Professional Smarts – Page 2

Options for Police Officers During A Traffic Stop – Dan Donzella interviewed by Tim Boehlert

In March I had the good fortune of networking with a gentleman on Facebook that seemed to agree with some of my postings – and he had some very good insights to add. I’m always reluctant to reach out and ask too many questions for fear of pushing people away, because in my business, it’s always hard to find like-minded professionals. And while it’s great therapy for me to exorcise some deep-seated thinking, it’s often disturbing to others not acclimated to what I did for years.

I’d like to introduce you to Dan Donzella. Dan is a Martial Artist, an Instructor/Consultant for Police Departments and also a Firearms Instructor. I had asked Dan outright if we could have a phone conversation – I was very curious about his thoughts and experience, and wanted to develop a conversation off-line. We spent over an hour poking around some dark corners, and I finally had to pop some disturbing questions on him! Lo and behold, not only did he agree, but also HELL YEAH! He agreed with my viewpoints.

Understand one thing about some of our civil servants. They are not always forthcoming with talking about, let alone sharing information that is of a specific nature. They generally don’t talk about the job with outsiders, in my opinion of course. I’ve found that many are reluctant to get into specifics or to talk about issues. I’ve also found that training is never discussed.

During my many years of security employment I’ve sought to learn from others – and who better to teach a newbie than a certified Police Officer? I also seek to give back – teach them things that we’d do, based solely on our own abilities or our guidelines. Knowledge is useless if it’s not shared.

In a nutshell, it was great to finally get to the one thing that always bothers me – training. Can we talk about some of it? What are your thoughts about what is taught? Did you see stuff that bothered you? Can we do better? What would you do if you could?

While we have a lot to explore, Dan was kind enough to accept a challenge from me to write his very first article. Dan is a teacher, but not a writer, and we both have that in common, and although he has more ability in many areas than I, we both want to teach better. Dan sent me a few lines of an idea, and I had to wring the rest out. I added my stuff, and took a co-writer option to encourage and guide him through the process, and my expectation is that the next article will be his entirely – and even if I have to edit it, we will strive for autonomy!

What follows is the ‘interview’ process that we undertook after that first phone call where I’d planted the seed to encourage him to share some of his expertise.

TB: Dan, I don’t know much about your background, but you seem to have ties to LE in our community, and we seem to have some very exclusive friends in the MA arena as well as some common friends in the Police community. I also know that you spent some time with a local PD, and did some DT training with their officers. Can you expand on that a bit?

DD: In 2007 a proposal was made to create a Regional Police Academy for numerous police departments. The purpose of this Academy would be to provide standardized training to new recruits while eliminating overlapping policies and tactics and providing a much-better prepared Police force that would be more well equipped to work together with other agencies.

The Department knew me because I had previously taught some of the high-ranking officers. The head of this project felt that the weapons retention course was out of date. He felt that it was inadequate because it was driven by a defensive mindset – strictly addressing problems from a defensive stance. I put together an offensive minded course that was so well received by the movers and shakers that I was then given the task of assessing the Defensive Tactics program and to try and put together a more-modernized version for new recruits as well as seasoned officers.

In doing so, I started by assessing the weapons retention training. Because I am a firearms instructor, and had spent some time on the streets with many of the officers, I was able to find several things that I felt ‘we can do better.’ After being exposed to some of the current training, I knew that I’d have a lot of work to do.

TB: I can’t imagine what it would be like to have the responsibility of designing any program for Police Officers – where do you start, what do you prioritize, and how do you cram it all into such a short program, yet provide them with a responsible end-product?

DD: As you may have guessed, it’s nearly impossible to cover all aspects of police work in a school setting. Your FTO (Field Training Officer) and years of experience are crucial parts of a larger puzzle that isn’t the same for any two recruits.

After completing my new Weapons Retention curriculum I began working with the various units within the Police Department. Each job is different though. For instance Traffic Division vs. Street Patrol. I had the unique opportunity to work Traffic Division with the Captain of that division for 2 years. I was getting a lot of questions from officers on “what if’s”, and the most common question I got was about how to extract a person out of their car. What they were asking me was “is there a ‘best’ way to remove the person and not have it end up escalating into a all-out brawl?” What gets taught universally in academies is that officer safety should ALWAYS be their first priority.

TB: Can you share any of the issues that you discovered in the field?

DD: The major mistake that I witnessed in the field was that the officers would reach in over the driver with their entire body and with both hands to unfasten the driver’s seat belt. This simple and too common method/error would expose the officer’s firearm, leaving the officer vulnerable to possible attack.

TB: You see a lot from a different perspective once you know more – based on years on the street, and/or in other training that you’ve pursued. So, based on this ‘mistake’, how did you address it?

DD: What I came up with were the following changes for those stops where the officer was dealing with a non-cooperative, non-compliant and possibly combative citizen:

[1] The officer should first place his/her right knee against the driver’s hip. This limits the driver’s ability to move offensively against the officer, and also allows the officer to ‘feel’ any sudden movements, but still allows a reasonable degree of control.

[2] Next, the officer places his/her your right forearm across the driver’s jaw-line turning their head away and towards the passenger side of the vehicle. You may ask why the forearm across the jaw? This is a control situation where the officer may need to assist the driver to unbuckle their seatbelt. The driver may be non-compliant for any number of reasons – medical emergency, or perhaps just being plain uncooperative. Reaching across the body without controlling the head in this manner could give the driver a means of pulling the officer into a chokehold. The forearm might actually not even touch the driver but still creates a safer entry technique. Prior and on-going assessment of the situation is always critical. The driver might fake a medical condition to gain surprise or advantage allowing them to get the upper hand on the officer, so always be on your guard.

[3] If needed, i.e. with a combative suspect, apply directed pressure against the driver’s head and into the headrest, rearward momentum. Unbuckle their seat belt with your left hand. Most drivers will exit on their own once they realize that the officer has experience with this behavior and advantage. There’s an old saying in the fighting arts, “Where the head goes, the body will follow.” By using this pain compliance technique, whether the suspect is feeling pain or not, the positioning of their head in this manner and using the suspect’s weight against them bypasses having to deal with their combativeness or resisting limbs to an extent, and is much safer for the officer. It’s called pain compliance for a reason, and it is a legal demonstration of the use of less-than-deadly force.

[4] Instead of fighting with the suspect while citizens are filming you, reach around and behind his head, insert your finger into his carotid artery (the brachial plexus region of the exposed neck) or up under the jaw into his glands with your right hand, the mandibular process. Pull his head up and back, out of the door and down towards the rocker panel. Be patient, as your fingers will penetrate more if the driver resists, making it even more effective and the driver will eventually lose his grip on anything in the car, including the steering wheel and fall out of the vehicle, where he can be cuffed and searched.

[5] It is actually possible to cuff them hanging out of the vehicle. It is a painful technique but with no lasting injuries. The exact same entry using the knee and forearm can be used in any situation entering the suspect’s vehicle. Use it in a much more forceful way if the driver is reaching for a weapon. By smashing him with your knee, elbow and forearm on your way to the hand reaching for the weapon.

So, while some drivers will grab onto the steering wheel, and some have even locked their feet behind the brake pedal, this technique may provide a best-defense entry and extraction strategy, safe for all, because some officers would hit their arms or try to peel their fingers off of the steering wheel, and some would be bitten as a result.

TB: I’ve heard the saying that goes something like this “the threat determines the outcome” and I always took that to mean, that they choose to fight or not, to cooperate or not, and when it’s over – you simply oblige them – and I’m not saying this is true nor the reality for you, but in my world it was often very true.

DD: I have patterned the majority of the arresting techniques that I teach in a way so that they look as non-aggressive as is possible if being filmed. Every department has to deal with the advent of this trend to capture everything the Police do while performing their duties. It does matter how it looks as much as how effective it is, which should always be the officer’s priority.

TB: Times have certainly changed. Respect for the law is a thing of the past, sadly. And the media has all but gutted the Police Officer’s ability to get home safe every day. Because of their lack of understanding, one-sided and under-researched articles, and outright deceptive reporting practices, our officers are in more danger every day. The media has painted them as thugs, and with the thought that all they want to do is to use force irresponsibly. That has impacted how the public responds and acts when coming into contact with officers.

DD: An officer stops cars all day long, never knowing what to expect. Sadly, there are too many road rage confrontations, and while some citizens solve it by displaying verbal outbursts only, others end up using deadly force.

Every officer wants a safe traffic stop where the driver of the stopped vehicle stays in their vehicle, the officer does his job, whether it be issuing a warning or writing a citation and then to have them both get back on their separate ways. Unfortunately, today a pleasant, non-combative stop can turn into a shoot-out. It happened just today, again, to a new officer, who was killed by the driver after a ‘routine’ traffic stop. No stop is ever routine, and the word ‘routine’ should be banned from every Police officer’s mind.

TB: Anything else that you’d like to share Dan?

DD: We all have seen videos of bar fights and how some bouncers handle the situation. Inexperienced ones get in the brawl and throw punches and toss patrons around. For a club that’s a bad ‘solution’ which can ultimately result in lawsuits, losing their liquor license or losing the business due to adverse reactions from their patrons. An experienced bouncer wants to defuse the mayhem. He can handle the patron with total control using different controlling techniques while adapting to his resistance and without causing harm, which is a sheer pleasure to watch!

