Cutting Edge Training

There's courage involved if you want
to become truth.  There is a broken

open place in a lover.  Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group?  What's the
use of old and frozen thought?  I want

a howling hurt.  This is not a treasury
where gold is stored;  this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that 
can heat up and change.  Lukewarm

won't do.  Half-hearted holding-back,
well-enough, getting-by?  Not here.

                                            —Rumi

How does anything that Rumi wrote apply to tactics, combatives, the brutal struggle to overcome assault and to accomplish the mission you have laid out for yourself, even at the cost of your own life?  Perhaps you might wish to read it again from a different perspective.

To find the tactical truth, or the combatives truth, or the shooting truth—any warrior truth—you must have courage to question your cherished beliefs about your tactics and combatives skills, as well as the limits to your capabilities you have accepted as truth.  Without insight into why the tactics you choose function, how they developed and what problem they were intended to solve, you have no idea of the context of that tactic.  The combative system you dutifully work out in—sweating and twisting and thumping and being thrown and striking and pressing triggers by rote, all without understanding the underlying principles that will actually permit you to employ it in combat—will fail you unless you have the courage to question and validate everything you do within the context of pain, blood, death, loss, defeat, and victory, for that is the only context in which combatives should be considered.

Are you playing a sport and thinking it is applicable to combat?

• Training scars are created that may be fatal:  Jujitsu players and wrestlers routinely leave their groins wide open while “fighting” in training—there are many in the profession at arms who think putting someone in the “guard” in a real life and death fight is a good idea.
• Aikido is a highly instructional method of learning balance during movement and a stylized response to someone striking at you with a sword, but is universally void of practicality for almost everyone in real life physical conflict.  Actual Aikido techniques applied to real life combatives problems universally fail all but the most accomplished practitioners.
• Shooters playing shooting games use “barricades” by resting their weapon on the edge of the object, with most of their body in full view of the paper target, never thinking about a "two-way range."

Are you willing to break open your accepted tactical and technical truths until hurts?  There must be a willingness to examine every minute detail of the system you love, holding it up against the contextually-correct situation it will be tested in during combat.

          “The event can in some ways be considered as an abrupt and brutal audit at a moment’s notice, (where) everything
           that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem, and every weakness comes rushing to the forefront…(The)
           brutal audit uncovers unforeseen weakness in resilience—the capability to recover.  Resilient action that enhances
           recovery from setback is built out of a broad repertoire of action and experience, the ability to recombine 
           fragments of past experience into novel responses, emotional control…” 
                                                                                                      --(Pat Lagadec, “Preventing Chaos in a Crisis”).

Combat is the most brutal audit there is for anyone’s combatives training.  The “broken open place in a lover” Rumi writes of is that searing, haunting drivenness to find that which is not truth, which will not survive the reality of one or more men attempting to take your life without politely and patiently waiting until you are ready or are finished with your series of complicated moves.  It takes bravery to question the very foundation of your beliefs in what works and what does not.  As a trainer, people prevail —or they get hurt and killed—based on what I share with their instructors.  As an instructor, you are ultimately responsible for every word, move, tactic, and skill you teach.  As a warrior, you live or die based on what you accept from your instructors, and consequently, so do other people because of your actions or lack of them, your effectiveness or lack thereof.  Choose well, for your life and the lives of others rest upon that decision.

How can it be that any trainer or instructor does not have the sharp compassion in their heart to break down everything, working from the fight backward, deconstructing the needs of the warrior to ensure he or she can actually apply it in an unforgiving environment where people suffer horrible injuries and die?  Teaching a skill, technique, or tactic because you like it or you have a vested interest in it, that looks good on the mat or on the range but is impossible for your warriors to perform in that fierce crucible of conflict is immoral at best, and not worthy of the trust others have in you.  As an instructor, you may have ninja quality reflexes and Greek god-like skills and attributes.  However, there must be compassion in the decision of what survival and combative skills to teach for those of us who are mere mortals, those humans in the uniform with all of the limitations and weaknesses and, yes, strength of heart and mind and the ability to overcome all odds that God put into us if only we would use it?

I cannot fight like you, because you are unique.  So, too, you cannot fight like me because my approach to fighting is necessarily and universally individual.  We have different abilities, experiences, schemas, strength, flexibility, mental and intellectual capability, emotional stability under threat, injury and health levels, and training.  When I try to fight like you, I fail.  This is something one discovers only through the pain and humiliation of failing—if allowed to survive the event by the victor.  While you may be exceptional in all areas of combatives, there must be compassion for those of us who are “average.”  For while most people consider themselves above average, it just ain’t so.  There are far more average people in uniform than exceptional or above average, and for every person who is above average, there is one or more who is below average and struggling just to stay in the game.

