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6 J. Police Crisis Negot. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/wpcn6 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL Ethics: The Time Has Come for Opening the Debate The story is told about an Austrian police officer who, one foggy night, talked a depressed and suicidal man out of killing himself. The man's name was Adolf Hitler. And we know the rest of the story. In our careers as negotiators, how many of us have wondered if we were doing the right thing by saving the life of somebody who may well go on to of- fend against others? I would bet that all of us who have been at the nego- tiating business for a while have had second thoughts. I know I have, when we successfully talked a man, who shot an officer, out of the of- fice where he was threatening seven others, or when we talked a woman who had killed her children into surrendering. This editorial would like to look at these issues and others from the standpoint of what it is to be a professional. Professionalism is a word that has been used often and loudly in po- licing over the last two decades. However, it has only been recently that policing has begun to become professional in the traditional sense of the word. The reason I say this is that I think of a professional as being somebody (1) who has a body of specialized knowledge that he or she has learned completely (he or she is competent) and (2) who applies that knowledge to problems in living according to a set of principles that Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, Vol. 6(1) 2006 Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JPCN D 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1300/J173v06nOl 01 1