Troubling Transitions
Any personal safety expert will tell you that you must have a gameplan before trouble happens. When you enter an area, note where the exit is. Note who is standing where. Look for anything unusual. And so on.
When you approach your vehicle, look for anyone standing near it. Does everything look the way you left it? Have your keys ready in your hand as you approach your car. Et cetera.
In Chongdo, we refer to these scenarios as “situations.” As you read this, you are in a situation yourself: either sitting at a computer or reading a printed version of this essay. Situations are obvious: driving in your car, sleeping in a bed, buying milk, walking the dog, folding clothes. The experts are right to say that in any situation, you should be aware of your surroundings.
However, few experts ever discuss transitions from one situation to another. Take the two examples above: being in a new area, and approaching your car. What about the seventy-five seconds it takes you between exiting the area and stepping up to your car? This is a transition, and provides a significant gray area that many attackers are quick to exploit.
Consider one popular tactic for mugging: an attacker lurks outside the vestibule of an apartment building. This keeps him away from the lone camera in the lobby, and provides an excellent psychological opening. The victim parks his car nearby, looks around carefully and exits (because parking is a situation). The victim watches carefully as he walks down the street, noticing anything hiding in the bushes, and anyone standing between buildings (a darkened street is another situation). He sees his front door, pulls out his keys, and is struck in the back of the head as he inserts his key into the vestibule door. He was nailed during the transition from the “walking down the dark street” situation to the “being inside the building” situation.
Another tactic for an attack: the victim hurries down a street, and she carefully keeps her distance from others. This is an easy situation to recognize, and she’s wary about people who pass closely by her. But she turns a corner and finds herself brutally shoved down and her purse gone. As she transitioned around the corner, she didn’t realize that this counts as a distraction. She had not anticipated that merely rounding the corner allows her to get too close to an attacker.
In the methodology known as the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act), the problem with transitions falls under observe and orient: when transitioning from one situation to another, you need to re-observe everything and then re-orient yourself to what you see. When you exit from a building into the bright light, it takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust; similarly, when you walk into a building from the outside, you might need a moment or two to see in any detail. These are transitions in which you’re effectively blind. You can’t orient if you don’t observe.
Similarly, you may be ready on foot, and ready in your car...but not many people consider the risk of entering or exiting a car as a transition. One real attacker in the UK used the following approach: he would wait for a woman to park her car. She opened the car door, began to step out, and then he would dash forward and throw his weight into the car door. This effectively crushed her ankle, causing her to fall to the ground. He utilized this transition as a distraction. The victim couldn’t “decide” if she couldn’t re-orient in time.
On your next errand, take note of your momentary transitions throughout the course of twenty minutes. As you do, you will easily recognize numerous opportunities where you were potentially open for an attack. Ironically, though, by merely recognizing those opportunities, you have made it much more difficult for that would-be attacker. This is the simple goal of Situational Awareness.