"Hold Your Fire"
Brooklyn, 1973. When Shu'aib Raheem and his friends attempted to steal guns for self-defense, it sparked the longest hostage siege in NYPD history. NYPD psychologist Harvey Schlossberg fought to avert a bloodbath, reform police methods, and save the lives of hostages, police, and the four young Muslim men at the heart of the conflict. The documentary is as tense as any New York thriller Sidney Lumet might have directed. Revisiting a landmark crime from the Brooklyn of 1973, he brings history vividly alive with the testimonies of those originally caught in the crossfire. It's the story of a botched robbery, a murdered policeman, a media scrum and a hostage situation that seemed unlikely to end well. The film creates a Rashomon-style narrative, challenging lazy assertions and revealing deep-rooted prejudices.
Shu'aib Raheem works as a Trauma Support Consultant. He previously served as the Program Coordinator for the Brownsville Arches Transformative Mentoring Program for criminal justice-involved children and families. He's the founder of the Jawala Scouts Leardership Training Program. He currently serves on the board of The Fortune Society. Harvey Schlossberg is an NYPD officer, Freudian psychoanalyst, and the founder of modern crisis negotiation. He founded the Psychological Services department in the NYPD, where he pioneered treatment for violence-prone police. In the Handbook of Police Psychology, Schlossberg is called a 'father of modern police psychology' for his role in changing the tactics police employed in hostage situations.
When we first learned about Harvey Schlossberg we were amazed to discover a maverick, pacifist, intellectual cop with a Ph. D. in psychology teaching radical empathy to the police. Harvey played a key role in the longest hostage siege in NYPD history. It took place in 1973 Brooklyn, the home of French Connection, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon. We discover that this harrowing ordeal is the origin story of modern hostage negotiation, and that Schlossberg's teachings provide hope for repairing America's broken methods of policing. Throughout the killings of Michael Brown, Ahmed Arbery, Brionna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others, we dismayed to learn that most policemen aren't trained in Harvey's defuse and de-escalate approach. This has to change. America tends to glorify macho guys adept at violence, such as heavyweight boxers and Special Forces Ops.
We'd like to glorify a 99-pound intellectual police psychologist who upended traditional notions of masculinity and police use of violence. In the words of NYPD Captain Al Baker, who was initially skeptical of Schlossberg. It was a revolutionary. We started to transcend street justice. It's an internal strength, the opposite of the eternal, explosive strength. That's true manhood. Violence is a weakness. There are challenging and disturbing interviews in "Hold Your Fire". They help spark the messy, difficult, and honest discussions America needs to have around policing and criminal justice. We've come to think of our nation as a dysfunctional family, full of love and compassion along with conflict, trauma, false narratives and toxic denial. As the spectre of coming political violence looms over America, can we hold this family together? Can we follow Harvey's lead and listen deeply to each other even as we strongly disagree? Can we absorb the truth that violence is a weakness and learn to hold our fire? The future of our multicultural democracy may well depend on it.
Written by Gregory Mann.
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