Surveillance - Part 4: Improving Situational Awareness (A)

There is a scene in the movie The Bourne Identity where actor Matt Damon reels off a bunch of detailed facts about people sitting in a restaurant to the female lead actress ("our waitress is left handed", "the guy at the bar weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself etc). In another restaurant movie scene, actor Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes provides incredibly detailed insights into Dr Watson's fiance based on the tiniest of clues ("The lady insists"). Real life is not the movies and this level of observation and deduction is purely the stuff of script writers. Actively watching your environment, looking for things out of the normal and scouting for potential threats is, however, a vital life skill which will arguably do more for protecting you and your loved ones than any firearm or martial art. It will certainly help you spot surveillance and the "heat" around the corner.

Many one off pieces are written on Situational Awareness. They generally attempt to provide a definition, give a scenario or two, describe Cooper's Color Codes and then move swiftly on to discuss other aspects of self defense such as getting off the X and what to say to the police. Even the few books which purport to be centered on the topic focus mainly on things like the predatory mindset, the application of observation skills and having action plans. The missing sauce from all of them is how to actually teach Situational Awareness to a newbie and how we might all go about getting better at it over time.

Perhaps one day we will write our own book and companion training manual but, in the meantime, this article and the next few will have to suffice. Up front we should say that some people cannot be helped. Those who cruise through life "thumb up bum and mind in neutral," clueless to their surroundings when out on the street, are simply a crime statistic or successful SWAT no knock warrant waiting to happen. As in most things, you have to be motivated to improve at something. At the other end of the spectrum there are those who have a huge head start. They either have natural, God given talent, or (more likely) grew up in dangerous, criminal or war torn environments and thereby attended the school of hard knocks. Some people are already switched on, always paying attention and know when fellow humans pose a threat.

Observation

Perception

Description

Memory

Human Behavior

a. Observation.

i. If there is not an old Chinese proverb along the lines of "many look but only a few see", there should be. Humans are highly visually oriented and have evolved to spot the first sign that the sabre tooth tiger is about to pounce. But the modern, comfortable and superficially safe world is saturated with distractions and many people are oblivious to the dangers which lurk just beneath the surface. When faced with a busy scene, you must force yourself to actively scan for things which warrant attention. What helps here is to have a baseline of normalcy: the more you know what your neighborhood looks like on any particular day of the week, the quicker you will notice that something is different and out of place. By neighborhood we mean anywhere you are, be it at home, at work, at the grocery store or a brand new city on a business trip. A good practice for spending time in a new location is to deliberately get around by foot and transport to absorb its vibe, cultural norms and pace. Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Some of this can be achieved in advance by map study, reading up on travel guides and talking to those with local experience. But nothing beats putting your own finger on the pulse first hand. The investment will be worth it.

ii. Any busy scene, however, can overwhelm the best of us and it can be easy to be sucked in by some bright shiny thing which attracts our attention while missing other important signals about what is truly going on. Tunnel vision can kill and discipline with your eyes is important. When scanning, most people let their eyes function like a radar system, sweeping from left to right. For most, though, they will absorb more information by looking from near to far and back again before moving their eyes left to right in increments. Getting your eyes to do this takes practice but it is very effective and can become second nature. Another system, for close observation of a big landscape (think of the hunter looking for elk across mountainsides) is called "gridding". Break the task up into sections, thoroughly scanning each section before moving on to the next. This is slow and laborious but has its place when you are not under immediate threat and have the luxury of patient study.

iii. There are many aids available to practice these techniques. Think of the "Spot the Difference" type puzzles. While these are excellent for starting children on their path to good Situational Awareness skills, they are equally valid for adults. Sian Keogh has a great series of such books of varying degrees of difficulty, as do the Brain Games Picture Puzzles. Youngsters might be better suited to the "I Spy" books, at least at first. Comparing photographs to find differences or trying to find obscure objects in a picture all flex the visual cortex and build muscle memory for efficient scanning. You can induce useful stress by limiting the time you give yourself for each challenge and keeping a track of the results: when you start becoming faster, you can be sure that your observation skills are improving. There are even apps for Apple and Android which bring the same puzzles to your phone or tablet.

iv. Additional useful training stress can be found in the card game "Spot It" by Zygomatic and it is very well suited for families. Basically, player cards are compared to a community card and whoever first spots the object which their card shares with it wins that card. Every card only shares one object with every other card. And the player who collects the most cards once all the community cards are gone, wins. A good fun way for kids to learn to look quickly at multiple objects and process information. But adults will also find themselves experimenting with strategies to remember which objects are on their card and quickly compare them to the objects on the community card when it is turned over. Find a strategy which works for you and embrace it for when you are out on the street.

v. At night or in other low light situations, eyes works a bit differently (due to the differences between the cones and rods in the retina). Some pointers include: slow down your rate of scanning; do not look directly at an object but rather slightly off to the side (you will better perceive it); do not stare at an object as your brain will play tricks on you; if your night vision has fully developed, protect it by avoiding bright lights or at least keeping one eye closed until the darkness has returned; and rest your eyes frequently.