In conclusion, constant training and improving not only your skills but also knowledge in your chosen field is a must. You must upgrade yourself, training facilities can last only so long and they must be upgraded as well. Having teachers who ‘think out of the box’ are crucial in this endeavor.

TB: I’d like to thank Dan for taking up the challenge and for sharing some unique insights about his training ideology. It’s good to know that there are teachers like him out there that our Police Officers can utilize. And depend on. Dan and I have both seen the effects of incomplete training and we’ve both sought to change that status quo in our own ways. As teachers, we both agree that more can be done, however. We need to get beyond the false sense of security that ‘we’ve learned all that we need.’ That simply is not true.

I can´t suspect everybody! – Marcus Linde

On the lack of professionalism in dealing with conflict in German social work and caretaking professions

Today, I arrived at a seminar held by the BGW (Berufsgenossenschaft für Gesundheitsdienst und Wohlfahrtspflege). It´s called “Professional Management of Violence and Aggression”. In Germany every working person automatically joins an employer’s liability insurance association. This government run insurance covers workplace accidents. It treats injuries caused by other humans also as workplace accidents. It is also responsible for controlling the companies’ security and prevention measures as well as helping to improve them. The BGW offers these seminars to everyone working in the social sector. For free. No charges. They cover the travel expenses and I´m actually sitting at the desk in my BGW paid hotel room. By the way, I´m not hungry because I just ate on their bill.

A year ago I started thinking about which topic to pick for my B.A. Thesis in social work. I wanted to find out how social work as a highly violent profession is dealing with violence. So I started researching.

Social work violent?
What do you call a bunch of people coming to take your kid from you? Or someone who doesn´t let you out on probation because you had to fight in order to keep your reputation? Or even someone who, legally, demands all your personal information?

Well, I found studies and literature on violence against women, violence against handicapped people, sexual violence against girls, abusive relationships, violence against clients and so forth. I found only one book chapter about client violence towards social workers which examines British literature on the topic. The author complained about the taboo of violence against social workers in German literature. It was written in 2003.

That means reality is ignored by a whole profession of caretakers for more than a decade. So I asked the BGW for data on how many “accidents caused by humans” have been reported regarding social workers. They replied they estimate 193 incidents in 2012. Well, 193 isn´t that much. But what wondered me, is that they were estimating the numbers. They didn´t have any solid data regarding “social workers” due to people not filling out the report correctly.

Today we were told that in 2015 the BGW altogether had about 4,000 reported incidents. That means that the only Job with a higher risk of getting injured by another human is being LEO. They also told us that they did a survey in 2013. They went inside the facilities and questioned the people. What they found out is that only three to five percent of violent incidents resulting in injury are even reported. That means that in reality there are between 80,000 and 130,000 violent incidents towards professionals in the social field every year out of approximately 7 million people.

Let that sink in:
There´s a profession in Germany that is more dangerous than being in Law Enforcement.

How come a whole “scientific community” focusses on the help recipients’ problems and overlooks the ones of the helpers.

Just imagine that for other helping jobs. Hepatitis vaccinations only for patients, tell the nurses to be careful with the pointy things. No oxygen masks for firefighters because we´re too busy handing them to the people in the burning building. Body Armor for the criminals, because if the cops get shot it´s their fault. Everywhere else it´s the other way around. When the army helps out in a disaster, the first thing they do is to set up a tent for shelter, unpack pallets with water bottles and start cooking something for the soldiers. I mean, you gotta eat when you´re supposed to carry sandbags the whole day.

So why not just train staff?
Because they don´t want to be trained.

Training on how to deal with violence and conflicts has to involve learning about the dynamics of it. Unfortunately, that means you have to take a close look at your own worldview. And this is where trouble starts for caretakers. I understand that it´s difficult to be empathetic and resource oriented towards clients and be careful and a little suspicious at the same time.

In my B.A. thesis, I designed a three-day seminar to introduce students of social work to the topic. While three days is enough to fit a lot of role play, physical stuff and theory in, I had to use almost the half of it to let the participants reflect on their worldview, morals and motives for even taking up the job. And to be honest. I don´t think that’s enough time.

This morning one woman reported that she took up a new job a year ago. She´s working in a Workshop for developmentally challenged people. She told us that she´s so tired of work that she thinks about quitting. Why? Because she gets hurt every single day. She mentioned bruises, scratches, black eyes and two weeks in hospital with a ruptured spleen. That woman literally has put others above herself. That kind of person is the reason conditions in the caretaking professions will not change in the near future.

I´m not even talking about policies written to reduce legal liabilities here, which are highly intolerable in my view. This is just about the self-image of the staff and their training. I once taught a nursing class and just gave general hints on how to manipulate the environment to make work safer. Simple stuff like arranging the bed and table in a way to leave room to get out quickly, putting glass bottles away, keeping an eye on the hands of the person. One of the nurses indignantly stated: “how can I do a good job when I suspect everybody?!?”.

That´s the point! We as teachers should focus on the benefits of “suspecting the clients”. Watching their behavior is a key component of the caretaking professions. Expanding those observations towards cues of violent and aggressive behavior improves the quality of the observation. Not only that caretakers become able to protect themselves better, they´re also able to protect the clients better.

Changed behavior towards “violent clients”, denied services, legal problems, self-blaming, future victimization are all things that can be prevented if violence as a possibility is recognized and therefore prevented. Additionally, caretakers will notice subtle changes in clients earlier and more often. This will make them be able to intervene earlier and provide better help. On the side of the professionals, fears can be reduced, psychological casualties prevented, resources to back up the injured staff minimized and general satisfaction with the work environment can be improved. There is no downside to safety in this case, except for the possible pain in reflecting the own behavior, motivation and world view.

Normalization of Deviance, Turkey Logic and the Insidiousness of Negative Reinforcement – Rory Miller

There is a golden time when any new organization begins. A time when you make your plans, make your contingency plans and try to anticipate and plan for any possible emergency. When a new jail is built (Corrections is my background) senior officers are called in to try to find ways to escape or make weapons. When an ambulance company writes their medical protocols or a hospital writes policy and procedure they set up redundant systems to make sure that medications and dosages are correct.

In most well-planned organizations, disasters rarely come from one person making a mistake or bad decision. When we were called out for a CERT (Corrections Emergency Response Team) operation and we intended to use less lethal weapons, the shooter, team leader and quartermaster would individually check:

The weapon to make sure it was a designated less lethal platform
The weapon’s chamber to make sure it was not loaded
The box of munitions to ensure the right designation (such as rubber bullets)
The box of munitions to verify the manufacturer’s approved safe range
Each munition to make sure it was actually what the box indicated

That probably seems excessive, but if someone had decided they were short weapons at the range AND had decided to use a designated “less-lethal” 12 ga as a regular weapon AND a shell had been left in the tube AND the weapon had been replaced without being checked, there would be the possibility of an accidental, lethal shooting.

The purpose of our procedures was to prevent this. And as such, it would take no less than seven mistakes for our agency to accidentally shoot someone with 00 buckshot when we intended to use a bean bag.

Normalization of deviance is a very unfortunate name for a very common phenomenon. It does not mean, in this context, behaviors once considered socially deviant moving to the mainstream. Normalization of deviance is when cutting corners becomes normal.

The safety protocols I listed above are onerous. They take time, they’re tedious and generally useless. They would not prevent an accident unless a series of other mistakes had been made to set up that accident, and a series that long is very unlikely. It is very, very easy to stop doing tedious, non-productive work.

Normalization of deviance. You run short of shotguns on range day, so you ignore policy and use one of the yellow-stocked “less lethal” designated weapons. Just this once. Just for the day. It’s a special circumstance. And nothing bad happens. Everything is inspected, no one gets hurt. No harm, no foul. The next time, it’s an easier decision. And soon, the policy is generally ignored. You get one more thing where the training officer says, “That’s what it says in the book, rookie, but this is how it works in the real world.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb did a better job when he called it, “Turkey Logic.” If a butcher buys a turkey on January 1st, the turkey has almost eleven months of stable data that the butcher cares for the turkey and loves the turkey. Every day, right up until butchering the day before Thanksgiving, is solid evidence of a pattern of care.

The difference is that the turkey can’t reasonably predict slaughter is in the offing. But humans can predict. We know there are potentials for carelessness. We know there are bad people who will try to circumvent the rules to harm others or do bad things. We know the world has a plethora of natural disasters in the wings. But they are rare enough it is generally safe to think like a turkey. The west coast of the US will suffer a huge earthquake and tsunami. But not in my lifetime. Probably.

This is not simple laziness. It is conditioned behavior. Behavior is conditioned by reinforcement (reward) and punishment. Reward and punishment each come in two flavors, positive and negative, and normalization of deviance is conditioned by the most insidious— negative reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement IS NOT punishment. Let’s define some terms.
Reinforcement or reward is anything that increases a given behavior.
Punishment is anything that decreases a behavior.
Reward and punishment are the value holders.

In math, negative is the opposite of positive, so negative reward would be the opposite of reward. Not so in psychology. In psychology, positive and negative refer to presence and absence. In psychology, a positive reward means you get something good, a positive punishment means you get something bad. A negative reward means you are saved from something bad, a negative punishment means something good was withheld.

