Standingon abridgewith someone threatening tojump,the rainstinging yourface.. youknow you’remaking adifference
Cathy MacDonald is using the skills she built up as a police negotiatior to help people communicate better
CATHY MacDonald knows it’s good to talk.
She has guided suicidal people down from bridges, dealt with pirates of the high seas and negotiated the surrender of gunmen locked in buildings.
Cathy said: “Seldom a weekend goes by without someone in Scotland standing in a high place threatening to jump.
“When you get a call in the early hours of Saturday or Sunday, you know what it’s going to be.
“When you’re talking to them, you get butterflies in your tummy. You have to make sure you choose the right words.
“You’ve got to be compassionate but not get so emotionally involved that you’re not thinking calmly.
“But when you’re standing on a bridge on a dark winter night, with the wind howling and the rain stinging your face, you know you’re really making a difference.
“I always worked to help people. To me, the most successful outcome was saving lives.”
Cathy, 50, from Perth, joined the police as a cadet in 1983, becoming a constable two years later.
Her communication skills were spotted early in her career, and she deployed them effectively as a bobby on the beat.
In 2004, she decided to use her skillset for specialist tasks and trained as a hostage and crisis negotiator.
Serving with Tayside Police and then Police Scotland, she loved every minute of the job with its challenges and ever-changing scenarios.
After a long career with the law, Cathy has turned her communication skills into a business.
She said: “It was only when I trained as a negotiator that I realised how powerful communication can be. I defused many violent situations by the right choice of words.
“Dealing with the whole spectrum of hostage and crisis situations, you need to really understand human behaviour.
“Identifying the person behind the behaviour is key. Good people do bad things and being non-judgmental is an essential element of negotiation.”
The vast majority of the cases Cathy was called to involved people threatening suicide.
She said: “Often, people don’t want to die. It’s that they have problems that have got on top of them and they can’t see a way out. It’s a cry for help.
“You listen and try to understand how they feel and talk things through with them.
“In most cases, you can help people find a solution. They come back to safety and are taken care of by their family and friends or the NHS mental health service.
“But sometimes you come across someone who is determined to take their own life and has planned it in great detail.
“On one occasion, someone jumped from a bridge in front of me. That only happened once but it was so hard.
“It’s part and parcel of the job but nothing can prepare you for it. I just had to tell myself they’d made the decision for themselves.
“Sadly, Scotland has one of the highest suicide rates globally. We still have a long way to go.”
Cathy was also involved in securing the release of a hostage kidnapped in Nigeria.
She said: “We were trained to negotiate when people such as holidaymakers or oil workers were taken hostage in the world’s trouble spots, like Somalia and Nigeria.
“When I went to see Captain Phillips, a film starring Tom Hanks about a container ship being hijacked by Somali pirates, it brought home to me what it must be like.
“But few people get up in the morning and say, ‘Today, I’m going to take a hostage.’ Lots of cases are crimes or family situations that have spiralled out of control, or when people evading arrest climb on roofs and refuse to come down.
“It was my job to help people see a way out of the situations they had found themselves in.”
Some cases were lighter than others. She once had to comfort a drunken reveller who had climbed up a crane in the middle of Dundee.
He had got up so high that he couldn’t be reached so Cathy and her team had to wait him out till he sobered up and could climb down.
Another call almost saw her caught out wardrobe-wise.
Cathy said: “I’d had a spray tan. They tell you to wear loose pyjamas with no underwear so the tan doesn’t get marked.
“I’d just left the salon and was on my way to my car in nothing but my Snoopy pyjamas when I got a call to attend an emergency – a man was threatening to jump from the Tay bridge in Dundee.
“It crossed my mind – do I go dressed as I am or do I go home and change? But there was life at stake and I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d got there too late.
“So I headed to the scene in my PJs. Luckily, just as I arrived, the man came back to safety. It gave my colleagues a good giggle.”
During the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Cathy was involved in security for the Queen’s Baton Relay.
Her role also included liaising in cases of complaints against the police, and training other police hostage negotiators.
Cathy, then an inspector, retired from the force in 2015. She now runs The Art of Communication, working