awareness

Crate Club: A lesson to all about staring at your cell phone

On October 31, 2017, an Islamist terrorist drove a rented pickup truck into cyclists and runners for about one mile of the Hudson River Park’s bike path in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The vehicle ramming attack killed eight people and injured eleven others. After crashing the truck into a school bus, the driver exited, apparently wielding two guns (later found to be a paintball gun and a pellet gun). He was shot in the abdomen by a policeman and arrested.

How often have you been walking in a city street looking into your phone or distracted? How prepared do you feel for unforeseen events or even a terrorist attack like this one in NYC?

We take our gear seriously at the Crate Club, and if you’d like to learn more about products like this you can sign up to get tactical and survival gear that’s hand-picked by Special Ops veterans and industry experts, delivered to your door monthly.

Learn More & Sign Up

*Featured photo courtesy of Pixabay

Personal Protection: How to be your own bodyguard

As current threats develop and old threats evolve, everyday people are subject to complex issues in which the overwhelming majority are unaware of and/or unprepared to face. Not everyone can afford private protective services, so what can they do to better protect themselves and become their own bodyguard? In this article, we’ll discuss increasing your own survivability and that of those you love and protect.

When considering personal protection, we can most appropriately break down the dynamics therein by priority and by type. For the purpose of this article, we will briefly discuss awareness, planning, skills, fitness and tools with many links included to other articles that are more in-depth on the topic.

AWARENESS

Situational awareness comes first, and with good reason. Without awareness you will always be forced to react to the situation, putting you at a disadvantage. To have the appropriate level of situational awareness, you must first be personally aware and by that, I mean to be aware of your condition. We are all human so put the ego aside along with the mentality that ‘it will never happen to me’ or ‘I will never/would never be in that situation.’ Human factors affect us all, regardless of training or experience. You need to understand if you are hungry, tired, multitasking or focused entirely on one task, etc. how do these factors contribute to your situational awareness? Additionally, how to you personally handle stress? Only once you are fully aware of yourself can you be truly aware of your environment.

Constantly consider the environment and its inhabitants. Consider what is or should be common for that type of place at that time. Look for anomalies and assess for the possibility of a threat. You cannot mitigate a risk or a threat that you have not anticipated. Stay alert, stay cautious, and remember “action beats reaction,” it is just that simple. See the article below for the mindset of a protective services professional:

Task, Threat, & Environment: The Mindset of a Protective Services Professional

While a study shows the majority of attacks on protected individuals have and do occur in or near vehicles, the civilian statistics are indicative of a similar attack methodology – the movement to your vehicle or while in your vehicle is a high point of complacency for most and this is exploited by criminals. The article linked below has more information on vehicle security:

Vehicle Security Tips: How to Stay Off the ‘X’

PLANNING

A lot of bad things happen to people when traveling abroad. You are in a new place, you do not have a baseline of the environment and you do not know where your support systems are, etc. However, there are many ways to prepare yourself against those issues which simply take a bit aforethought and planning ahead of time. The article linked below is full of knowledge for traveling abroad:

Planning a trip? Security Tips for Traveling Abroad.

The FBI recently published statistics showing home burglaries occur every 13 seconds in America, as many as 2,000,000 homes are burglarized each year and 30 percent of all burglaries are through an unlocked window or door. The simple fixes go a long way and there is hardly ever a need to apply a ‘Fort Knox’ mentality when it comes to residential security. The article linked below if full of information on the subject:

General Residential Security Guidelines & Recommendations

Unfortunately, the risk of mass shooting has drastically increased and most of these occur in the workplace. Most alarmingly, shootings accounted for 78 percent of all workplace homicides—83 percent of which occurred within the private sector. While the same principles of personal protection that apply in your daily life apply in the workplace, many of those are restricted in application as you are not the deciding factor. The article linked below offers guidance to those decisions and policymakers as well as information for yourself in optimizing your survival in workplace emergencies:

