From Negotiator to Hostage

From Negotiator to Hostage is a work in progress that explores why I ultimately left the NYPD—not in anger, not in protest, but through clarity.

Before I ever received formal hostage negotiation training, I was already negotiating every day: with people in crisis, with volatile situations, and eventually with a system that quietly held its own officers captive.

Once I became a trained hostage negotiator and began expanding my empathetic perspective, something unexpected happened. I started to see the job—and the culture surrounding it—from the outside in. What I once accepted as “just the way it is” revealed itself as a cycle: a rat race built around quota's, overtime, financial pressure, and the constant threat of having that overtime taken away. Your livelihood, your family’s stability, and your future were always contingent on forces beyond your control.

In that realization, the title took on its true meaning.

I was no longer just a negotiator—I was a hostage.

This book examines the moments, conversations, and internal conflicts that shaped my decision to leave. It’s not an attack on policing, nor a romanticized exit story. It’s an honest account of what happens when empathy—real empathy—forces you to confront a system that depends on silence, compliance, and financial dependency to keep people in place.

This project is ongoing. Several chapters are complete, with more to come. In the meantime, excerpts are available here, along with a podcast interview that dives deeper into the experiences and realizations that ultimately led me to walk away.