THIS IS THE KEY TO PERMANENT AWARENESS.

What happens is that you have created mental ‘multi-tasking’ in that you can now function on a conscious level e.g. hold conversations with people, but underneath your radar is at work, giving you a full 360 degrees all the time. The habit of awareness has been formed and you never lose it. This is how you stay in Condition Yellow so that changes are noticed,

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people evaluated and filed away, the result being you are no longer ‘Wide Asleep.’

Applied Elsewhere

If the practise works for driving it will work for the other parts of our lives where risk from others is associated e.g. the street, work, home, or during ‘transitions’ i.e. from one to the other. In Chapter 7 on Mobile Security I have expanded on ‘commentary’ work for it’s original role in driver alertness, but you should also do it wherever you are. Essentially it is a way of detaching yourself from your body and ‘watching’ what you are doing from a distance -

‘Be an Observer of Your Own Actions’ - If you can do this you will

expand your view of your environment and take more data in. The threats are out there, most people just do not ‘see’ them, even when they look straight at them.

Expectation

I touched on this in Chapter 1 and will attempt to explain how expectation differs from awareness. It may first help to separate the way we use the words ‘alert’ and ‘aware.’ Quite often when I and others use the word aware, we actually mean alert, the Chambers Concise definition being - “watchful, wide awake, a condition of readiness or expectancy.” Aware on

the other hand reads - “wary, informed, conscious.” When I use the word ‘aware’ I mean it to be a compilation of the whole of the meanings given for the two words. Every description used above is so relevant to our safety. The word expectancy cropped up in the meaning of alert and as we know expectancy is that state we are in when we expect something to happen. In summer of 1997 a young Detective Constable, posing as a businessman was knifed by a man suspected of being part of a gang preying on Rolex watch wearers in central London. DC Shaid Ali, 31 was attacked when he approached a man thought to be acting suspiciously. After the attack the assailant jumped into a Mercedes. DC Ali suffered minor injuries. The attack has been linked to a series of similar incidents across the capital involving so called ‘Rolex raiders’.

If you look at the circumstances or what we know of them it is clear that alertness or awareness was not absent as the constable was suspicious of the man. However, he was still knifed despite being aware and I would submit the problem was one of expectation. This is, that the mind has not been programmed with the possibility that today I am going to be attacked with a knife. It is asking

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a bit much that each morning we get up and say “today will be the day I will be attacked”, but without being paranoid if you do not ‘inculcate’ into your subconscious the ‘possibility’ that an attack is likely then when it happens and despite your awareness you will have the old problem of “this shouldn’t be happening to me” - Aware But Not Alert!

The result, if the person survives the incident is a continuing loss of confidence, fear of situations and inability to function properly. This is more pronounced when the incident takes place in unlikely circumstances and usually these are where you feel most secure and have absolutely no expectation of attack being a possibili- ty. I was once attacked in the toilets of an office block where I once worked by some youths I challenged one of whom produced a knife.

The incident was fundamental to forc- ing me to develop the correct attitude to the inherent risks in life and in par- ticular to the very considerable risks which obtain in situations we least expect them to happen e.g. the office, the home, in a restaurant etc etc. The most unlikely the circumstance the more horrific seems the event and the more shocked the victims are.

Worse at Home!

Two police officers, a man and wife with many years of service had their lives changed when the husband attempted to arrest a suspected burglar dressed in black in his garden one night. What ensued was horrific with the suspect chewing off a part of the husbands ear and spitting it out. When his wife came to her husbands aid she was repeatedly battered against the fence. Her husband described how he was unable to subdue or hurt his assailant and how the man tried to gouge his eyes out. He also described how the he got increasingly desperate as the shock and pain of the attack took effect. A neighbour came to the rescue, hitting the man with a baseball bat which enabled him to be cuffed.

Since the incident the couple have, very sadly, been suffering from severe ‘post traumatic’ stress. I am in no position to judge such incidents, but I would submit that if the incident had happened on duty, in many ways the post incident consequences may have been less. When we willingly choose to put ourselves on the front line either as policemen, bodyguards or doormen there is an acceptance of risk, but when it happens to us in the security of our own home and off duty, adjusting to it is almost impossible.