An example: A kid does his homework, so you take him to the movies. That’s positive reward. A kid does her homework so you give her a day off from chores. That’s negative reward. A kid ignores his homework and gets a spanking, that’s positive punishment, pain introduced to the system. A kid ignores her homework and loses TV privileges, that’s negative punishment.

The reward and punishment system is natural and very deeply wired. A classical behavioral psychologist will say that all learning, all changes in behavior, follow this model. We do things that hurt (punishment) less than things we enjoy.

Negative punishment is one of the slowest ways to learn. Behavior influenced in this way tends to drift rather than change. One of the questions in self-defense is “To what extent can intuition be trained?” Defensive intuition is hard to train because it relies solely on negative reinforcement. You get a bad feeling and don’t get into a relationship or go down a dark alley and nothing happens. But maybe nothing bad would have happened if you had made a different choice.

Deviance normalizes when nothing bad happens. It is passively and slowly rewarded— with time saved and tedious procedures avoided.

When your policy is set up to prevent a one in a thousand chance, 99.9% of the times you apply that policy are wasted. It feels inefficient, until the one in a thousand occurs. Then it depends on the cost of failure.

There are generally five ways to avoid normalization of deviance.

The first is to work in a highly dangerous environment with very active threat factors. It’s amazing how good people get at doing things right when doing them wrong gets you injured. Realistically, however, you can’t create this. That said, many of our safety protocols do rely on historical knowledge, not fantasy. We have solid data on how bad things happen.

The second is to ritualize the safety protocols. To have the patterns ingrained as part of the tribal identity of the group. It becomes unthinkable, for instance, to pass a weapon to another team member without the action open and the safety on. It’s not perfect. Any ritual can be done mindlessly and ritualistically looking at a dosage label is not the same as reading it.

The third, one notch away from ritualizing is to make the proper process a mark of elite membership. “I can tell you’re an amateur because you did that the wrong way.” This makes people competitive about being consistently competent. All of this, of course, predicates on the process actually being intelligent.

The fourth is to rely on prophets. Traditionally, prophets were not people who saw the future, but people who warned that if the tribe did not follow the laws, the gods would punish them. Almost every large organization has a handful of people constantly warning of the bad things that will eventually happen due to current practice or policy. The trouble is, because the tragedies are so rare, the prophets are wrong almost all the time and become easy to marginalize or even to punish.

The fifth is to administratively punish, through positive punishment, what nature is slowly rewarding through negative reinforcement. This, I would say, is the common practice but runs into its own unique problem. Punishment almost always requires direct confrontation, and direct confrontation is unpleasant. You guessed it. When the supervisor tasked to confront poor behavior avoids his job, that is negatively reinforced. And when nothing bad happens…

When the axe falls and the turkey finds it is butchering day, very rarely do people look at systemic issues and the normalization of deviance. People like simple explanation with simple solutions and are thus likely to view systemic failures as individual failures. Blaming the shooter and not the three people who were supposed to inspect the ammo, nor the one who stored a loaded weapon, nor the one who failed to inspect the weapon after the range, nor the one who used a designated “less-lethal” weapon in a firearms qualification nor the one who decided to use the “less lethal” in the first place. And certainly not the culture that said cutting corners was allowable.

References

Banja J (2010) The normalization of deviance in healthcare delivery. Bus Horiz 53: 139 10.1016/j.bushor.2009.10.006 [doi] [PMC free article] [PubMed]
Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why. WW Norton (2005)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Thing that Gain from Disorder Random House (2014)

What the Pro’s know – Mr. Brassy McKnuckles

When you need a job done, do you go with the cheapest and least experienced contractor? I mean hey money is always an issue and if you can save a buck why not. Because when you hire a professional you are paying for knowledge and experience and he or she is going to cost you a lot more than the guy you hire out by the local giant home supply store. Sure it’s cheaper but you are paying for what you get and all the headaches that go along with it. Think I am kidding, go talk to people that use a public defender to represent them in a court of law and you will begin to see what a professional you are paying can do for you. One of my favorite things to tell a potential client is that you think it’s expensive to hire a pro then go ahead and hire an amateur and see just how costly it gets.

So now that I have that shit out of the way I am going to tell you why there is a huge fucking difference between Professional Violence and Self-defense or Amateur night fighting. When I was a kid I read one of my dad’s westerns and one scene has stuck with me throughout my entire life. A punk kid is drinking in a bar when an old timer walks in for a drink. He is one of the old mountain men and the kind of man that other hard men walk clear of. The kid is trying to make a name for himself and despite the warnings of some of the hard cases drinking with him he begins to prod and push the old man. Calling him names and making fun of the way he is dressed. The old man ignores him and the kid gets madder and madder, till he calls the old man something that he can’t take back. He braces himself and tells the old man to draw at which the mountain man shoots him in the chest with a big .50 Hawkins he’s been holding in his hand while drinking. This one scene has stuck with me for my entire life. When it’s time for violence then it’s time to do it right

I watch these videos on the computer and laugh my ass off not only at the time some of these guys take to finish a fight but the amount that people comment on the fight and say things that show just how ignorant they are of real world violence, one of my favorites is the keyboard warrior that goes off on a rant about how if the cops were so fucking tough then why did it take 4 or 5 of them. Listen up dickhead the cops are pros and use the amount of force necessary to get the job done, and that is the difference between amateurs and professional level violence. Cops, the Military, bouncers, hired thugs whatever the need there is a professional to fit it.

I was trying to explain to another contributor to the magazine just what pro level violence was and I used this purely fictional explanation.

My crew and I were hired to collect a large amount of money for a local sports enthusiast that had wagered on the outcome of certain events. One of the other parties in the wager had decided not to pay what he owed for his lack of foresight into the outcome of the event. I gathered up the gang and we made our way over to a local drinking establishment to explain why his course of actions were purely unacceptable for our employer.

Three of my cohorts and myself went to where the gentleman was enjoying a nice frothy beverage and sat down with him, me in the front and my friends to either side of him. I asked him if he knew why we were there. He said yes, and I explained to him the course of action we were going to be forced to take if the money he owed was not paid. He agreed that he had made a very poor choice and that if I would be so kind as to take a message to my employer that he would be paid in full the very next day. I told him that it would just thrill me plum to death to do so but I needed to be paid for my services with gas prices being so high that I needed a little something to make it worth my time to do so. I admired his watch and he had almost $200.00 cash on him. So I took both as payment for delivering his message and asked him to please be prompt in his payment of my employer. Then I asked him if he ever got that big old tree stump out of his front yard. He said no he had not and then after a few seconds asked me how I knew where he lived. I just smiled at him and the four of us walked away I told him I expected payment in full after the bank opened in the morning or that stump would be the least of his worries.

This is an example of what I like to call Verbal Violence, simple explanation backed by sufficient threat of what will occur if the demands of the situation are not met. The key to this type of violence is to make sure you are able to back up the threat in a way that insures the problem will not happen again.

Now let’s take this to the next level or what is called disciplinary violence. Rory Miller terms it an educational beat down and for most folks that is as good a term as any. So the guy doesn’t come across with his end of our arrangement, and me being a man of my word, I go to take care of business. I gather up the crew and we begin hunting the gentleman, because we don’t get paid till the employer gets paid. We go stake out his work, home and hangouts and as soon as one of us spots him we converge. Now don’t get me wrong, I would have much rather he had paid his bill and never to have seen him again. It doesn’t take long and he shows up at one of the bars that he frequents. We go over and one of the guys goes in to scout out the situation. He is alone and the scout waits till he goes to the restroom to signal us. We go in and make a B line for the restroom. One of the crew stops at the restroom door to prevent interference and the other five go in. We surround him and with no fanfare two of the guys begin beating him.

The correct application of violence is to use enough force to achieve the goal without going over the limit. After just a few seconds “Mr. Idonthavetopay” begins crying and explaining that he had the money and would take it to my employer right away. I tell him that he should give me the money and I would take it to my employer. He complained that I would just steal the money and that’s when I hit him in the mouth. I then explained to him that we are professionals and that kind of thing was a sure way to end us getting another job. We took the money to our employer and got our pay. This type of thing is good for business. No he wouldn’t call the police because even if all of us were arrested he knew that at some point in time on of our brothers would be waiting for him and he didn’t want to pay the bill for that on. This is one of the truths about the majority of people that live on the outskirts of society. They are subject to a different style of taxation for doing business and subject to punishments that don’t involve prison.

Now we are going to look at the third type of Professional Violence, the hard job. Say a crew moves in and begins selling illegal products in an area that has in the past been controlled by someone that we do business with on a regular bases. He or she might call us and ask for assistance in remedying this situation and after negotiation over price we would go to work. Intelligence gathering, recon, watching members of the new business venture. Form a plan and then implement it. Begin taking out members of the other crew if feasible and if not target the leadership. Cost them money, rob their members, interfer with their money train. Don’t give them a break. Use the police as a secondary strike team by giving them as much information as needed to break up the new business. Do whatever it takes to accomplish the job. If it comes down to it take out the leadership through active intervention.

This could go many different ways but I will only focus on one of them right now. We as a full crew would find and where the leader like to hang out, and most of the time this type of person wants to be seen and known as a player in the game. That’s one of the big differences between small time hoodrats and the really big dangerous players. Big players stay in the shadows and control things for behind many layers of protection. Getting to those types of individuals is far beyond a small crews reach and better left alone. Know your limitations and operate within your parameters. Overreaching can and will get you killed.

