Most cops love the thrill of the chase that ends with a suspect in the back of a divvy van. Sergeant Victor Yanes is a bit different as he admits he has little interest in arresting crooks and even less in prosecuting them.

If he or his team makes an arrest he says it is a “byproduct” of the main game.

Don’t think for a moment he does his best work behind a desk, for he deals with the sharp end of life and death policing, where one mistake, one ill-chosen word, can be fatal.

For Yanes, 35, if you have to use force to get a result you may already have failed.

He is talking publicly for the first time about his role as the head of the Australian Federal Police Negotiation Operations Team. It is tightrope policing without a net. Get it wrong and someone can die.

Because the group deals with national and international incidents, diplomacy is vital. “It’s one of the few areas of policing where we could cause a major political incident,” he says.

Go too soft and kidnappers escape. Go too hard and the prime minister may get a call.

The job of a police crisis negotiator can be a very lonely one. Credit: Istock

Yanes’ policing philosophy, or more broadly, his views on life, were formed, not in the Australian Federal Police Academy, where he graduated in 2013, but in the country of his birth – Brazil.

As an eight-year-old after school he would treat himself to a pastel (fried pastry – chicken with cream cheese was his favourite) from a vendor 100 metres from home. Then one day at the pastel cart a robber demanded a mobile phone from another man.

“When he refused he was shot in the head. I thought what’s all this about? Life was so cheap,” recalls Yanes.

His family immigrated to Canberra when he was 11. In his application to join the AFP he wrote that he wanted to be a police officer, “To make sure this place doesn’t end up like the place where I was born.”

The Negotiation Operations Team is called in to help resolve anything from a mentally disturbed person threatening self-harm, armed offenders with hostages, international cyber extortion demands to Pacific Island riots.

One day, he may be dealing with a person who has temporarily lost the capacity for rational thought and the next with a........

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