While training need not—and should not—be “dumbed down,” it must be achievable by each person you teach.  And within that sharp compassion for those you train, it takes courage to find that place inside your precious beliefs to question the content of your lesson plan.  What you teach may work for you because you are stronger than most people—but that cannot work for me.  It may well be that you are extraordinarily calm under pressure—the “Ice Man” incarnate—but that, too, cannot work for me in the midst of that weird adrenaline haze and crystalline clarity of combat.  It may work for you because you love it and you train incessantly, fascinated by the complexity and the special feeling it gives you to know how to counter the counter of the counter to the first technique, but that cannot work for me because, well, I’m not you, and I may not be that fascinated and it may be that I would love to know and even equal your skill level but I don’t train that often, if at all, even when you nag at me for my own good that I need to practice.

In this deconstruction and microscopic examination of your combatives training system, is there any frozen or old thinking you still accept as truth?  Wisdom is often old, because what is wise is ageless in its applicability to any age—every generation either continues to prove its validity or is forced to relearn its lessons.  Frozen thinking, however, results when we either do not think to question our dogma because “we have always done it this way,” or because it is easier to just accept what the latest expert says rather than to take the responsibility to think on our own, or we are lazy because we are comfortable and no longer feel the need to explore and grow in our skills and knowledge base.  You may be frozen in your thinking if think that:

• Martial arts is “fighting” and prepares you to win in a fight.
• MMA and fighting in the octagon is preparation for combat on the street and suitable as training for anyone in uniform.
• Shooting games are preparation for winning gunfights.
• You teach a “technique” that takes more than two-tenths of a second to complete or has more than two steps to accomplish, because anything costing more time or requiring more movements in a fight depends upon the other guy’s cooperation to be successful—and not many people are interested in giving you that opportunity.
• You teach 45, 145, or 1,145 techniques in your defensive tactics or CQC program, and think any technique will work in combat (within that overwhelming swirl of fear and rage and frustration and dread and excitement) without 10,000 to 25,000 conscious and contextually-correct repetitions of each technique that must be recalled instantly given the fluid and dangerous nature of the fight and exactly executed in-time, on-time to effective.
• Teaching the law or ROE is something lawyers do, and is not necessary for a survival skills instructor to be a Subject Matter Expert.   Why do my students need to know the context of the application of force?
• Defensive tactics problems can be solved exclusively through DT solutions, that firearms problems can only be resolved through firearms solutions, that tactics are for SWAT or the classroom or the field, and not part of the mat or range.

The first time a cop I knew was murdered I was pierced by a “howling hurt.”  That howling hurt came again the first time a police officer I had trained was murdered.  There’s a place inside of me where those howling hurts live still—as well as the other howling hurts suffered over the years of murders and medical retirements and discharges of good, honest heroes—and I touch that terrible place each time I stand in front of a class realizing that the warriors sitting or standing before me may actually listen, believe, and use what I teach in an attempt to keep their lives and in the defense of other peoples’ lives.  So teaching is a place to offer everything and hold nothing back, and to realize there is no silver bullet, that all the glitters is not gold, and every assumption about how to keep myself and others alive is just that, and must be examined and turned inside-out, then examined again and again.

Because change is life.  Life is growth, and any system upon which I depend for my safety and my family’s, and that I teach other people who will depend upon it for their life and their family’s, must grow and change and improve as we understand more deeply what constitutes effective training and efficient action during chaos and blood and pain.  Science is helping us learn what is valid, and helping to disprove what is myth.  A growing body of experience, born of pain and effort gives us still more information.  Do we have the fire in our bellies and the commitment to excellence to make the effort to grow and to change and to challenge those cherished beliefs we all hold about “my” system and the way “it should be done”?

Fighting isn’t about gold—it is about copper and steel and lead and bone and sinew and guts.  It is about purifying the lessons, distilling them down to the underlying principles that are easy to grasp, universal in their application, and functional when needed, especially when you are hurt, tired, and very scared and need them to work.

Half-hearted holding-back, well-enough getting-by?  When I read this piece by Rumi I see in the wisdom of his words the truth that I believe all trainers and instructors of combatives—and the warriors who employ those methods—must take to heart.  When lives are on the line, when any person's rights are in question, when any person trusts what we teach, how can we someday stand before God without having had stood in the white-hot furnace of self-critique and contextual relevance when not doing so fills caskets of those willing to risk their lives in service to others? Lukewarm in the lessons and skills being taught, learned, and employed just won’t do.  Not here.

“Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”   Sun Tzu

Any type of fighting carries a risk of injury and death—people have fallen after being simply shoved backward, struck their heads, and died.  So you prepare:  you lift weights, you work your cardio, you keep your weight down, you go to the range on your own time, and you train with other motivated cops in defensive tactics, you attend training paid for on your own dime, and are tactically aware in the street.  Despite your own individual skill development, physical conditioning, and aptitude for dealing with the violence you are faced with, nothing can be taken for granted in any combatives environment.  You may be the toughest guy on the block, but there is always someone on any given day who is more prepared, more capable, and more willing to engage in violence than you—thinking otherwise is foolhardy.  Whether it is hand to hand, hand to knife, or a gunfight, it is vital to make use of every advantage, and not assume that your high level of personal abilities, your size and strength, or any other skill factor is going to mean you will automatically win the fight.

Going head-to-head, muscle-to-muscle is often effective when you are dealing with an unprepared, weaker, smaller offender.  It is also the method most fraught with risk, and is unsophisticated in a situation where a sophisticated fighting strategy disadvantaging the suspect combined with your on-going pre-conflict preparations is the best strategy to win the fight.  Please note that “sophisticated” is not synonymous with “complex” or “complicated.”  Complexity in any fight or tactical response is a sure recipe for failure in the real world of combatives (see the article “Abandon Techniques All Ye Who Train Combatives” on this blog).

For purposes of discussion, assume you have contacted a subject who is on the verge of assaulting you.  He is equal in every way to you physically, intellectually, as well as in his skill development and physical conditioning.  Without considering the “luck factor” that is present in every combatives environment (which may also include the “Murphy-factor”—anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible time), your chance of making it through this fight is no better than 50/50.  How do you change these odds in this fight to your favor?

Change your orientation to solving combatives problems from fighting to fighting smart.  When one is equal to or less than his opponent in physical capabilities and skill, the only available strategy must incorporate deliberately affecting the ability of the suspect to act upon current reality.  All conflict is about time.  It is about taking time away from the Threat and using the time you have efficiently to deprive him of even more time.  Time is a luxury permitting you to understand the current reality of your relative positions and physical actions.  Ultimately, the purpose of every fight is to control his perception of time, hence his ability to make effective decisions leading to relevant physical actions.  This is done most simply by multitasking the subject so that he cannot catch up with the action and make those precious decisions he needs so desperately in order to destroy you.

Multitasking is the concurrent performance of multiple tasks.  We all want to believe we can do it, and we want to believe that we can do it well.  However, if we get honest with ourselves, we really don’t do it very well at all.  Even non-critical tasks such as simultaneously watching TV, reading, and talking to our spouse will demonstrate the fallacy of any type of multitasking capabilities.  As an experiment, try it to see how it works for you (hint:  pay attention to your spouse and forget those other activities if you want to survive this little experiment with any degree of marital harmony).  Similarly, being multitasked by a Threat during combatives can be fatal.  It is a very good strategy to deliberately employ multitasking against the suspect in every physical conflict.  It should be one of your primary tactics for success.

Attentional Load

To understand multitasking, research is proving that our ability to focus our attention, or “attentional focus” is limited.  Attention is a basic component of thinking, cognition, and of orienting to relevant change.  To note something in our environment, to have any chance of taking that information into consideration, we must pay some level of attention to it.  Attentional focus is defined as, “The ability to focus attention on cues in the environment that are relevant to the task in hand” (Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science & Medicine).  When someone says, “The knife came out of nowhere,” or, “I had no warning that he was going to attack me,” the hard reality is that the victim’s brain either did not receive the numerous pieces of information signaling the impending threat, or did not interpret the numerous clues because the victim’s attentional focus was elsewhere.  Whether it is because the victim is ignorant of the threatening behavioral cues, or deliberately or innocently distracted, his or her attention was elsewhere, leaving that person unable to apprehend the changes in the behavior, positioning, and/or demeanor of the person about to assault them.

Our ability to focus or concentrate on anything can be compared to a very bright, narrow, very focused, spotlight in a very dark room filled with dozens of pieces of a puzzle, each constantly moving independently of the others, changing position, or modifying its shape and color.  As the spotlight of our conscious mind is placed on a particular puzzle piece in that black room, we are able to utilize our attention to gain information on the specific puzzle piece illuminated by narrow bright beam of light, considering changes in status of that puzzle piece solely based on what we are seeing at that moment.  All of the changes occurring in the other puzzle pieces in that dark room are unavailable to us until we focus on each individually.  The problem is we can only ascertain the status of a particular piece when we are focused directly on it.