After watching and being patient Mr. X’s habits become known. Where he like to go, his preference in women, cars, drugs, everything is valuable as a possible edge. There are two ways to handle this situation. One is Hard Work the other is an Easy Job. I am going to concentrate on the Hard Work to show you how Professional Violence works. Mr. X leaves the bar that he like to show off in. He may have an escort or he may not. For this scenario we will say that he is overconfident and not afraid of possible threats against him. We as a crew will be waiting outside. As soon as we can, we will surround him, hit him with pepper spray then tazer him. When he is down, out come the hammers and Mr. X’s legs and hands get broken in many different places.

I would then explain to him that his choice of business location need to change or the next time he will not even hear what hits him. Overwhelming force applied correctly can and will often stop the need for things to escalate any farther. If Mr. X does not listen to reason the next step is called easy work and I won’t talk about it. I hope that this short article helps you understand the difference between how Violence Professionals view the use of force versus how two guys getting into an argument and fighting in a parking lot. Or how self-defense situations are completely different than getting on the wrong side of hard people.

Youth – Jeffrey Johnson

Before getting too deep into this second part on crisis intervention with youth, I want to remind the reader that this is far from an exhaustive treatment of things to know. I’m sure one point I make here could easily be dedicated to a full chapter in a book on the subject. This is really basic, and I would encourage anyone reading this to study for themselves and, more importantly, align themselves with the nearest veteran staff member working in your program/unit/facility/school. The perspective of a veteran staff with a rep for doing good work is invaluable and more often than not the ideal example to follow.

Read this scenario. This is a textbook example of how a crisis might start in your setting.

“Danny, can you take a seat?”

“NOPE.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t fuckin talk to me.”

“Ok, but you can’t stand in the middle of the classroom while I teach math.”
“FUCK this CLASS.” (Pushes books off of your desk)

I want you to re-read that and really imagine it. I want you to note how the situation made you feel and what you thought. This is what will inform your decisions, and your decisions can make this easier or way more difficult. I want you to think about whether you imagined “Danny” as white, black, latino, Asian, or any other background. I want you to note whether or not you imagined this young person as big or small, athletic, skinny, or fat. I need you to consider all of this because your expectations will alter your choices.

I also want you to note whether you took it personal. If you take it personal, you will not be effective.

To be truly effective you have to have a lot of background knowledge. I said in part one that you should already know the objectives and guidelines of the organization you work for, what the rules and expectations of the classroom/unit are, what the enforceable consequences are and what qualifies in your organization as aggressive behavior. You should know the case history of the young person if that is possible. You should have some familiarity with family and community issues. The more you know, the better chance you have at making decisions that don’t blow up in your face. Even knowing how the weather might be affecting your clients is valuable. Our clients got restless around winter and the holiday season. The times that are stressful for the rest of us can impact youth with emotional problems much more significantly.

In a public school, a teenager sweeping the books off of a teacher’s desk in a threatening manner would be a huge deal. It was a huge deal in the schools I worked in, but for us, detention, suspension, and expulsion were not options. We had to deal with these situations and attempt long-term strategies to change the behaviors so that this young person might become a functional adult. In the program I worked in, we were also authorized to use physical restraint-a “last resort” decision that sometimes was the only option when things went south badly.

Time and Space

If you are too angry to be rational, do you want to have conversation with a manager at work that is always enforcing rules and checking up on you to make sure you are doing your job? The answer is obvious. These clients often have a difficult time trusting adults because the adults have failed them. In some cases, adults have severely abused them physically, sexually, or through neglect. They have been made promises that have ended up broken. They have learned that authority figures like teachers, case managers, police officers, magistrates and judges are only present to crack down on them.

Giving a young person time to calm down (note: do not EVER use the phrase “calm down.” It comes off as condescending and only makes people more aggravated) and space away from you or others can start to de-escalate the situation. There must be boundaries to this, however. For example the young person can stay in THIS room with me and one other staff member. When he calms down enough, we’ll ask if he wants some water just to feel out how he is responding. We issue directions only with the goal in mind of helping the young person to get calm and collected. If there is no need to touch him, DO NOT touch him. If talking to him about your expectations will agitate him, don’t. Just have the plan in mind. But be ready to change the plan if necessary. Holding on to a plan concretely can cause some problems.

In the above situation, I might start with asking “Danny” if he would please just leave the room so that the rest of the clients could have math class. Obviously, this doesn’t always work, especially if you haven’t caught on to the problem in time (there are a lot of distractions in a classroom). Next I might have other staff escort the remaining clients out of the space to take away the audience. If the client doesn’t want a major situation, then he will stay in the classroom alone. If he makes a move for the door (which you and at least one other staff member should be standing at, ready, anyway), then obviously you have to physically intervene (remember to ask yourself if this is allowable in your organization. Don’t put yourself in a bad legal situation or in the unemployment line because you didn’t think things through.) He may amp up as soon as I start making directions, and depending on what he is doing we may have to move in and limit his space. We need to send a message that this isn’t ok and we won’t stand for it, but we’re not just moving right into using force. And if he starts getting physical, then your restraint training will be necessary. Be keenly aware of the rules for this and the physical safety of the client and others around you.

I hope you are noticing how many different twists and turns this all takes. That’s why I say not to be bound to the plan. Being aware of multiple strategies, multiple possibilities, not taking it personally and keeping safety as the number one objective is all crucial. Otherwise, you are making your job impossible and creating dangerous circumstances for yourself and everyone working with you, as well as the clients you are serving.

Physical Intervention

There is a range of physical interventions that are appropriate for dealing with these kinds of situations. As I said before, if touching the client isn’t absolutely necessary, don’t. If you do touch him, then be ready to get really physical really fast. You are probably dealing with a trauma survivor. It’s possible that touch can trigger a traumatic reenactment and push the client even further into aggressiveness and irrationality.

But you have boundaries and a right to protect them, for sure. It should ideally start with a verbal command and an assertion of what you feel your boundary is. The client should be made clear what he is allowed to do.

“Danny, you have this whole room to use if you need, but I can’t let you in my space. You need to back up.” If the client is amped up, pacing, you are likely standing at this point anyway. If you are, you may want to position yourself in a way that makes it easier to respond to whatever happens next. You may want to take a step back with one foot, leaving one side of your body more forward than the other (my right side is dominant, but I always step back with the right as a habit of martial arts training. I feel more comfortable with my strong side “chambered,” even though I don’t intend to use any strikes at all). I don’t raise my hands to chest level unless the client is close, so if I can I keep my arms extended with my hands no higher than my belt-line. High hands can signal a desire to fight, or make an excuse for the client to become more aggressive. Stepping back as opposed to stepping forward implies that I don’t want a conflict, but I’m wary of what is happening and readying myself.

If the client has gotten too close, I may use my left forearm and open palm against his chest with a firm command “You need to get out of my space right now.” I don’t mention the restraint. That’s a challenge that leads to more physical aggression. I don’t have to make eye contact with him to see him. I may keep my eyes trained on his chest or at the wall or floor keeping him tracked in my peripheral vision. Meeting eyes is a challenge as well. Being mindful of all the non-verbal communication is really important, because you can set yourself up for an unnecessary altercation by looking through to the back of a client’s head because he just called you a bitch.

Often when we become frustrated we take in a deep breath and let out a heavy sigh. It’s just this kind of breathing we should practice in times of calm and use as soon as situations begin to get stressful. We’ll be more likely to maintain level-headedness despite the dump of adrenaline, which often leads to a dry mouth, spaghetti noodle knees, a shaky voice and even shakier hands. At least that’s what happens to me. These symptoms can be frustrating for someone used to that adrenaline dumb since they appear to be signs of fear. Looking fearful can be a button that an aggressive person uses to push and manipulate you. Breathing can still help to keep you rational enough not to make major errors in your tactical thinking. You will likely be getting called every name imaginable, threatened, and eventually even assaulted, and you can’t afford to let upset be the major motivating factor in how your intervention plays out.

In the program I worked for, we were trained in TCI-Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, which has it’s own approved restraint techniques. Make sure you know well what is trained in your program and do your best not to deviate from that training. I am often asked if I used my martial arts training in this kind of work. Aside from being physically more fit and acclimated to physical aggression, I always answer, emphatically, “no.” Obviously striking is 100% unacceptable. Joint locks could lead to major injuries, and throws on a concrete floor could kill a client. I think I reacted quickly because of the training I received, and could change what I was doing relatively easily in response to whatever the need was, but knowing how to hurt people was only useful in helping me know what NOT to do at work. Sensitivity training was useful though, because you could tell what someone was intending to do based on how they moved against you. It’s important to know the difference between an attempt to scratch an itch and an attempt to grab a handful of skin from your abdominal region.

I won’t advise anymore on physical intervention because your organization will have it’s own rules regulating the use of physical intervention. Know them, follow them, and do what you can (within reason) to prevent needing to use them. But when you have to use them, don’t be hesitant. That can lead to injury for you or the client and make the situation more explosive.

Debriefing

In the aftermath of a physical intervention it’s important to debrief with a client, peers, and supervisors to review what worked, what didn’t work, and what everyone can do differently in the future to prevent the need for a physical intervention. The debrief with the client is separate from the one with coworkers, even if all of your co workers were present during the crisis and the debrief with the client.

Debriefing with the client might look like this:

“Ok Danny, can you tell me what happened?”

