Harvey Schlossberg, a former New York City traffic cop with a doctorate in psychology who choreographed what became a model law enforcement strategy for safely ending standoffs with hostage takers, died on May 21 in Brooklyn. He was 85.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest, said his wife, Dr. Antoinette Collarini Schlossberg.
The need for a standard protocol for hostage situations became more pressing in 1971 after the botched rescue of guards during the Attica prison riots in upstate New York. The next year, captives were taken in a Brooklyn bank robbery (the inspiration behind the 1975 Al Pacino film “Dog Day Afternoon”) and Israeli athletes were seized and massacred by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics.
In a pioneering training film he made for the New York Police Department in 1973, Harvey Schlossberg said that in a hostage situation, police officers “all believed, ‘If you gave me the right gun with the right bullet, I can put everybody out.’”
Dr. Schlossberg was originally assigned as a traffic officer in the accident investigation unit. But one day Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy was perusing a printout of personnel and serendipitously discovered a hidden asset: an officer with a doctorate in psychology. Dr. Schlossberg was soon transferred to the Medical Bureau to perform emotional testing that would determine the well-being of prospective and current police officers. He was promoted to director of psychological services in 1974.
He went on to coach thousands of officers in hostage negotiating. One was a Boston police sergeant, William Bratton, who would rise through the ranks to lead the police departments in Boston, Los Angeles and New York City.
Dr. Schlossberg’s hostage-negotiating strategies accounted for all sorts of eventualities. He would advise, for example, against summoning a spouse or a priest to the scene of a crisis — a Hollywood tactic, he said, that often backfired because the hostage-taker’s rage might be rooted in family tension to begin with.
“It’s important to remember what an outsider Harvey was in the N.Y.P.D. In a top-down, paramilitary, predominantly Irish police culture of command and control, in walked an iconoclastic Jewish intellectual pacifist, a beat cop with a Ph.D. in psychology.”