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Building Trust and Saving Lives: Insights From Crisis Negotiator Mentor Geno Dorough

February 28, 2026·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Geno Dorough, who had watched three people die by suicide in front of him and had three friends kill themselves, broke down crying in front of a room of Missouri State Highway Patrol troopers while teaching suicide negotiation — and only then realized he had PTSD.

1. The Crisis Cop Podcast features Geno Dorough, retired St. Louis County Police Department patrol officer and hostage negotiator, in the podcast's first in-studio guest appearance, with host Pat Dorian identifying him as a personal mentor. 2. Dorough joined St. Louis County Police in 1973, spending four years on patrol, then moving through undercover narcotics, sex crimes, and back to patrol before joining the tactical special weapons unit in 1985, where he served until 1999. 3. Dorough is unusual in crisis negotiation circles because he was simultaneously a tactical entry team member, helicopter pilot, and negotiator — giving him firsthand understanding of both sides of a standoff response and allowing him to shape tactical culture from within. 4. His negotiation philosophy centers on the conviction that law enforcement can negotiate approximately 99% of barricaded situations if the agency has the patience and training — a philosophy he developed without a formal mentor, drawing instead on psychology reading and street observation. 5. One of his core teachings is that yelling during any police interaction demonstrates that the officer is the one in crisis: subjects only hear noise when screamed at, not words, and unprofessional profanity-laced shouting gives the media and community clear evidence of loss of control. 6. He implemented a no-yelling, no-profanity policy during high-risk drug warrant executions in his tactical unit, replacing screams with stern, clear speech, and trained tactical officers to maintain the same communication tone when completing arrests after a negotiation concluded. 7. Dorough's Four R's framework — recognize, respect, reduce, and remove barriers — was developed during a helicopter conversation with tactical partner Kurt Frizz and became the core of his training book on compliance and surrender. 8. He distinguishes between two types of barriers: emotional barriers (privacy, shame, lack of trust) and physical barriers (doors, distance, weapons) — arguing that emotional barriers must be reduced first through communication and active listening before any physical barrier can be addressed. 9. He estimates that most barricaded situations take roughly four hours to reach the point where a subject is willing to surrender, followed by an additional two hours of communication to help the subject through the embarrassment and face-saving required to actually exit. 10. The most memorable incident in Dorough's career occurred two days before Christmas in front of St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Louis, where a man with serious mental health issues and shock treatment history had taken his girlfriend hostage in a car and then released her before Dorough arrived. 11. Dorough found the man at the trunk of his vehicle with a 12-gauge shotgun under his chin, approximately four feet away at the rear quarter panel, with media present. 12. After hours of negotiation, Dorough brought the man to the point where he said he did not want to die — but the overwhelming shame and embarrassment of the situation he had created proved an insurmountable barrier; as Dorough asked him to hold eye contact and keep talking, the man spread his legs and pulled the trigger. 13. Dorough went home that night and told his wife, when she asked how work was, simply that 'somebody killed himself here,' then moved on — a pattern he maintained for years across multiple witnessed suicides. 14. Several years later, while teaching a four-hour section on suicide to Missouri State Highway Patrol troopers at their Jefferson City academy without notes, Dorough began crying in front of a room full of uniformed officers as he spoke about the accumulated weight of three negotiation deaths by suicide, three personal friends who had killed themselves, and his sister's two attempts. 15. Troopers later told him the breakdown had made the session more impactful; Dorough then contacted Bill Hogwood, a negotiation and psychological trauma specialist from Prince George County, Maryland, and only then recognized he had been experiencing PTSD for years without identifying it as such. 16. A formative professional lesson came from a Chesterfield standoff where, wanting to leave for a high school reunion planning committee meeting, Dorough told his lieutenant the negotiation had failed and to send tactical in; officers had to execute a dangerous open-air arrest of an armed subject, two colleagues received medals of valor for what they were forced to do, and Dorough calls it his most embarrassing professional failure. 17. He contrasts this with the Waco siege as the definitive case study in what happens when tactical and negotiation teams operate from different philosophies — describing the outcome as entirely predictable given how disconnected the two sides were in their communication and goals. 18. Dorough credits Chief Kurt Frizz of St. Charles County, a former tactical colleague, with maintaining the communication-first philosophy across his department in the decades since Dorough left. 19. He argues that the most important reframe any new negotiator can internalize is that every barricaded subject has someone who loves them — 'somebody loves them no matter what they've done' — and that negotiators are not judges but life-preservers. 20. The episode suits listeners interested in the human and psychological cost of crisis negotiation careers, practitioner-developed frameworks for de-escalation, and the history of how communication philosophy emerged in American law enforcement before it became policy.

As heard by us

A mentor interview that traces a career from patrol to negotiation.

Pat Doering opens the show's first in-studio Legends interview by introducing his mentor, Geno Durow, and the conversation follows a career that moves from St. Louis County patrol in North County to undercover narcotics, sex crimes, a tactical unit, and negotiator work.

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You want a first-hand, plainspoken look at a retired St. Louis County Police Department negotiator talking crisis work under pressure.

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