“I was mad about what Steven said to me in the bathroom so when I came to math I wanted to fight someone.”

“Ok. What did Steven say to you that made you want to fight?” (This statement reflects that I heard what he has already said)

“He said I looked gay in the shirt I’m wearing.”

“Oh…that really bothered you, huh?”

“Nah, not really, but when I tried to leave the bathroom he touched my arm and I told him don’t do no shit like that.”
“Do you think you handled this the best way you could have?”

“No.”
“What could you have done differently?”

“Asked you to let me sit in the hall until I calmed down.”
“Do you feel comfortable telling me what’s going on before we have a problem?”

“Yes.”

“Can we try that next time?”

“Yes.”
“Ok. Now you know this situation was serious. You will have to deal with the consequences of what happened. I don’t want to hold this against you for long though, but we have to be fair.”
“I know.”
“Ok. So in the future what can you do?”

“Tell you what’s going on and ask to leave the classroom til I calm down.”

That is really oversimplified, but essentially what a debrief with the client looks like. It is to ensure that all parties are on the same page, understanding what is expected going forward and united towards the same goals. It certainly doesn’t always go smoothly and depends a lot on rapport between client and staff.

Debriefing with colleagues looks similar. What happened? What can we do differently? How can we prevent this? Who else can help? What is our plan for tomorrow when Danny and Steven see each other? What other staff members need to be informed so they can be prepared as well? Are you okay? How can we help you next time? This is also a good time to own up to mistakes. This builds trust with colleagues and lets them know you are invested in what they are trying to accomplish with their clients.

Again, this is too brief to really do justice to the topic, but I think it provides the reader with a good place to start. Again, genuine care for the job and the clients, being aware of your organization’s expectations, rules and policies, knowing when to talk, when to shut up, when to give space or limit it, and the appropriate physical interventions is all key to success working with young people who are severely emotionally disturbed.

Intervening with Youth – Jeffrey Johnson

Crisis Intervention with youth is far too vast a topic to do justice to in a short article. There are too many anecdotes, too many rules and laws to remember, too many configurations of teams in so many diverse programs and schools that do this kind of work to really cover it all adequately here. Instead, I will try to give a rough overview of the topic to give the reader a decent framework to begin operating from as he or she approaches this kind of work.

You Must Care

This is hard, often thankless work that most people don’t get fairly compensated for. If you signed up to work with young people who have major emotional and behavioral issues, you have an important job that can be highly stressful at times, and highly rewarding at other times. You will hear, see, and experience things most people have no frame of reference for understanding. You will meet people who have been through a lot of really horrible traumatic circumstances, and who may have committed horrible acts themselves. You have to care about the young people you work with, and you have to put your pride aside and make sure that the right thing happens every time. And you have to accept that the right thing doesn’t always happen every time.

When you are threatened, or even assaulted (being spat on or kicked for example), you have to remember that you have a job to do and people to keep safe. Taking it personal and not learning to cope with stress and emotions will lead to making mistakes, and a split second bad decision can lead to people being injured, property being destroyed, and you being handed your walking papers. Or worse. Lawsuits and jail time are not out of the realm of possibility. If you have become vindictive, careless, or are lying to cover your ass, you are making huge mistakes that can be costly.

My best piece of advice is to align yourself with whomever is a veteran of the program you work in who is ready and willing to show you by example the best way to do the work. I was blessed to be around a lot of people who knew very well how to do their job and I had a lot of support from coworkers and administrators.

Know Your Environment

You need to understand where you work. When you are part of a team you have backup, a closed in environment, and hopefully some consistent plans and strategies for preventing aggressive outbursts and dealing with unsafe situations as they come. You also have state and federal laws (HIPAA is an example), company policies and ethics, and the professional culture of your setting. Are you in a hospital setting? Partial-hospitalization? A behavior unit of a public or private school? A detention facility? You need to understand the setting and the options and limits you have when confronted with crisis. Otherwise, what you do could prove disastrous for you professionally and physically, and may have consequences for your co-workers and the young people you are responsible for.

Next you have to know the physical layout of the place you work in. You need to know where youth are allowed to go, where they aren’t allowed to go, where they like to hide or where stolen items might be stored, etc. You need to know what doors are kept locked at all times, where utility closets are and what is in them, and you need to be aware that objects that are available to be used as weapons may be. In my experience, the vast majority of occasions where a chair was grabbed or a stapler was held it was just a threat, but there have been times where the improvised weapon was used. Keep scissors in drawers if they are not being used, and be mindful of who is using whatever implement to participate in whatever activity.

Know Your Team

This makes or breaks everything. A good team always assumes that a solution is possible, that there is always room to improve, and that supporting each other is absolutely crucial. A good team consists of people who will put quality of work before any ego or recognition, and are always ready to help whenever possible. A good team builds rapport with each other proactively, getting to know each other and probably considers each other to be friends as well as work colleagues. They will listen to and protect each other, and will verbalize regularly that they are available to help in any way possible. Anything less means that “the inmates will run the asylum.” And if that happens, your job will become nearly impossible.

Synergy with team mates means we can communicate with non-verbals, we can predict each others’ intentions and actions, and we can monitor each other and step in and switch-out with someone to make a bad situation calm down. A lack of synergy means that we make decisions that undermine each others’ authority, and can show clients that we are not a unified front. Once that happens, there will be some who exploit the gaps in our cohesion. The manipulators are the ones that exploit these holes the most, and that creates more disunity within a team.

Team building exercises, retreats (we used to have a program wide camping in-service), and simply meeting after work for food and shenanigans can help a team build rapport. Joke, smile, and laugh whenever there is time for it.

Know Your Clients

Your setting may call them clients, consumers, students, or whatever term is most appropriate. In any case, knowing as much as you can about them is very helpful. New intakes are especially tricky if you have never read any of their information, and you have to be ready to deal with a client that behaves in a way that is totally inconsistent with what has been reported. Sometimes the previous staff who worked with a client, or their parent or guardian, has such a bad relationship that all they write is negative, and the client turns out to be genuinely good hearted, polite, and desiring to make positive changes. Other times someone will have completely omitted that the client has a history of sexual predation, a key piece of information that can completely change how he/she is monitored. I had teaching partners who had worked with adolescent sex offenders and were able to spot problem behaviors that were invisible to me at first. I heeded the warnings. It pays to listen even if you don’t always see what someone else is seeing. It probably protected some vulnerable clients.

For small children, crisis episodes tend to be high frequency, low intensity. This means that you may have to deal with lots of instances of verbal and physical aggression, but due to the size of the client, it presents a relatively low amount of danger (Danger is still danger. A 6 year old can still stab me with a pair of scissors). In adolescents, crisis episodes tend to be low frequency, high intensity. This means that the instances of verbal and physical aggression are low compared to very young clients, but are typically much more dangerous and volatile. These kinds of situations are the ones that may result in police intervention and can have a lot of spill-over into and from the community (i.e. gang related issues, neighborhood conflicts, etc.). This is a range of averages, and not any kind of perfect predictor of behavior in an individual young person. Read the files, talk to parents or guardians, and familiarize yourself with different behavioral profiles. A sexual predator has a certain list of personality traits and behaviors to look for. So does a neglected child or one who was beaten severely by an adult. No 2 clients are exactly the same, but you will see variations on themes if you stay with this kind of work long enough.

To understand the type of client that ends up in a program that deals with severe behaviors, whether this is a unit within a school or a residential facility or a youth detention facility, one has to have some background on the causes of the behaviors. The clients I worked with typically had a brutal trauma history, lived in economically depressed areas, and experienced marginalization due to cultural and racial factors.

As a result, the world in their experience was a small place where yelling, cursing, and aggression are cultural capital, and not being able to communicate with at least the threat of violence could and would lead to being bullied, jumped, robbed, and otherwise ridiculed. When we professionals are coming from very different environments than this, it can be difficult to understand the clients we serve. And understanding is key in helping them.

Cultural capital is a big deal. Most of my clients came from inner-city Cleveland, and most were African American. I came from the suburbs and was at least 7 years older than most of them when I started. I had to listen and observe them a lot to get a handle on the slang they used, the body language that told me that a fight was on (pulling up pants was an indicator that a fight-or at least grandstanding like tough guys-was about to happen), or what type of intoxicant they might have used before coming to school that day (this can be key, because what they used may have had some serious physical effects as well as mental.

An assumed increase in blood pressure and heart-rate due to drug use can change how we approach a physically aggressive person. A physical restraint could have dire consequences if a heart is already abnormally pounding out of a client’s chest). You have to piece together a puzzle sometimes. On client looks quizzically at his peer while another laughs at him. Another asks “you gone of that lean, ain’t you?” The client in question seems amped up. Is he high? What is our protocol when we suspect drug use in a client?

As you can start to see, lots of different kinds of knowledge and pieces of the puzzle begin to come together and overlap each other, and you have to gather all of this info in a short amount of time and already have in mind the policies and procedures for handling situations legally and ethically, all the while doing your best to keep everyone as safe as possible.

