for six straight hours, relieved periodically by two FBI…

““for six straight hours, relieved periodically by two FBI agents who were learning crisis negotiation, I spoke through the apartment door. I used my late-night FM DJ voice. I didn’t give orders in my DJ voice, or ask what the fugitives wanted. Instead, I imagined myself in their place. “It looks like you don’t want to come out,” I said repeatedly. “It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.” For six hours, we got no response. The FBI coaches loved my DJ voice. But was it working? And then, when we were almost completely convinced that no one was inside, a sniper on an adjacent building radioed that he saw one of the curtains in the apartment move. The front door of the apartment slowly opened. A woman emerged with her hands in front of her. I continued talking. All three fugitives came out. None of them said a word until we had them in handcuffs. Then I asked them the question that was most nagging me: Why did they come out after six hours of radio silence? Why did they finally give in? All three gave me the same answer. “We didn’t want to get caught or get shot, but you calmed us down,” they said. “We finally believed you wouldn’t go away, so we just came out.””

— Chris Voss