Disregarding Indicators

[Matt Landfair]

In Utah, when drivers approach an intersection with inoperable traffic control lights, they are to stop and yield to prior traffic before entering the intersection. This morning, we had an intersection along a state highway with dead traffic control lights. I watched many cars just fly through the intersection and several near miss collisions to the point that I parked my police truck in the center of the intersection with emergency lights on to make people pay better attention.

When the traffic control lights are working, I don't see nearly the same amount of people running red lights, so that makes me consider if people are only looking for a red light and not paying attention to the green. Anyone who has spent any amount of time driving a car knows what the traffic control colors and the position of those colors mean. There are several clues provided by those lights to indicate if it is safe to proceed.

There have been some good discussion about paying attention and reading clues to get more information that can lead to avoiding a confrontation and ultimately avoiding the need for deadly force. Darryl Bolke, Cecil Burch , Craig Douglas , Chuck Haggard , and several other notable figures talk about various body language queues that help you recognize preattack indicators.

If we are only looking for the obvious "red lights" of an attack, we are missing clues that provide opportunities to avoid, create distance, formulate a plan, etc. Many people only consider training to be firearms related - there are far more applicable topics to daily life than just a pistol class.

For people looking for more information on this topic - look up the names provided above and look up MUC - managing unknown contacts.

 

[TheBigDog65]

I've lately been re-reading Amanda Ripley's "The Unthinkable" on surviving disasters and some of her work crosses over nicely into the defensive space. Our brains love patterns but we so often fail to recognize something that doesn't fit. No lights showing in a traffic signal should be a pretty obvious deviation from pattern... but yet it goes unrecognized for so many.

Recognizing when something doesn't look right and then acting on evaluating and avoiding it, if evaluations reaches the conclusion that it is a potential threat. I think of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It happened the day after Christmas. My wife and I were spending spending the holidays in Hawaii and when the news first broke I remember looking at a map displayed on the news, doing some calculation and determining that we weren't at significant risk. If we had been at risk by doing thinking up front we could have moved to higher ground immediately with several hours to spare.

But how many of the people in these photos, some of whom almost certainly got killed, might have had a better chance had they thought about the exceptionally outside the pattern action of the ocean receding suddenly hundreds of yards back from the shore and what it might mean if all that water came back just as suddenly?

 

[Smith&Steward]

In Utah, when drivers approach an intersection with inoperable traffic control lights, they are to stop and yield to prior traffic before entering the intersection. This morning, we had an intersection along a state highway with dead traffic control lights. I watched many cars just fly through the intersection and several near miss collisions to the point that I parked my police truck in the center of the intersection with emergency lights on to make people pay better attention.

When the traffic control lights are working, I don't see nearly the same amount of people running red lights, so that makes me consider if people are only looking for a red light and not paying attention to the green. Anyone who has spent any amount of time driving a car knows what the traffic control colors and the position of those colors mean. There are several clues provided by those lights to indicate if it is safe to proceed.

There have been some good discussion about paying attention and reading clues to get more information that can lead to avoiding a confrontation and ultimately avoiding the need for deadly force. Darryl Bolke, Cecil Burch , Craig Douglas , Chuck Haggard , and several other notable figures talk about various body language queues that help you recognize preattack indicators.

If we are only looking for the obvious "red lights" of an attack, we are missing clues that provide opportunities to avoid, create distance, formulate a plan, etc. Many people only consider training to be firearms related - there are far more applicable topics to daily life than just a pistol class.

For people looking for more information on this topic - look up the names provided above and look up MUC - managing unknown contacts.
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I really like what you wrote about the "red light" cues. The traffic correlation fits nicely with the trend of split second high speed action that can be seen on social media. But that sort of situation doesn't present itself in reality very often.

How often do we get in our vehicle to run an errand or go to work? Do we get onto a race track where all of the other drivers have the same goal, similar performance, similar skills, all acting in a predictable way because they all know the course? No we drive on the road or highway where each driver's goals, skill, perception and experience are all a roll of the dice for each one we encounter. This is the same for the people we interact with in our daily lives as well. We have no control on how other people perceive the world around them.

Instead of speeding up to stop at a red light, it may be more advantageous to let off the accelerator and give yourself the time and distance to apply the necessary action rather than a last second reaction. Trying to tie the analogy back to the critical situation world, we could view the gunfight, assault or any other critical situation as the car crash. Why are we waiting for the crash happening to be the point where we do something about it?

I must stress that I do not have much experience in the training realm, so from an outside perspective it seems alot of what is advertised as "training" is more of a rehearsal for a last second reaction to a known situation. As the defender/ the one reacting to the situation, we will rarely if ever be put into or get into a situation where all the variables are known. I think those situations tend to be more offensive. Most times we will be reacting to an undetermined stimulus or if you don't know or are unaware that you are being probed and assessed it will be a completely unknown stimulus. Again that will most likely be several visual cues rather than one blatant audible one. Then the defender has to scramble to figure out as much information as they can gather and process it accurately in the shortest amount of time possible.

Like you mentioned if we can slow down, observe and process data we may be able to provide ourselves with the opportunity to avoid the critical situation entirely. To add to what you wrote, there are several great Modcasts with the people you mentioned as well as others, all of which have much more experience than myself, go that into length and detail about this topic. These are some of my favorite ones. Varg Freeborn's input and books come to mind as something that may be beneficial as well. Lee Weems has had several guests, like John Hearne and John Holshien( sorry I probably spelled that wrong) that sound like they have been pursuing a more cognitive approach to their training classes.