1973 Brooklyn hostage crisis

The 1973 Brooklyn hostage crisis occurred when four robbers in Brooklyn, New York City, took hostages and engaged in a standoff with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) over the course of 47 hours from January 19 to January 21, 1973. One police officer was killed, and two officers and a perpetrator were injured, all within the first three hours of the incident; there were no further casualties during the standoff.

The incident began on the morning of January 19, when Shulab Abdur Raheem (24), Dawd A. Rahman (22), Yusef Abdallah Almussadig (23), and Salih Ali Abdullah (26)^[1] robbed the John and Al's sporting goods store to acquire weapons for self-defense. The four African American Sunni Muslim men were spurred by the 1973 Hanafi Muslim massacre in Washington, D.C. a day prior. NYPD officers responding to the robbery confronted them, sparking a shootout followed by a lengthy standoff when the perpetrators retreated back into the store and took twelve hostages. The NYPD used crisis negotiation techniques pioneered by detective and psychologist Harvey Schlossberg to peacefully ensure the release and rescue of all twelve hostages and the surrender and arrest of all four perpetrators.

The incident, one of the longest standoffs in the NYPD's history,^[2] led to a shift in the standoff tactics of the NYPD and American law enforcement, who had previously believed standoffs were best resolved using lethal shock and awe attacks. It also highlighted the need for proper crisis negotiation and de-escalation in policing, and cemented Schlossberg as a "father of modern police psychology" as the NYPD and other agencies sought to learn from the events of the standoff. The incident has since been described in retrospect as the "birthplace of hostage negotiation".^[3]