‘Expectation’ is coming to terms with the fact that violence can and will happen and that it is likely to be at the most unexpected time and place. Expectation is raising your ‘Alert State’ when you reach your house or car. Expectation is ‘switching on when you enter toilets or the lift at work. No attack will be a surprise to me. I may not like it and it may frighten me to the core, but it will not come as any surprise, wherever I happen to be. If it does, I know that I am very likely to lose the day. Expectation is knowing that “when you feel most secure you are most at risk”. It is a trite statement, but it is also a truism. The reason you are at risk is because when you feel secure you switch off and go into condition white. When you are in this state, probably because you feel secure in familiar surroundings the shock and surprise is worse, resulting in a substantially longer recovery time, if at all.

An article in the magazine Police Review talked about officers safety. It related stories about officers who thought they were safe in a situation or ‘rushed’ into a situation without prior evaluation. Many officers argument is “they haven’t time to think before they have to act”.

- The point was made that they have to make time!

The cry really was about inadequate training. There is a greater need to train officers how to ASSESS correctly a potential situation. In the past personal safety training for police officers in the UK has meant teaching officers techniques of Restraining prisoners and Defending themselves against attack. They are now being taught such things as not to dismiss a passive, compliant individual as non-threatening.

Only 2 categories of risk --

HIGH RISK & UNKNOWN RISK .

Unless you are psychic or can read his mind there is no such thing as LOW RISK. “The threat a person presents increases as the person gets closer to

you”. NB 100 yards in 15 seconds would be too slow for the school team,

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Whilst unlikely, for some people this is what the day may hold!

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but that same person still covers 10 yards in 1.5 seconds.”

An attack out of the blue!

Two police officers were cut when approaching a car with 2 suspects in. “The attack came out of the blue - we

felt powerless and very vulnerable”.

Neither officer thought to handcuff the suspects because they seemed calm and passive at first. The point here is that if two experienced offi- cers who are actually approaching suspects with, one would assume, a degree of awareness, can be taken by surprise then the answer lies not simply in awareness, but expectation.

It took me many years to arrive at everything I have written about in the first two chapters. It took me many years to realise my awareness was spasmodic and telling myself to stay aware was only ever a transient solution. Once I had developed a ‘system’ to stay aware I then realised there were many things which assailed it and made the process difficult e.g.- ‘attentional state, excessive stimuli, familiarity of surroundings, daily routine, etc, that I had to deal with. But the most important , final part of the ‘jigsaw’ was

‘expectation’.

It is human nature not to dwell on the negative. To be constantly thinking each day you leave the house, you may not return, have a car crash, be attacked, fall ill, your business go bust would soon send you to the nut house. In a balanced way though we must all try to develop some way of raising our ’reality level’ if I can call it that. Reality

level is expectation. Think of a Fireman. Long periods of sheer boredom, punctuated with short periods of unthinking response to what might turn out to be sheer terror. If each time the bell sounded in the station house every fireman had to sit down and try to recover from the shock of it and come to terms with what they might face before they plucked up

Unfortunately, he’ll be too busy thinking it shouldn’t be happening to him to actually do anything about it - not that he probably could anyway. Lock the doors!

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courage to go, the world would be smoking ashes.

Fireman cope because they have one underlying thought process to which they have had to come to terms with - EXPECTATION. What they expect during the day is for the bell to go off and everything else is a filler. Policeman should, but many I submit don’t work hard at the mental process of inculcating expectation. It is evident in the nature of police injuries that this is the case, when we contrast the many, but generally minor injuries policemen suffer in ‘public order’ disputes as against the few, but serious injuries where the violence has been gratuitous and often - unexpected!! So if policemen, whose very job inherently contains opportuni- ties on a daily basis for conflict and violence can be caught unawares, it is even worse for the average man and woman. This is the cause of the shock, surprise and the classic freeze.