The 30-hour stand-off of Paradise Circus brought Birmingham city centre grinding to a halt and was almost unprecedented in the West Midlands. The Birmingham Mail can today, for the first time, reveal the full inside story into the drawn-out, delicate police negotiations that saved a man from jumping to his death. Mail Crime Correspondent MARK COWAN reports
THE someone in crisis call police speak for a member of the public threatening to take their own life came to Chief Insp Shaun Russells attention at 4pm on September 29.
An unidentified man had perched himself on a pedestrian crossing over Paradise Circus roundabout and threatening to jump off the metal railings above the A38.
Exclusive video of the moment police grabbed the man - click here
The man assumed a diving position and repeatedly crouched down on the railings as the first officers on the scene tried to coax him down.
While he recognised it was going to cause chaos, Chief Insp Russell said closing down parts of the city centre was the only way of ensuring the safety of the man and innocent road users.
The top priority is to save lives, he said. It is one of the roles of a police officer, but we also have to balance that with the rights of the public.
In 90 per cent of cases officers are able to build some trust with a person and we would get them off that ledge within an hour.
But it was very quickly established that this individual was not going to come down. He wanted to do himself some harm, he was in crisis, this wasnt a cry for help.
A decision was made to close major roads, causing log jams in the city centre as officers assessed the tactics available to them.
If we had left traffic flowing underneath and the man dropped off, he would have suffered life-threatening injuries. He may not have been hit by a car but it could cause another person to swerve and have a collision. Instead of one casualty, we could end up with five or six.
In such situations, there were few tactic available to the police.
Shooting the man with a Taser was ruled out. The stun gun is for dealing with violent offenders the man was not posing a threat to anyone but himself and not a tool for simply making someone compliant.
And if one had have been used, it could have sent the man plunging to the road 35ft beneath him, something that everyone was working to prevent. In addition, police were unable to deploy anything beneath the man to break his fall, because nothing like that exists for use in the region.
LITTLE was known about the man or his condition when senior negotiator Supt Iain OBrien arrived.
However, he appeared agitated and reacted to movement among bystanders by jumping back over the railings, forcing police to push the crowd cordon back beyond his line of sight to ensure an innocent movement did not lead to fatal consequences.
The first thing that struck the superintendent was the mans agility.
I felt he may have been a gymnast or in the circus, the way he bobbed back and forward over the railings with such speed. We had someone walking very confidently along the hand rail like a bar beam.
This presented police with a problem, even the slightest movement triggered a response so they had to move slowly so not to spark a reaction.
The man had a perfect vantage point to see officers and they were forced to stand well out of reach as the night of delicate negotiations began.