The moment the spotlight moves to another puzzle piece, we no longer are able to monitor what is happening to the last puzzle piece.  Our ability to focus on multiple puzzle pieces is serial rather than global; that is, we must move the spotlight of attention from one piece to another to another to another before moving back to the first in order to monitor what all of the pieces are doing, how they’re changing, and what all of this means to us in the real world of violence, pain, and death.  Attentional focus on multiple areas or problems, therefore, is a cycling of attention where one’s full attention cannot rest upon any single piece of the puzzle long enough to ponder its significance.  This attentional cycling permits only snap-shots of information without the ability to deeply consider its relational meaning.  Significance is fundamental to relevance, and determining relevance is a function of orientation.  This means that unless a particular puzzle piece among many is not immediately and obviously significant, it is unlikely that you will be able to orient to its meaning, and its significant information and relevance will be lost to you. It may also be that you are focusing your spotlight on a particular puzzle piece that is changing its status in a very important and meaningful manner while your thoughts are elsewhere, perhaps thinking about that puzzle piece you saw moments or minutes ago, or even something completely unrelated to solving the puzzle at all.  Your eyes may be looking directly at the puzzle piece but your focus of attention is elsewhere, making it impossible to “orient” to the important information that is right in front of your eyes.  We have all experienced looking directly at a person speaking to us and not hearing a word he or she said because our mind was “a million miles away.”

A limiting factor of the ability to focus on threatening suspect behavioral cues is the amount of information you can work with at any one time.  There is a maximum capacity limiting the information you can process or focus upon at any moment in time.  As the demands to your attentional focus increase, your ability to focus on multiple tasks will rapidly become limited as your attentional load is maxed out.  Irrelevant information is filtered out as the attentional load increases, permitting attentional focus on whatever has captured your attention.  The greater the “task load,” or for our purposes, as your perception of personal threat increases, so, too, does the narrowing and filtering of available information available for your attention.

• Tunnel vision is the result of an intense perception of threat where the attentional (or in this case, perceptual) load of the central focus is primary, and the “irrelevant” information is excluded as being unnecessary to survival at this moment. 
• Auditory exclusion occurs when the attentional load in attempting to resolve the perceived threat is so great that visual processing of environmental cues takes precedence and what the subject is saying, or even that anything is being said (or yelled or screamed) at all is not available to be processed.

As more information is received and considered, older information is lost from your working memory, or “cognitive load” (“The total amount of mental activity imposed on working memory at any instance of time.” http://dwb4.unl.edu/Diss/Cooper/UNSW.htm).  As you experience a deluge of more and more data through the senses, your ability to understand, categorize, and utilize the info is quickly overwhelmed.  Once overwhelmed, your mental filtering systems begins shutting down data (perceptual) streams to attempt to manage the situation, and give you the ability to make sense of the data to produce useful information.  Being increasingly pressured by time and the perception of threat, the more and more overwhelmed your cognitive processes will be, and the less effective your ability to discern and synthesize useful information from irrelevant data.  Injuries, overwhelming frustration, and fatigue begin to compound, increasing the sense of being overwhelmed. At some point, the attempt to sort out the valuable from the worthless stops, and the individual is incapable of problem-solving his way out of the fight.

Negatively Multitask the Threat

In a physical conflict, the least sophisticated method of fighting is head-to-head, muscle-to-muscle attritional conflict—“I’ll be able to inflict more injury and disable you before you can inflict injury and disable me.”  Inherent within the “victory through attrition” is universal injury; even the victor is bloody and walks away with a limp.

To avoid this high-risk method of combatives, it makes better sense to fight the Threat on both the physical and the mental planes.  Negatively multitask him.  To "negatively multitask a suspect, you intentionally give him two or more tasks, each of which is threatening, and each of which demands his full attention.  If he stops one of your efforts, he pays dearly at failing to stop the other(s).  Negatively mutlitask him to get into his head and confuse his decision-cycles by misdirecting his attentional focus.  Creating confusion provides openings and opportunities to exploit that are less risk to you while creating more confusion and injury for him.  Events begin moving too fast for him to react and understand—he just won’t be able to put everything that is happening into context in time.

Negatively multitasking the suspect is achieved by physical or psychological means.  It requires you to divert his attention from what he wants to focus upon, and deliberately engage his attention on multiple tasks, none of which he can afford to solely focus upon.  It may be necessary to focus his attention on an irrelevant factor leading to his sufficiently being distracted so that he cannot orient to your actual intent, preparations, or movement.  This requires you to fight smart rather than through attrition.  For example, the following examples compare commonly trained attritional solutions with a possible solution that negatively multitasks the Threat.