vi. There are more advanced methods of observation beyond the scope of this article which provide hints at further study. The world of animal or human tracking is all about noticing things which are out of place in the environment. Developing skills as an accomplished tracker or, at least, leveraging the techniques they use has much cross over to Situational Awareness. "Attention Deconcentration" was a technique developed by Soviet scientists in the 1980s as part of the training programs for operators in complex, extreme and uncertain conditions. It was subsequently adopted by many in the free diving community as a way to enhance awareness deep underwater. A form of hyper-vigilance, it allows the subject to take in and process a lot of information in parallel, the whole scene in one go, as it were. Definitely an interesting concept.

b. Perception.

i. We actually see with our brains, not our eyes. The brain is very good at adjusting visual input to let us see what it thinks we should see. In something as simple as the color temperature shift between a daylight white LED bulb (5500K) to a warm white incandescent bulb (2000K), the brain corrects the image of a blank piece of paper so that it is perceived as pure white. We only notice the difference (one tinted blue, one tinted yellow) if they are side by side or there is a rapid change from one to the other.

ii. The same can be true for objects and events: as any detective knows, if you interview 5 different witnesses to a high stress criminal event, you will end up with 5 different accounts of what happened with some of them being quite contradictory. The mind likes to play tricks on us all the time and it will fill in the blanks or ignore data when it suits. The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons delves into these illusions in depth and should be read as part of your training. Suffice to say that for our purposes, we need to recognize the risk of mistaken perception and strive to be as objective as possible in our observation of likely surveillance indicators.

iii. The flip side to this is that we must not succumb to the temptation to rationalize away or ignore warning signs. "Don't die of embarrassment" is a good axiom by which to live: if your gut is telling you things are not right, do not let etiquette, rules of politeness or fear of what other people will think prevent you from taking defensive action. Gavin De Becker's book the Gift of Fear is an essential read on this and should also be part of your homework.

c. Description.

i. It is not enough to simply spot something weird or out of place in your neighborhood: you must also be able to describe it - first to yourself and then, possibly, to others. Defending against surveillance almost always requires cataloging multiple incidents to build up an overall picture of what you are up against. Seeing someone once on your street corner might be noteworthy but recognizing the same person, despite changes of clothes and/or locations over the course of your week could send your spidey senses into overdrive. Ditto vehicle colors, models and license plates. It can be even more powerful when you can share those descriptions with other trusted members of your team to alert them and look for common themes. Being able to provide succinct, accurate and evocative descriptions for your own database and to share with others is important. It can be critical when you urgently need to pass on such information to a companion (when it looks like you may be imminently attacked) or to the authorities in an emergency.

ii. Protocols are helpful here. For people, follow the A-J guide (Age, Build, Clothing, Distinguishing Marks, Elevation/Height, Face, Gait, Hair, International/Ethnicity, Just like/Resembles). For vehicles: make and model; shape (SUV, saloon, station wagon, sports etc); color; license plate; and any identifying features (antennas, window decals, damage, tints, accessories, advertising etc). A written checklist can be worthwhile, especially if you use it enough times to commit to memory.

iii. There are various "Photofit" and "Identikit" games, apps and software programs commercially available which aid in categorizing face types and features. They help develop a real proficiency in describing people.

iv. There is a saying in the expert driving world that there is no such thing as advanced driving, only advanced observation. One of the techniques taught for driving safely at high speed is to provide a running commentary of features, hazards and route, first for the instructor and then as a natural habit for yourself. Pithy descriptions are essential: they need to be short and precise to allow you to look far enough out and keep refreshing the approaching view. Again, looking near and far, near and far helps and is much better than sweeping left to right. Practiced properly it should allow you to routinely go faster than the speed limit without getting a ticket: you are looking far enough ahead to spot traps and slowing down whenever you cannot see sufficiently ahead. Not that we condone or encourage speeding.

v. In all of the above it is also important to be able to describe the location of an object of interest within the scene. This amounts to giving direction, distance and any distinguishing features. For direction, the clock face method works well: 12 o'clock being the direction in which you are oriented or moving and then using the numerals to describe the angle from that 12 o'clock position. 6 o'clock is directly behind you (hence the military saying "check your six" when making sure the enemy is not trailing), 3 o'clock to your right at 90 degrees and 9 o'clock to your left at 90 degrees. Anywhere in between those cardinal points will be at one of the other numerals on the clock face. Add in an estimated distance plus any terrain features and you will allow anyone else with you to quickly lock on to the same point of interest. For instance "Ten o'clock, 300 yards next to the gate in the barbed wire fence - dark blue Ford SUV with tinted windows - that is the same vehicle we saw at the gas station 2 hours ago, isn't it?"

Let us pause there. We will tackle Memory, Human Behavior and Deduction in the next articles along with some practical exercises which tie all of this together. Until then, keep paying increasing attention to the world around you. You never know what you might see.