Other things to be aware of…has the client had neighborhood issues? Domestic abuse issues? A history of sexual or physical abuse? How stable is the current home environment? Has the client and his/her family had to move recently or frequently? Are there siblings or other family members living with the client? Are there any intellectual delays? Is the client currently medicated? What medicines is he/she on? What are the medicines for? And on and on…

Running a Hard Crew – Mr Brassy McKnuckles

Ok kiddies gather round and listen to the words of your elders and probably betters simply because we survived our own stupidity. So you want to run a crew of hard men and make a living in
the violence trades. Well kids this take work determination and rules to make it successful and if you listen to me I will try and make the path a little easier for you.

You have probably heard the old saying keep your friend close and your enemies closer well that is the damn truth. Do not build a large group of people that you don’t know. Stay small and stay tight, know each other and know who you can trust. Know their perks and their idiosyncrasies, learn who you can trust and who you cant. Remember Jesus only had twelve people in His crew and one of
them stabbed him in the back and sold him out to the Law.

Learn how to support your crew with only eighty percent of your pay. Now I know some of you that are reading this are now pissed that I would say such a thing and that shows just how stupid you are. Running a crew cost money and even if all the jobs are cash you are still going to need to pay your taxes and tithes. What are those you ask? Well it’s the money you spend on Lawyers, Bail bonds agent and the expense of a crew member going to the hospital or jail. Most people who get into the violence professions do not last long because they can not gather up the cash to pay a lawyer right
from the start. So they either sit in jail or go tits up because of the lack of preparation.

Ask around and find the absolute best criminal defense lawyer that you can afford, and put them on retainer, even if this means you do some work and you don’t have anything to show for it right at first. A good lawyer is worth their weight in gold if you get popped for something and are looking at pulling a 5 piece in jail. After you have paid him then talk to him, tell him what you are doing
for a living and instruct him that his job is to keep the majority of legal problems to a minimum.

Next find a bail bonds agent and develop a close personal relationship. Work out a prepaid bond agreement with them. Put the money up front with the agreement that they will post bond when and
where you need it and for any member of your crew. Have their and the lawyers numbers on speed dial plus have them memorized. This saves time in the long run and you will also love the since of security these two simple steps provide. These are just a few of the business cost that come with the territory and you will definitely need them. So now do you see why I am telling you to learn to live off of eighty percent instead of the one hundred percent you were planning too.

Now it is time to talk about work ethic. If you are going into business as a violence professional you had better damn well be professional. This means that you are there to do a job for money. Plain and simple. Not pussy, not drugs, not emotions or feelings, you work for MONEY! Too many guys get caught up in violence by proxy because some split tail wags her snatch under his nose and promises him that she will suck his dick so good that he will have to pull the bed sheet out his ass if he will do this one little favor for her. FUCK THAT! Pussy don’t pay the bills and damn sure don’t put money on your books if you are doing time. Or he gets caught up in drug abuse and cant think straight so he goes off and uses Stupid like Yoda uses the force then goes to the pen for ten. MONEY folks that’s why you’re in business. If you get paid to do a job then do that job to the best
of your ability, do not slack off because all you have to do is go and collect from a guy who owes a guy. Sloppy work equals sloppy results.

I have seen too many crews go down the drain in a short amount of time because of three things. Drugs, Pussy and Money. So do not let this happen to you. If you have a crew of 4 then all money gets split 4 ways even if not all of you are there. If two of you go on a smash and grab or a shoot and loot because the other two can’t make it for some reason, all four of you split the pay or the take. This stops hard feeling right from the start. Now I would never recommend that only
two of you go but shit happens and you need to be prepared for it. This is after you take the initial twenty percent out for taxes and tithes and put that in your war funds(lawyer fees, bail money ect.)

Here is another one of my pet peeves and it better damn sure become yours. Yes I am my brother’s keeper. Why because I need to make sure he isn’t fucking up in his personal life and bringing heat down into mine. If a guy is abusing drugs then it’s time to either get him some help or make him get out. He has become a liability. His actions will cause you nothing but headaches somewhere down the road. No I am not talking about recreational use or getting sped up for a job, but if he is an addict then he is a problem waiting to occur and get your ass thrown into jail. Same with pussy, if one of your guys keeps bringing drama mamas into your business then it’s time for him to choose whither it’s worth the ass beating that is coming from the rest of you for acting like a goddamn teenager. A solid woman behind you can make the world of difference but some old bar snatch that can’t keep her cock hole shut needs to be gone. Plus you need to make sure your lady is up to date on your business. Do not cheat on her, do not use or abuse her in any way she is the one that will have your back if you need it and be the one to come see your ass if you are doing time plus putting money on the books for you to make commissary. Also make sure she is able and willing to discipline another member’s lady if she is the one getting out of line and not keeping her mouth closed.

Now let us discuss professionalism. Pay your bills, don’t draw attention to yourself or your crew. Don’t waste a bunch of money being flashy and needlessly showing off. This is not a long time game and you will get tired of it sooner or later. Put money back to live off of if trouble arises and it will show up after a time. Pay back everyone you owe whether it is money or blood. If someone owes you money or burns you then make sure all debts are settled either way Green or Red it is all a commodity. When you go out don’t let your crew get out of line attention it is bad for business. If your crew can’t be seen to take care of themselves socially then it will reflect on them in business and that means a loss of revenue. Be polite to waitresses and bartenders, tip well this is a great source of intel that comes your way after your crew becomes known. Don’t get into bar fights with bouncers and damn sure don’t get into it with the police. If you get arrested shut your pie hole, be polite and wait to say a damn thing till your lawyer that you have employed shows up. You pay him to talk to the police because he speaks legalese. Most people get convicted because they just don’t know how to shut the fuck up.

Ok now you’re asking where do we go to make money. I always liked robbing dope dealers and pimps, mainly because the cash was there and they don’t go to the police. I also recommend that you talk to your lawyer and have him put the word out to his colleagues that he know someone that can handle business for a price. Also look at doing escort work for dope dealers and for you guys that are in places that marijuana is legal look at doing security work for the pot shops. Be creative there is a whole wide world of pussies out there that don’t have the balls to do what you can do, take advantage of them.

Police Use of Force on the Emotionally Disturbed and Mentally Ill Opinion Piece – Rory Miller

Violence is a visceral thing and people tend to respond to it emotionally. There is always an emotional element to an act of force. Simultaneously, people assume a moral aspect to an act of force. One person is assumed to be the good guy, one assumed to be the bad guy. Combined, these make a powerful gut reaction and people tend to look at a force incident through a moral and emotional lens that is almost completely irrational.

I am going to try to explain and explore some basic but uncomfortable truths in this artitle.

In my opinion and experience, people with mental health issues are not more criminal than those without. They are far more likely to be victimized than to be the bad guy. But they are less predictable, and that increases the fear in other people. In mental illness, the person may see the world differently (e.g. hallucinations) and/or may process the world differently (attributing other people’s motivations to conspiracies or spiritual forces; or seeing personal connections that don’t exist.)

When thinking of justice, motive matters. Force is always tied up with ethics, and every rational person only wants force used on bad people. Using force to stop a murderer or rapist is moral. Rapists are bad. Murderers are bad. People with screwed up brain chemistry aren’t bad. We don’t want force used on people who aren’t bad…

That is the source of the disconnect. This is where the moral aspect of the lens confuses people and influences them to write bad policy and to scream against good decisions. “Rapists and murderers are bad, mentally ill people are not” is a completely irrelevant metric. It is not the people, not the rapists nor the murderers that are bad, not in the moment at least. Rape is bad. Murder is bad. Force is used by police officers to stop behavior. The motivation behind that behavior is irrelevant.

For justice, when the courts and the mental health experts have time to find the facts and discern underlying causes, motivation is a big part of determining right or wrong. When it comes to treatment or rehabilitation*, motivation is critical in changing long-term behavioral patterns. But if someone is swinging a hammer at a baby the person needs to be stopped before he or she finishes the hammer swing and motive doesn’t matter at all

Force is used to stop behavior. Force is used to prevent bad outcomes. Those bad outcomes must be stopped regardless of the motivation behind them. If you are going to take my baby, I will stop you. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to kill my baby to get back for some generational vendetta between our grandfathers or because you think you will get ransom or because you believe my baby has been possessed and must be destroyed to save the world. My choices are the same no matter your motivation.

Screwed-up brain chemistry versus evil intent does not affect my options at all. Motivation is irrelevant and as such, this is a problem completely separated from the concept of “justice.” The only thing that affect my choices are;

how hard you will be to stop

how much time I have to stop

If I have all the time in the world, I will try to talk you down. Doesn’t matter if you are an old enemy or having a psychotic break. If you are in the act of swinging a hammer at the baby, I will shoot you, regardless of your motivation. And if you are small and weak and untrained and unarmed and close enough that I can protect the baby just by pushing you away, I will do that. And if you are big and strong and skilled, I may have to hit you in the back of the head with a brick. None of this is influenced by your emotion or your mental state.

But because we want force tied with justice, many people want a completely different suite of options to use on the mentally ill.

If that hypothetical suite of options, with a lower level of force and ideal outcomes existed, guess what? We’d use them on everybody. Not just the mentally ill. Not just people in altered states. Everybody. Because officers are taught to use the lowest level of force that will safely work.

And since it would be used on everybody, my fear is that advocates would then scream for a special lower level of force to be used when the subject was mentally ill, because they can’t outgrow the idea that force should be tied with motivation. They can’t recognize the irrelevance of their justice filters.

There are some political and practical considerations that aren’t long enough to be separate articles. In the emergency services world, political considerations are important, because they can force changes in policy that severely affect how the work is performed.