WEAPON RETENTION:

• Attritional Solution: Pin your weapon into your holster with your gun-hand and strike the suspect repeatedly with your free hand or elbow, head strikes, knee strikes, bite, put your free hand’s fingers into his eyes, etc.  If possible, take him to the ground, landing on him to ensure additional disability so it does not turn into a groundfight.  When he is sufficiently injured and incapable of continuing to fight, remove his hand from your handgun and force him into handcuffs.
• Negatively Multitasking Solution:  Pin your weapon into your holster with your gun-hand.  Strike, hit, bite, etc.  When he begins to focus on defending against your strikes, he will necessarily lessen his focus on your weapon, and his grip will relax to a degree.  Move to small targets:  grab a finger as hard and pry it suddenly and viciously back while maintaining pressure on the grip of the weapon into your body.  If he is not immune to pain because he’s mentally ill, diabetic, or under the influence, he will likely focus on you twisting and pulling on his broken finger.  Transition back to your strikes with the other hand.  Continue twisting the finger until you judge he no longer wants to disarm you.  Peel his hand from your weapon and shove him away.  Note:  a Parole Officer in Pennsylvania was forced to break four fingers, one at a time, to protect his weapon against a psychotic offender who first attempted to kill the officer by hitting him in the head with an ax.  Once the four fingers were broken, the suspect could no longer physically grip the weapon and was eventually taken into custody.

SUSPECT DRAWS A HANDGUN FROM TWO OR THREE STEPS AWAY:

• Attritional Solution:  You draw your weapon in response, depending upon your vest and volume of fire to save your life as he fires as quickly as he can at you.
• Negatively Multitasking Solution:  The moment you perceive he is drawing a weapon, you move hard and suddenly at an angle toward his flank.  As you’re moving you draw your own handgun.  By now you are just a few feet from his flank, punching your handgun at him, firing as soon as it interrupts your eye-target line.  You continue to move to his back as he frantically attempts to target you through the bullets punching through him and the muzzle blast thumping his body.  Your movement and fire continues as he spins in pursuit of you, and finally corkscrews, falling to the ground.

ATTEMPTING TO EMPLOY AN ARM TAKEDOWN TO PUT A RESISTING SUBJECT ON THE GROUND:

• Attritional Solution:  This subject needs to be on the ground right now!  You have a hold of his elbow, pin it to your body, and attempt a takedown.  However, he’s a prepared offender and skilled enough to prevent the takedown, you both begin moving in circles.  As you attempt harder and harder to put him down, the action speeds up.  At this point, you’re a bit frustrated and getting scared he might get loose, and that would not be a good thing for you with this guy.  You use brute force to muscle him to the ground, shoving him quickly and with as much strength as you can.
• Negatively Multitasking Solution:  This subject needs to be on the ground right now!  You have a hold of his elbow, pin it to your body, and attempt a takedown.  However, he’s a prepared offender and skilled enough to prevent the takedown, you both begin moving in circles.  As soon as you orient to this fact,  you quickly slap at his upper inner thigh with one hand, striking sharply just under his groin before locking your hand back to his arm.  His body reacts defensively to the slap as if it actually struck his groin and you hear a quick grunt of anticipated pain.  This puts him off-balance, enabling you to complete the takedown without extraordinary effort.

HE ATTEMPTS TO DRAW A HANDGUN FROM HIS WAISTBAND WITHIN TOUCHING DISTANCE FROM YOU:

• Attritional Solution:  Upon orienting to his grabbing and pulling something out of his waistband, you focus on his hand, grabbing his wrist as you attempt to prevent him from being able to draw the weapon.  You begin to strike him with your forehead, free elbow and hand, and attempt to prevent him from getting that weapon out of his waistband until he is sufficiently debilitated, permitting you to safely remove it, and then throw him to the ground.
• Negatively Multitasking Solution:  Upon orienting to his grabbing and pulling something out of his waistband, you focus on his hand, and suddenly reach out with your closest hand to press his hand and wrist as well as the handgun against his body as you surge to his flank, wrapping his head with your free hand in a slapping motion.  Pulling his head sharply backward against your shoulder, with your fingers abruptly dig into his face.  With your hand pressing on his and his weapon at the waistband, your fingers, while still pressing the handgun to his belly, reach for and press the trigger.  The weapon fires as he is still worried about being off-balance and your fingers digging into his face.  The shock of the contact shot to his groin/pelvic/femoral area permits you to take him to the ground (if he isn’t already falling).

YOU'RE MAKING ENTRY INTO A HOUSE:

• Attritional Solution:  You and your team line up, give the announcement, and after a sufficient time for his response, your breacher rams the door successfully.  Your team flows through the door, taking possession of the living room and access points to the whole house.
• Negatively Multitasking Solution:  You and your team line up, give the announcement, and after a sufficient time for his response, your team leader radios the initiation command, signaling the window to the room where the suspect is expected to be ported and flash-banged while the back door is simultaneously breached and held.  Upon hearing the report of the flash-bang, the front door is then breached successfully, and your team flows through the door, taking possession of the living room and access points to the whole house.