Active Shooter Preparedness – Optimize Your Options to Optimize Your Survival

SKILLS

To quote the eloquent Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Well, he’s right. All of the awareness and planning in the world may not prevent the random indiscriminate criminal from targeting you. What do you if you find yourself in that situation? You will likely have to rely on your hard skills to flee, fight or defend from the issue. There is no one size fits all approach, but the article below lends guidance to some of the avenues you may take to improving your hard skills:

Hard Skills: ‘Better to have and not need than need and not have…’

FITNESS

To play off the above quote, no plan survives past that first punch in the face, but every time I’ve been punched in the face fitness was a factor. The point to stress here is even among the many who take the steps necessary to increase their survivability, there are some who overlook a step in that process. Fitness is a factor is every physical task you will ever do, and when we consider fighting for your life or that of another…you decide for yourself if you should invest your time and effort into physical fitness. The article below has excellent guidance for those who struggle to find the time or place to workout, especially those who are on the road or constantly on the job:

Fitness for Protective Services: Tips & Techniques For Staying Fit While On The Job

TOOLS

Lastly, let’s discuss some tools. As far as your everyday carry (EDC) list goes, there are a few things should be a constant, and a few more that are a priority. Something to stress whenever ‘tools’ are discussed is training – if you decide to carry anything, ensure you are well trained in that regard and depending on the tool ensure you are certified or licensed to carry it. We will be discussing these categorically as a firearm is not the best edc item for every person out there, for example, so we’ll discuss the kind of item as something to assist in self-defense.

EDC Flashlights for Security and Self Defense

A constant to your EDC kit should be communications gear, meaning at least a cell phone, as well as an on-body medical kit. Plain and simple: medical emergencies are the most common type of life-threatening issues the normal person will face. As a high-risk operator from an African country once told me, ‘Do not get so focused on the lion across the valley that you miss the snake at your feet.” We highly recommend something fundamentally similar to our IPAK.

Priority items would then be those which assist in self-defense, physically. This could be anything from a high-lumen, hard-cased flashlight, knife, or pepper spray or even a firearm. That is for you to decide as an individual, based on your task, threat and environment.

EDC: Gear That Is Worth The Weight

Joseph M. LaSorsa, CPP® is a senior partner managing and conducting: Protective Operations Training Courses, Executive Protection & Bodyguard Services, Risk Management Consultations & Seminars, Workplace Violence Prevention Seminars & Intervention Services, Security Consultations & Seminars, Private Investigations and Technical Surveillance Counter-Measures with LaSorsa & Associates – an International Protection, Investigations & Consulting Firm.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephmlasorsa

Tyler Grey, Former Delta Operator, Walks you through Home Security

Tyler Grey (former Army Delta Operator) has started a new series called Greyman. In this series you will gain new knowledge, new tools, and new skills to be able to better protect yourself, your family and your friends. In this first episode, Tyler hooks up with a professional in lock picking and other physical security areas. They expose the vulnerabilities of most homes in America and give guidance on what to do to better secure your home.

*Featured image courtesy of Pixabay

The Cooper color code and threat assessment

The Cooper color code system of awareness gives us a baseline to identify the psychological condition of a person dealing with a life threatening situation. Developed by Lt. Col Jeff Cooper, Marine Corps retired, the system includes four stages or colors that denote a person’s mental state during a dangerous event. The sequence of these colors or levels of awareness are White, Yellow, Orange, and Red. Each one represents a process and can enable a positive or negative outcome depending on its application to the circumstances.

White is a state that no one wants to find themselves in when a potentially lethal situation occurs. A person who’s brain is in the White is completely unaware of their surroundings and has zero concern for personal safety. Should a person in the White be engaged by a threat, they will likely crumple or become victimized because by that standard it will be far too late to prepare or react. We as individuals should always strive to stay out of this mentality, it is the definition of complacency and irresponsibility in terms of threatening conditions.

Yellow is by far the most productive of mentalities, an individual who values self-reliance and personal safety will constantly being sitting here psychologically. In the Yellow stage, the individual is aware and alert while consistently evaluating their surroundings and assessing the situation they are in. This does not mean they are maintaining a constant state of paranoia but they have good head on their shoulders and are maintaining a state of alert readiness. They are proactively searching for the danger and if done correctly can be made a routine mental exercise.