Policies that require officers to deal differently with mentally ill or emotionally disturbed persons rather than “regular” bad guys are impractical. Even a trained and experienced clinical psychologist can’t tell the difference between schizophrenia and LSD at a glance; or meth and the manic stage of bi-polar, or suicidal ideation brought on by depressant chemicals versus natural brain chemistry. Expecting a cop to figure it out in a fraction of a second with bad lighting and a huge number of other distractions and concerns (no clinician has to make the diagnosis in busy traffic or with an audience of hundreds, some of whom are potential threats and/or victims) is ludicrous. It is setting an impossible standard that will get more people hurt, not fewer.

As a rule, advocates from the psych professions who say that all it takes is a little training and officers could talk down violent EDPs have never dealt with someone who wasn’t at least stable enough to get to the office. Officers deal with people ranging from the mildly upset to full-blown Excited Delirium; people charging into traffic or chewing up and spitting out their own tongue. Some who are pre-verbal and can’t seem to process words at all.

Physically and verbally, some people in altered mental states are much harder to deal with than criminals. Verbally, some don’t process words at all. Some do not know or remember how to surrender. Many will not recognize an officer tackling them as an attempt to save their lives. Physically, many of the lower level force options fail with EDPs. Pain compliance, a very low level of force frequently fails. In my experience, it is not because they don’t feel the pain, but because they do not understand that the pain is part of a bargain, and the pain stops when the resistance stops. Another low level force option, simply using mass to tire the threat (‘threat’ is the law enforcement euphemism for someone requiring force) often fails. Some people, especially on the excited delirium end of the spectrum, will fight until their heart fails.

This point ties into point 3. High levels of force are rarely required on experienced criminals. An experienced criminal knows how to play the game, knows how to surrender and when to do so. Neurotypical people without extensive criminal histories, if they resist, tend to require more force because they don’t know the rules, they think fighting is like they see on television. The mentally ill and emotionally disturbed, with a combination of naivety and the fact that low levels often fail frequently require extreme levels of force to control. The amount of force necessary to control a person is often inversely proportional to how we would do it if justice or motivation was a factor.

All uses of force look shocking to the uninitiated. In many cases, the force that looks most shocking actually involve very low levels. Using a mass of officers to hold down a single struggling subject is a tactic designed to cause minimum injury. With four officers, you can attempt to have one merely hold each limb until the subject gets tired. A lone officer in a similar situation would likely have to use a baton or a gun. But the social media reaction is often, “Why did it take four officers to beat down one poor, unarmed, mentally disturbed child?” It took four officers because they were trying so hard, at extra risk to themselves, to not injure the threat.

Because the uses of force look shocking and because officers work in a political environment where public outrage fueled by ignorance can change their policies, people can feel good about demanding change that in the end endanger the very lives they intended to protect. In the eighties, after a few incidents of death following the application of choke holds** many agencies banned the use of vascular restraints or reclassified them as deadly force. This removed the one tool most likely to control an EDP with minimal injury. Tasers(tm) are incredibly painful, and they are new and scary and electric and a “weapon” and so people agitate to have them banned or restricted extremely, even though they cause pain with very minimal risk of injury. The only tool that does what a Taser(tm) does, which is give a fairly reliable stop at a distance, is a gun. Wanting to ban Tasers(tm) is effectively saying, “I’m more comfortable with blowing holes in people than in causing five seconds of pain.”

Using force on EDPs causes extreme emotional toll on everyone involved. The officers as well have the concept of justice tied to their need to use force. This is why so often a number of officers and a lower level of force is used even when a higher level of force is justified. And when the subject dies anyway— after a long fight when the officers are trying not to use deadly force— the officers have emotional issues. The public and the victim’s family are extremely upset. Everyone wants something done. Wants a better outcome. Wants their irrelevant instinct for justice satisfied.

To sum up, many of our instinctive filters are irrelevant in an emergency situation that requires force. The “solutions” offered often require officers to have supernatural levels of skill and knowledge that simply don’t exist. If a workable solution with less chance of injury existed, it would be applied universally, not just to special cases. And that has and is being done. The Taser, as one example, is an effective tool that decreases the risk of injury to everyone, when it works.

Public outcry stemming from a naive understanding of force endangers everyone.
*Leaving aside for the moment that metastudies show that involuntary rehabilitation is pretty much a myth.

** Setting aside for now that many of the holds were taught and applied incorrectly, which could and should have been addressed as a training issue instead of a policy issue.

Tripod – Clint Overland

A buddy of mine asked me to fill in for him at the bar that he works at. No biggie, we cover each other whenever there is a need. It’s a part of being Brothers. I should have turned him down. The night is almost over and everything has gone smooth. No fights, no puking, no blood. It’s all good. The guy that’s playing on stage is a midget, long haired little cat, plays a hell of a guitar and has a great blues voice. What I don’t know is that all night several patrons have been buying him shots of Jaeger. I talked to the bartender later and she said he drank almost an entire bottle by himself.

It’s about that time and I am hollering out LAST CALL. When all of the sudden, this little naked long haired midget runs right by me.

Now let me pause here and say I froze in my tracks. There are times when you can’t move because you are not sure what the hell it is that you saw and you are not sure you know how to deal with it. In my mind, I pull up everything I can remember from every Marc MacYoung and Peyton Quinn book I can remember. Nada, nothing. I look into the old memory file inside my head and, nope, not one thing about dealing with drunken naked midgets. Fifteen years of the violence trade and not one idea of how to deal with a naked hairy midget! Have I got my point across? I was frozen in my tracks. Now back to the story.

He runs right up to a table full of middle aged biker mamas and starts gyrating wildly while they start screaming and laughing hysterically. There I come, like some twisted leather clad version of Frankenstein’s monster, “STOP IT! COMMME HERREEEE YOUUU!!! He zips away from me and runs up to a table of Mexicans. Then does the same thing and everyone is applauding and laughing. I get close enough this time to grab his arm, and he starts flailing away trying to twist out of my grasp. At this point, his gigantic penis slaps me across the shin. Second freeze in less than 2 minutes.

Let me try to put this into perspective for you. He would have needed a blood transfusion to get a full blown hard on or he might have passed out from lack of blood to his brain. It was a trip hazard. He could stand on a pool table and play golf with no hands. Crawl across the desert sands on all fours and leave five tracks. Do you have the picture? It is fucking HUGE!! Gary Lawson, in his Far Side Cartoons, drew one of a guy that worked in the Herpetarium for 20 years and all of a sudden had a cumulative case of the HEEBIE JEEBIES! That is exactly how I felt at that moment. GWAAAA get away get away now!!!

He runs off and after I unfreeze, I start chasing him again. Finally I got close enough to grab a handful of his hair with a straight arm, didn’t want that thing to hit me again. I lead him back to the manager’s office where they bring his clothes to him. It was then I learned that this was not the first time it had happened and that his nickname was TRIPOD.

So folks, don’t think that you won’t freeze just because you have dealt with things in the past. Trust me, it can get weirder than you would ever imagine and if you’re in the violence trades you had better damn sure be able to change gears on the run.

This is something I do not even consider to be one of my worst nights at work. In a Dallas dive bar I watched a man get gutted by a broken beer bottle and had to fight my way through a brawl to get on my knees and hold his intestines in while a fight is going on around me and kick people away so he didn’t die. It took almost 15 minutes for the ambulance to show up all the while the cops are breaking up the fight and I sat there just thankful that someone hadn’t decided to bust a chair over my head or slit my throat while my hands were full. This is a reality check folks, life is a precious commodity and if you want to save yours you need to learn to adapt and adjust to whatever comes your way. How you react as well as respond to a situation can very well mean whether you and others live or die. In my opinion one of the first things a person has to learn to do to be a good Conflict Manager is the ability to think while acting. If you can’t do this find another line of work, it’s a simple as that. One of the best lessons I ever learned from twenty seven years of dealing with drunken, chemically enhanced primates is to read situations not from what was actually happening but from what should be happening and wasn’t .

I would position myself where I could view most of the bar, and what I was looking for was people not having fun, individuals that were drinking alone and acting sad or frustrated. For groups backing away from an area, or moving into tactical position. I would watch for people that might be either blocking the flow of traffic or entrance into bathrooms. Go out some night to a local bar and look for what is happening and what disrupts that flow or what should be happening and isn’t. Then go to a nightclub and sit away from everyone and watch as the same things occur but in a different speed. This gives you a position of experience to draw from. Do the same at a mall or in a crowed venue, each situation has many similarities and will flow the same way if you know what to look for and what not to look for. You should then begin to look into yourself to see how you will or could respond to anything that happens. Remember that the first goal of a good conflict manager is not to outfight people but to outthink them. This is the difference between a Professional and an Amateur, a pro wants to end it as easily as possible a fool wants to fight. It took me 10 years of broken noses and missing teeth to get this point driven into my thick head. The next 17 I spent learning not to fight but to win no matter what it took.

Let me give you another example. Middle aged man walks in one night with a hot 20 something year old woman. I recognize him from another bar across town I used to work at, real asshole that likes to make a fool of himself and show everyone how much of a badass he is. But what I know that he doesn’t is that two days before I saw him with his wife at a local Walmart. I waited a bit and sure enough he starts acting the way I knew he was prone too. I walked up and leaned over and told him “I know your wife.” He stopped everything and left a little later without causing a scene. I won and kept the peace by simple outthinking the person without the use of violence.