As can be seen in each of the above solutions, every fighting problem can be solved in multiple ways.*  How you deal with the specific combatives event involves your orientation to the solving this particular problem.  In each of the “negatively multitasking” solutions, you took advantage of a momentary distraction, purposefully redirecting his attention from his main effort and intention in order to capitalize on his inability to track and react to every counter of yours.  Once his attentional focus is diverted, he is unable to keep up with the events as you are directing them.  He just doesn’t have time to focus on all of the information he is receiving, and becomes confused and less effective.  That decrease in efficiency and effectiveness translates into an immediate advantage in the ability to process information, orienting more closely to the current physical reality of the conflict, and the resultant control of the direction of the fight.

It is through the multitasking of the Threat that you can defeat a superior athlete with superior skills.  It is said that “Deception is the art of the master.”  If you are someone who cannot expect your attributes (your size, strength, skills, endurance, etc.) to permit you to quickly win through an attritional solution in every instance, learn to negatively multitask the Threat to negate his advantages over you.  If you are someone who has superior attributes, never discount the role of luck in a fight.  Increase your odds of winning by learning to negatively multitask the Threat so that he is confused and overwhelmed first in his mind, and then physically.  It is better to learn it and not need it, than to need it and not to have learned it.

If being successful in a combatives situation is the result of controlling the perception of time, negatively multitasking the subject decreases the time available to him.  The net effect is that you have more time to make better decisions in the fight.  Time is the greatest luxury on a battlefield.  Treat yourself luxuriously in your next fight—negatively multitask him—and you may very likely limit the amount of bleeding and limping you will do after the fight.

_______________________________________

*    Note:  None of these “solutions” are offered as "trained techniques.”  They are a result of the “Universal Rules and Principles of Defense”© within the “Effective Combatives Problem-Solving”© system of “Integrated Force Combatives”© available only through Cutting Edge Training, LLC.

Another in a series of never-ending shootings of officers on traffic stops just landed in my e-mail box.  In this one, gratefully, the officer was uninjured--not because of what the officer did, but because of what the suspect did not do.  A brief review of this particular incident, and the catalyst for this article, is the following:

• The officer, after having made a traffic stop, walks up and contacts the driver at the driver's window.
• The driver, in this case, engages the officer with a lie, to which the officer bluntly responds, "No.  I was right behind.  I saw you..." (slowing his perception-reaction time to anything the suspect might do). 
  
• The officer asks how much the driver’s had to drink, whereby the driver petulantly answers, “Plenty.” 
  
• As the officer says, "Plenty, huh?" the suspect produces a handgun (“out of nowhere”).  

This video is, thankfully, different than most of its kind—the suspect is A) too drunk to realize he has not chambered a round; B) is incompetent; or, C) both.  The loud “click” is the officer not being murdered from the muzzle 12 inches away from his face.

The officer’s reaction to the muzzle in his face and the very loud click (which is the second loudest sound in the world from that side of the muzzle) is similar to every officer who has survived this type of event:

• Hands go up to his face as his body crouches in a startle reaction.
• Expletive uttered.
• Change of balance to the rear (directly in-line with the trajectory of the round). 
• Amazement he isn’t dead.
• Realization that he is not finished with the gunfight and must take action occurs when the suspect fires a round at him.
• Response with deadly force. 

It is also similar to every officer who is unexpectedly shot and injured or murdered:  hands go up at the sudden movement of a handgun shoved at the officer, the expletive if there is time, and the change of balance in response to the fright and muzzle blast.

It's been common knowledge for decades that traffic stops are extremely dangerous.  That this type of shooting unfolds as it does is typical.  This is because we now have so many in-car video systems and recordings of these terrible, violent events.   We know the process and what happens during this shootings--officers walk up to contact the driver, and are shot before they can react.  Every officer, regardless of his age, fitness, tactical awareness, experience, or any other factor any officer believes exempts him from the limits of being in a human body and the attentional capabilities it posseses, is at the mercy of the driver upon approach for approximately one second of the contact.  And if the suspect decides to put a gun through the window and shoot the officer, it cannot be stopped because there just isn't time to observe the weapon, orient to the fact that a muzzle is now pointing at the officer, and to decide to do anything while acting in time to make a difference.  Typically, the suspect gets off two or more shots before the officer reacts with anything other than an instinctive flinch. 

This repeats itself over and over and over, the same way, year in and year out.  And still, trainers in academies keep teaching their recruits to walk up on unknown suspects in situations that commonly cause officers to be murdered.

So, as trained, cops keep walking up, and continue getting shot and murdered.  Even when an officer is hit in the vest, we see the suspect minimally get 2 rounds off before the officer reacts with anything other than shock and surprise.  The end result of every one of these is that the officer is either shot at and hit, or shot at and missed through no counter-assault action on the part of the officer.  If the officer walks up on an occupied vehicle, the suspect either does not shoot or he does—there is nothing the officer can do that changes this variable:  it is a roll of the dice.