Orange or the mental state of it means a threat has been identified and a solution is being formed to fit the life threatening situation. Orange while still a positive within the context of a present threat has a serious draw back that the Yellow mentality does not. When in the Orange, or having identified the threat, the individual goes into a state of tunnel vision where they focus on the threat in order to reach a decision about what needs to happen in regards to the situation at hand. This tunnel vision completely obscures any possible secondary or tertiary threats from the individual’s mind. In that lies its shortcoming; it would also be insanely exhausting to attempt an Orange state of awareness at all times and would closely mirror the symptoms of post traumatic stress.

Red is go mode and it is the stage where the plan has been formed, the decision has been made, and the individual is executing it. This state is a level of hyper primal brain activity as the individual is well within the flight or fight response. It is in this realm that the chemical cocktail of adrenaline is in full swing and individuals carry out incredible feats despite extraordinary circumstances. Red is where human beings carry out lethal action.

Another stage was added later, Black, which has been defined by a complete shut down of the brain due to essentially a system overload via an excessively elevated heart rate or mental stimulus. Basically a person in the Black cannot function in any fashion and would be physically represented by the fetal position.

I hope that you can take this system and learn a bit more about the human condition, specifically the human response to a lethal situation in relation to levels of psychological awareness. If you’d like to learn more about psychology and violence, I highly recommend you pick up Dave Grossman’s works, On Killing and On Combat. If you would like to learn more about situational awareness and being prepared for conflict, I suggest you look into Left of Bang by Patrick Horne and Jason Riley.

Photo courtesy of the author

*Originally published on SOFREP

22 Every Day: Check your six

We’ve heard the numbers. On average, 22 Veterans end their own lives every day. This is an abhorrent reality, one in which 22 of our nation’s defenders feel their situations are so untenable that they see no other way out every day. It’s a sad reality, one that many people much smarter than I are working hard to change. There are small steps that we Veterans down here at the ground level can take that might end up saving a life.

Leaving the service is tough. I left halfway through our fifth deployment to the sandbox. Just a few days later I was being handed my DD214 while simultaneously hearing my guys had been hit hard, and that there were wounded coming home. One day I woke up in the sandbox, a few days later I’m in my Corvette with a couple hundred bucks and more freedom than I knew what to do with. The next year of my life was brutal and I owe my brother a great deal of thanks for giving me a place to figure out how I was supposed to fit into this weird world where booping someone with a rifle barrel was somehow not ok.

I missed that band of brothers fiercely. Not having that support network and camaraderie that had defined my life for years was an albatross around my neck. It has taken me a long time to figure out that it is not only possible to re-create some aspect of that, it is essential. I’ve been blessed with a tremendously supportive wife but I’ve watched a brother-in-arms struggle with the opposite. I’ve had the luck to live very near to not one but two of my Ranger buddies. I’ve seen what the lack of that proximity has done to others. Developing a new support network is imperative. My old squad leader liked to say “you can’t cram for the swim test.” You can’t wait until you’re at the bottom of the barrel to try and put together a cohesive group for mutual aid. Get it started when things are going well and it will serve you when things aren’t.

22 Every Day: Check your six — Fair use, photo by Jerry Fallstrom/Orlando Sentinel

If you’re lucky enough to live near people you served with, that’s a big help. If not, consider looking up other people from your unit from generations before or after yours. Think about joining the VFW, American Legion or IAVA. Staying close to other Veterans can be a major boon. Otherwise, if your situation allows, consider volunteer firefighting, flight school, competitive shooting clubs or some other aspect of your new life that can have ties back to your old life.

Try to be an active part of your Veteran community. Work to keep in touch with those you served with so you can keep tabs on each other. Check your six and I bet you’ll see people there willing to support you. Just as importantly, you may see someone there who needs your help. That network you created might not end up being there for your benefit, it may end up saving someone else’s life.