live? Blah, blah, blah. I said, what was stolen? And he said, my front lawn. And I said... LAUGHTER And I paused. I went, what? And he said, my front lawn. What had happened? He laid turf on this Saturday afternoon. He went to bed.
He opened the curtain on the Sunday morning and overnight someone come along, rolled up the turf and stolen it.
So I suppose it's something you can't nail down. Turf, isn't it? You can lay it, but you can't nail it down, therefore it's pinchable. Oh, dear. That's great. Vince, tell me about the day you went out on a call in Mount Druitt with your colleague Phil.
So Filthy Phil and I, as he was called, we got called to a Fibro Housing Commission house and the bloke we knew there was Rory, was his name. And the police had been there, you know, hundreds of times possibly over the years. And we parked out the front and we walked up the drive and he stuck his head out the window. There were no fly screens on the house windows.
He'd all punched them all out over the year. And inside there was holes punched through the wall. Anyway, we're walking up. He stuck his head out and Phil said, what are you doing, Rory? What are you doing? And he goes, oh, not much, not much. He's pulled his head back in. The next minute he's turned out with a shotgun and taken aim at Phil and I, let off a shot. And how he didn't hit us...
I have no idea. We didn't even have time to unclip our holster, let alone get our firearm out. And we were just stunned. So we obviously got out of there and he was charged with attempted murder. But it's the unpredictability of things like that in amongst all people stealing lawns that really makes you aware of how diverse society is and the risk of policing.
Because we never did anything to incite that. It was just a random thing. And when you got back to the station and composed yourself, you go, you know, I could be dead.
Yeah. How much was attending to scenes of domestic violence, bashing of women is what we're talking about really, a common factor in the police work at the time?
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Chapter 7: What are the psychological impacts of dealing with violence in police work?
It's a totally different culture. But whenever I hear a police siren or I look at a police vehicle and it's got their lettering on it, you know, they'll have a lettering on it. That will indicate where they're from and what type of duty. I go, oh, that's RY10. That's Ride 10. That means that person is the shift supervisor. I wonder what's happening in Ride today. So I do miss that, yeah.
Wow, it's been completely amazing speaking with you, Vincent, hearing your extraordinary life story. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Richard, the pleasure's been mine. Thanks very much for the opportunity.
Vince Hurley now teaches at Macquarie University in their Department of Security Studies and Criminology. Today's conversation with Vince Hurley was made on the lands of the Gadigal people. Producer was Maggie Morris. Executive producer is Nicola Harrison. I'm Richard Feidler. Thanks for listening.
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