To emphasize this, a State Trooper teaching a traffic stop class at a state academy put his recruits through a simunition/FX cartridge scenario.  The recruits were being graded on their approach and positioning as well as their contacting the driver appropriately.  Each recruit knew there was a gun involved, and knew the subject was going to attempt to shoot the recruit-officer contacting him.  Regardless of the efforts to properly position themselves, 100% of the recruits were shot.  Now, the purpose of this exercise (other than wrongly training the recruits to purposely walk up on a man-with-a-gun) was not, as I thought it was going to be, a caution against walking up on a traffic stop to contact the driver.  Instead, the Trooper, straight-faced and intense, stated, “That’s the risk you take being a cop.” 

Um…what?  So we teach officers to walk into a no-win situation; a crap shoot that could mean they are shot and murdered every time they walk up on a traffic stop?  Yup. Some well-known "tactics" instructors advocate that as officers approach the violator's vehicle, that they touch the brake light cover in order to have the officer's finger prints on the suspect vehicle for identification purposes should the officer be shot and killed!  Really?

BOTTOM LINE:  The walk-up (a.k.a. “I-have-no-idea-who-I’m-stopping-and-I-cannot protect-myself-so-please-don’t-shoot-me”) traffic stop presents an indefensible tactical problem for which the only safe option is to stop using it.  It is a violation of every officer safety principle there is, and is solely performed because “That’s how we’ve always done it.”  HOW MANY MORE MURDERED COPS DO WE HAVE TO BURY BEFORE WE STOP THE INSANITY?

There is no defense to a driver or passenger shooting the officer from either a driver’s side approach, or a passenger side approach.  It is time to get consistent with the tactical principles we teach to officers for every other citizen contact other than traffic stops:  Make the subject come to you. 

The "Call-back Traffic Stop"

Call the driver back to the side of the road with their documents, and make it a “Ped stop.”  Conduct business where the suspect is not in his environment where his hands and what is within reach cannot be seen by the officer until it is too late.  This gives the officer the advantage of noting the subject's compliance and apparent armed status prior to gaining proximity where time-distance factors mitigate against any effective response.

The usual objections to this much safer practice?

• “I’ll get complaints.”  Umm, not so much.  In fact, people will do what you tell them to do, and the courts have permitted getting the driver out of vehicles for years.  Officers who are practicing the call-back T-stop for two decades report no increase in the number of complaints related to their conduct of a traffic stop.
• “I won’t get my ‘plain-view’ arrests.”  Umm, again, not so much.  Nothing stops an officer from conducting the interview, issuing the cite, and then following the subject back to the car to get a look inside at anything that might be in plain view.  The question might be asked of these officers, “If you are up at the driver’s window or front passenger window and are busy looking around the interior of the vehicle, then who is monitoring the driver’s/passengers’ hands?”  We know that humans can focus on one task at a time, and the visual focal area is very small.  Attentional loads being what they are, if the officer is looking at the interior for drugs or guns, he’s not looking at the suspect’s hands, and (let’s say it together) “Hands kill.”
• “He could attack me just as he steps out of the driver’s door.”  Yes.  He could.  And he is 25+ feet away.  And the officer is back at his vehicle, with much more time to react, with a greater likelihood of being missed at that distance rather than 6-18 inches.  The suspect is also in the officer’s primary field of vision, where the officer’s attentional focus is.  As Clint Smith says, "Distance is time, time is marksmanship, and marksmanship is hits.")  Micro-threat cues should be alerting the officer’s spidey-senses that something is wrong simply by the way the subject is exiting the car, giving the officer a jump on his perception-reaction time.  This is a good time to focus on the driver’s hands (although EVERYONE first focuses on the subject’s face) because…well, you know why focusing on the subject's hands is a very good idea. 
• “He could physically assault me at the side of the road.”  Yes.  He could.  So could every person you contacted on your last shift.  Physical assault, like deadly assault, does not exist in a vacuum.  Violence is a process.©  Assaults (punches and kicks and being tackled), guns, and knives do not “come out of nowhere.”  There are threat cues in every assault.  And having this person walk up to you gives you an opportunity to assess their compliance and glean something of their intent.  
• “I’m not going to have 80-year old grandmas and soccer moms get out of their car.”  Good.  Don’t.  It is always your choice to intentionally violate the safety principles IF you believe it is in your best interest and furthers your mission.  Think about this:  if you feel it is safe to approach because you don’t want to get grandma or mom out of the vehicle in the rain, take the conscious risk and approach the vehicle.  However, a routine unconscious violation of safe Universal Tactical Principles© doctrine (approaching an unknown, unsearched, and unidentified subject, and dealing with him in his environment) is an invitation to be assaulted and/or murdered, like that of the officer in the video, and every video of a police officer being shot on a traffic stop. 