I teach young people that want to go into the bouncing trade a list of rules that if they follow to the best of their ability they will be able to survive. My number one rule and this one is as sacred as anything you will ever read or learn and all the other rules lead right back to rule number one.

1.NO MATTER WHAT WE GO HOME TONIGHT!

If that means we have to apologize to someone we hate, we apologize. If we have to act as a priest and hear a confession from someone that disgust us, then we listen. If we have to bust someone in the mouth with a chair then that’s what we have to do but we go home tonight. We will take the easiest win that we can get and by win I mean we live. To be a conflict manager doesn’t meant to be the best fighter or martial artist. It means to use the best tool for the job and the ability to adapt is one of the most important.

Secrets of the Elite – Karl Thornton

The Intentional & Unintentional Murderer.

I am an undercover operative as well as trained in, and a trainer of, the physiology and psychology of violence. As well as trained in human behaviour and operational areas of the anti-human trafficking profession.

The information in this article is sensitive yet supplied to give the general public an idea of some of the training that goes into working undercover in the world of special operations personnel, in the area of Anti-Human trafficking. It is only a taste of what is involved. But I hope it sparks interest.

My specialist field is training personnel for high risk environments dealing in child trafficking. I have, and am still involved in intelligence and surveillance operations, as well as undertaking rescue operations globally. I also have the unique opportunity of training other operatives in this specialised field. Not to mention also training law enforcement officers in Anti-Human Trafficking.

Much of an undercover operatives work in our field is unarmed, so there is a high importance on unarmed self-preservation and self-protection skills.

Unarmed, we face the need to deal with individuals whom are armed as well as unarmed, and one of the main things we need to understand is the enemy. So when training in our type of undercover work, we need to be trained in many different areas. One area we need to be highly trained in, is RPD (Rapid Prime Decision) making, we need to minimise information in relation to how we asses a threat as quickly as possible, and how a threat sees us as a confirmed target for assassination or whatever their purpose, or mission is.

This article is about the process of training, where we deal with the possibility of dealing with, or applying lethal force. And part of the RPD making process.

So when we talk about “kill or be killed” in a real life situation, we train operatives in the physical hand to hand combat skills of undercover tactics including dealing with blown surveillance and blown intelligence missions, as well as physical response units where things go wrong. But equally important is training in the psychological side of understanding the possible enemy.

Part of our specialised training, looks at what we call “The Intentional & Unintentional Murderer”.

The following will explain the classifications, not the training process on how we identify the classifications.

First, we will look at what we call, the Intentional Murderer.

The Intentional Murderer, is the hardest to deal with. In this classification we look at individuals like assassins, hitmen, gang members (from criminal syndicates) and those who are intent on murder.

For this article we will use the term attacker.

In the majority of cases here, you won’t see the attacker coming, you will be ambushed and before you know it, its lights out permanently. This includes attacks with knives, firearms, blunt objects or even their bare hands, single and possible multiple attackers. Basically, this classification is taught to our operatives, where you won’t know it is coming, but still train in hand to hand combat for survival. If you can, as you cannot fight off a bullet to the back of the head. However, where there is still that slight opportunity for survival, we train in a system of combative tactics where there is no prior warning. Working on the physiological and psychological aspects of survival under ambush conditions. Even under conditions of what we classify “deceptive engagement” where one deceptive attacker will distract the operative, while his associate completes the physical attack. Basically where you are blindsided.

As this article could go on to become a novel, I am keeping it as brief as I can.

In an operatives’ world, all the OSA (Optimal Situational Awareness) in the world cannot protect you from a professional individual that has intentional murder on his agenda. I am not saying you cannot survive the Intentional Murdered, what I am stating, is even when the likelyhood of survival is next to zero, we still train for survival.

Now let’s look at the Unintentional Murderer.

The Unintentional Murderer is easier, if you can use that word, to train to survive against.

The Unintentional Murderer is classified under 4 subcategories. Remember in the world of special operations personnel, we need to train in OSA, RPD (Rapid Prime Decision) making, as well as other physiological and psychological skills for high risk environments. And keeping in mind, that the vast majority of missions require the operative to go into environments unarmed, with only his training and improvised weapons as his self-preservation and self-protection tools.

So in the area of RPD making and OSA, we teach behaviour analysis, and clusters of behaviour to assess a possible threat. But we also train in what we call “Forced human responses”, Natural defensive responses and deceptive tactics to deal with the Unintentional Murderer.

So why the term Unintentional Murderer?

The 4 subcategories are set to allow RPD making, and to respond. As the unintentional murderer is not intent on killing you. Not to say that isn’t the case all the time, as we can never give a 100% guarantee of an attacker’s intent, or what we call their outcome. However, we still have the 4 classifications to help identify the attacker’s objective, and how we can deal with them, as in this category murder is not considered the intent.

The 4 classifications are:

Evade
Escape
Maim
Gain

Once again, as this is an article and not a book, the following are brief descriptions of the 4 classifications.

Evade.
This classification is based on the attacker that the operative may face, due to interrupting the attackers assignment or objective. Say for example, the operative finds himself in a situation where he has cornered the attacker and the attacker is going to try to evade capture, and is going to physically respond to evade capture. If they are armed, then they may use this weapon to evade capture. There may be a verbal situation where you have a chance to deceptively negotiate to gain control in a tactical manner, to physically defend yourself when possible.

So the reason it is still classified as “Unintentional Murderer”, is that in any physical and violent encounter with a weapon (or even without a weapon) there is still the possibility of you being killed during the process. The attacker (especially if not well trained) may use the weapon, let’s say in this case a knife, to lash out and slash or stab you to evade capture. Their intention may not be to kill, but simply to evade capture. Yet we know that any trauma caused by a knife or any weapon, could lead to death. We need to train the operative to know that, if a weapon is involved, you are most likely going to sustain trauma, train for the worst outcome, and fight for the best outcome.

There are so many examples that I could give, to cover the “Evade” classification, but the above example should give you an idea.

So now we look at the next classification, Escape.

Escape, is similar to evade, except we use this classification to look at if an individual has been captured, and will use whatever they have at their disposal to escape. Once again the individual trying to escape may be armed, and will use whatever weapon they are carrying to escape. If for example it is a knife, they will produce, and or use the knife to escape. Now, in this article I am not going into all the physical techniques and tactics used. I am simply giving you information on how we classify for, RPD making, how we assess intent based on behaviour and what we call clusters of behaviour. And how we use physiological and psychological training to deal with these potential killers. So similar to the evade classification. The individual’s intention may not be to kill, but simply escape. Yet we know that any physical encounter, in these high risk environments, could lead to death.

Now we will look at the classification, Maim.

Maim, is where the operative is faced with an attacker that is trying to warn the individual off. Simular to say, gang violence, or a turf war, where an individual will maim, as a warning to the rival gang member. Keeping in mind that the “Intentional and Unintentional Murderer” also relates to general street situations as well. But we will go into that in another article.

So as an example here. If the operatives cover has been blown, and the attacker has found out who the operative is, they may inflict harm, be it a beating or weapon related attack. For example, a gunshot wound to the leg as a warning and as a deterrent. There is still a possibility of dying from any related trauma. It may be minimal, but where any trauma is caused, there is always the possibility of death. There have been cases where an operative has been slashed as a warning, and still bled out and died. It was meant to be a warning, but turned out to be a fatality. Many of us have heard of what could be seen as basic and superficial wounds, which have led to death. We need to train, that any trauma could be fatal, so your survival on a psychological and physical level needs to be trained to deal with all levels of aggression, violence and the related trauma. Once again simular to the other classifications. The attackers’ intention may not be to kill, but simply inflicting trauma as a warning, could still end in death.

Finally we will look at the classification, Gain.

Gain is basically situations like armed robbery etc. The attacker will utilize what it is they have, be it a weapon or not, to gain what it is they require. So in an operatives’ world for example, where we deal in anti-child trafficking. The operative may have gained some valuable Intel, or in the case of a rescue operation, where say a child is involved. The attacker may use what is necessary to regain their asset (the child that makes them money). Or regain the Intel the operative has. So the attacker will use the weapon to achieve the result they require. Once again, they may use that weapon as a tool to gain what they need and once again the attackers’ intention may not be to kill, but simply inflicting trauma while regaining their asset. Can once again, still end in a fatality.

The above are a few examples. However, it gives you a brief understanding, of how we train our operatives to make decisions in high risk environments, and with minimal time to make those decisions. How they need to be trained in specific physiological and psychological areas to achieve their objectives.

Combative hand to hand combat skills are no less important. Our operatives, as am I, are trained in unarmed hand to hand combat, as well as the use of weapons from sharp edge weapons, firearms through to improvised weapons. Yet the world of covert operations and undercover work, is a world where the physical is only one aspect. There is much to learn about human behaviour, but not just what we call normal human behaviour. But learning about criminal intent, sociopathic and psychopathic behaviour, as well as instinctive and learnt behaviours. We need to train to be deceptive and yet objective.

I hope this article has sparked interest in the world of undercover operations in the area of anti-child trafficking…

….In the next issue, I will delve into another Secret of the Elite.

“Covertly engaging the enemy.” Looking at manipulating the proxemic push and forcing proxemic pull. Learning to deceptively manipulate behaviour.