Huh?
I ordered a book suggested on FR.
400 THINGS COPS KNOW. Good info!
I love that website .... lots of good info on a variety of subjects.
Always.
One more of those things pounded into my head by my great grandmother who noticed everything and pointed them out.
Bkmrk.
I gave the police an description of the person they were looking for -- a middle-aged black female. My description included her approximate height and age, the location and direction she was walking when I saw her, and an exact description of everything she was wearing.
The cop didn't seem to believe me. He asked: "How do you remember all that?"
My response: "Something didn't look right about her, and I figured she didn't live around here. I guess I just made a mental note of it when she walked past."
One good trick is, when you are in a restaurant or public place, is to try and get the “gunfighter’s seat”. Sit with your back to a corner, where you can see everyone who enters, and nobody can approach you from behind.
Bfl
Unless you grow up with “street-smarts” it’s difficult to ever acquire this kind of awareness. Unless you have actually been in dangerous, real life situations your body just will not react from book-learning alone. I suppose you can train yourself....or be trained, but there’s no substitute for experience.
...and look at the horizon. Don’t just look at where your feet will land on the next step. Most people don’t seem to be able to look beyond their noses.
I practice that in defensive driving, too. Constantly scanning near and far, left and right for emerging threats. Just like piloting a plane, you never stop scanning.
bfl
When I was a young homeless kid.... Just kidding. In those days we called it living on the street. I developed a keen sense of my surroundings, and the people who were around me. It was instinctual, and I never thought to analyze it as a manly skill. At fifteen I knew I was prey, and spotting predators was a matter of survival. Well past my teens I was unable to go into a public place without sizing up everyone in it. At 61 I don’t care anymore. On the rare occasions I go anywhere, I figure everyone is a nutcase, and if they come at me, I will draw my firearm and plant them.
An active memory helps, but it has gotten a bad name called flashbacks. I am now trying to be uncured of that to the extent I can apply the skill to current environments. This article and website will help.
My son was a member of Marine Presidential Security Forces, and is now with the Federal Protective Agency. I remember one of his sound bites was, “Always be courteous, always be professional, always be prepared to kill anyone you meetâ€.
Interesting.
I recently saw the Jason Bourne movie, which is why this thread interested me. I watched the movie, and that part just stuck out at me. It isn’t a very long part of the movie, but as I watched it, the concept just hit me, and I realized that we all do it to some degree, however small or well.
I thought about that one scene a lot afterwards, and realized that it was something that could be developed and honed by doing it often and thinking consciously about it.
It isn’t hard to conceptualize, but...it isn’t easy to reliably develop, in my opinion. Unless you are someone whose livelihood depends on it (such as a cop or a pilot) the OODA loop isn’t a natural thing because...most of us are easily distracted. Like a lot of things, to be successful at it, and find utility in it, you have to habitualize it, and that isn’t a natural thing.
But you can develop it no matter who you are, of that I am certain. That is why the linked article (from a website that experience has shown me sometimes has good stuff, and...sometimes insanely stupid stuff!) was so interesting. It gave some tips.
I was one of the last people I knew to get a cell phone. I had to, for professional reasons, being on call all the time. On my ride home, and driving around in a 25 mile radius, I had a good understanding of where every single pay phone was. Not only that, I knew the kinds of places that *might* have a pay phone.
I used to joke that pay phones were, for me, like trees probably were to our ancestors who walked the earth with a lot of predators that like to make meals of them. As they walked in that primitive landscape, they probably knew, without even consciously thinking of it, where every single tree that could be climbed was within their field of view, and how fast they could get to it if they had to.
They had situational awareness.
I think it is harder for us in many ways, because the threats to us are not as immediately obvious as a saber-toothed tiger appearing within our field of view. But that can be developed.
Just talk to any GI or Marine who rode around in vehicles in Afghanistan or Iraq. They got to the point where they nearly developed a sixth sense about things as they drove. The orientation and shape of a dog carcass on the side of the road. Types of roadways, structures, and curves or hills that were innately dangerous. Cars occupied and unoccupied on and around the road. Terrain features, mounds of dirt, pipes going under the roads. Many of those guys got to the point they almost couldn’t help seeing things that jumped out at them. They could glance at a car sitting near a road, and something about the way the tires were would scream a warning at them involuntarily, sharpening their focus. (I wasn’t there, this is what I have read and heard from those who were, and it really stuck with me)
It is a wonder any of them could even come stateside and enjoy simply driving down a road after all that. Habits die hard...
I don’t want the situational awareness of Bourne. I don’t have that many people trying to kill me, that level of situational awareness would just make me pay attention to the fact that everybody around me is boring and doing boring things. Which is what I do, and don’t need that level of awareness.
Who was that FReeper whose tagline said something like, “Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to for killing everyone you meet”?
Sounds a lot like profiling. Works for me.
L8r