There is simply no excuse for continuing to conduct the unsafe and dangerous traditional "walk-up-please-don't-shoot-me traffic stop."  It is time to stop this insanity of doing the same thing the same way and expecting a different result.  Just because you spent 30 years walking up on cars and weren’t shot, only means that you didn’t walk up on someone who wanted to shoot you without warning.  If you had, he would have shot at you in spite of anything you did or didn’t do.  That is not “safe” or “tactical.”  That’s luck, and luck should not be considered to be a skill set.

“…the hero and the coward live just a decision away from the other.”

A recent discussion of fear caused me to think about the part that “fear” plays in the warrior’s response to the need to act in dangerous circumstances, where that danger is life threatening and a real possibility. 

The discussion started with a bashing of fear citing how debilitating and horrible having fear is to the human existence.  I believe that fear, in and of itself, is neutral…it’s really neither good nor bad.  It just is.  Fear is a part of being human.  It is our response to fear—our decisions and resulting behavior—that is the real issue.  In fact, there are times when fear is good and justifies threatening and even deadly responses (e.g., pointing a gun at someone whose behavior has placed others in imminent fear.  This creates a fear response from the antagonist—he stops his threatening behavior because he fears he is going to be shot, and injured or killed).  So fear has a place that can be healthy when it motivates people to behave appropriately.

Fear as a motivator is the mechanism by which many people achieve great riches, or why they get up and go to work every day even though they would rather sit in the sun and relax, or why they behave in socially acceptable ways.  Fear can be a co-motivator with healthy pride in achievement, causing warriors to perfect and maintain their skills, as well as to seek out new and different ideas, methods, and knowledge.  Warriors understand that no matter how prepared they are at this moment, they cannot prepare for everything, but they can be better prepared to meet the unexpected through a greater and more diverse skill and knowledge base.

Fear is a problem when we experience a degree or level of fear that paralyzes and causes us to do nothing when we should be doing something (even running is sometimes the appropriate response to fear).  Paralyzing fear is created when we let our imagination to overwhelm us, focusing on “what if,” and fixating on our mortal vulnerabilities.  When the mind has not been disciplined through difficult, arduous training, the mind can spin helplessly out of control, and the paralysis is complete unless something greater shocks us out of our stupor.

Fear can become debilitating when we deny it for too long.  The fear may be so great that we believe we cannot face it, so we consciously stuff it down.  Eventually, however, the fear will make itself known through negative psychological or physical manifestations such as mental or physical paralysis, numbness, and disease.

If we really get down to it, fear seldom occurs in a vacuum.  It is generally the companion of something more sinister (despair, anger, hopelessness, danger etc.).  So really fear is just the messenger of something that is already present or something that is coming.  Healthy fear does not generally happen by accident.  Perhaps the old adage of “Don’t shoot the messenger” is appropriate here.  Whether you see fear as a good or bad thing, as a stand-alone plague or a tag-along to a much bigger issue, fear will be present in a warrior’s life.  It is in our response or lack of response to this universal emotion that truly tests and forges who we are.

As Gavin DeBecker suggests, “fear is a gift,” and not a curse.  I don’t believe that fear is a “monster.”  It is what we do in the presence of fear that is telling about the individual.  In the presence of fear, our character is revealed.  Having been a police officer, I will tell you that there were times when I was definitely afraid, but I chose to do what needed to be done.  And in life there are still times when I am afraid, but I step forward anyway, through that fear. 

Am I schizophrenic because I feel the fear yet continue my life in a positive way?  Should I kid myself, deny that I feel fear, and live in pseudo-humility asserting all the while that I am not really scared at all?  I say NO to both.  I think that the hero and the coward live just a decision away from the other.  I think that the myth of the never-nervous, always calm, going forth and conquering warrior is just that…a fantasy.  Lt. Col. David Hackworth (US Army, deceased) once said, “Being brave on a battlefield is not letting anyone know you’re afraid.”  Fearlessness before and during battle is simply a perception by others, not something that is experienced except by the foolish or mentally ill…it is not reality.

I believe we should recognize our human fear and accept its capacity to motivate or cripple us.  As a warrior and trainer of warriors, I offer this to our students:  ”feel the fear and do what is required of you.”  Courage is not about the absence of fear, but what you do in the presence of fear, while under the influence of fear.  We train to respond in times of danger.  Imagine what your response is going to be—believe it, taste it, smell it—and then work your skills and tactics until your response is automatic.

The bottom line is that each of us must accept the fact that as a human, you and I will die one day—maybe today.  Also accept the fact that, as a warrior, you and I invite the possibility of death because we choose to run to the sound of gunfire.  Because it doesn’t matter that I am going to die.  What matters is that I die as a warrior if that is what God demands of me, stepping into my fear and not hiding from it.  If I can accept that, I need never fear being afraid—I will simply be whatever I am despite my state of fear.