When I used to consult for large organizations to advise their employees how to stay out of harm's way in dangerous places, the primary concern was travel to unstable countries. Today, similar worries extend to places like shopping malls, yet some of the advice from my corporate engagement was equally welcome by a concerned shopper with fears springing from the mall shooting in Kenya. Here are three of my top ten tips that apply to the situation we all face today.
Rule 1: Always go in the direction opposite trouble rather than toward it.
Rationale: People are curious creatures. Our natural inclination on hearing some commotion is to approach its source to see what is going on. For personal security, this can be a deadly mistake. Bodyguards learn to stay focused on their principal, no matter what noise or distractions are taking place. They train themselves to make protection their overriding priority, to move the protectee safely away. Similarly, the noise of gunfire should not magnetize but repel you. While the naive cannot help but be drawn to the commotion, making themselves targets in the process, smart survivors react by getting out of harm's way.
Rule 2: Trust your instincts about danger. Looking silly beats getting hurt.
Rationale: Humans process some clues faster subliminally than via time-consuming application of logic. A story in Gift of Fear, for example, recounts how a woman who was carjacked outside an ATM experienced a feeling of unease while waiting for her boyfriend to withdraw his cash as he left the engine running and the car unlocked. Only after debriefing did the woman realize that what had triggered her visceral anxiety was that she saw a glimpse of an approaching figure wearing jeans -- the carjacker -- but had not had the luxury of time to reason out that her instincts had activated because her boyfriend was not wearing jeans that day. The point is that if she had trusted her instincts without delay, she would have locked the car with the push of a button instead of experiencing a tense encounter with a dangerous villain. The same applies in cases where people routinely override their instincts for fear of appearing silly or prejudicial, as when stepping into an elevator occupied by a hulking derelict or gang of kids. People do this all the time because they don't want to appear judgmental or to look silly and waste time taking the stairs or another elevator. But silly is better than hurt or dead. Isn't it better to defer your shopping, lose your place in line, and get rapidly out of Dodge at the onset of a mall shooting than to linger or worry about how silly you may look if overreacting? Considering the respective worst case scenarios, looking silly still trumps getting shot.
Rule 3: Move, move, move.
Rationale: This was a favorite tip from a friend and colleague I had lost touch with for over 20 years until finding him training executives and their chauffeurs outside the U.S. in how to use their armored limousine to avoid being killed or taken hostage. (Chauffeurs in particular needed more training, because their knee-jerk reaction was to avoid scratching the limo.) His point was that, outside of the movies, few adversaries have a Plan B. They prepare one main attack and generally stick to it. If you can disrupt that plan by getting away from the target area, in the vast majority of cases you will get away and the attackers will not keep after you. Besides, in the case of a mall massacre, the chances are that you are not being targeted specifically. In the terrorists' minds, any casualty is as good as another, and numbers count. Your objective, then, is to avoid being one of those numbers. Move quickly. You need not be as fast as an Olympic sprinter. You just have to be faster than the next victim who hesitates or wanders unthinkingly into the line of fire.
Bottom Line: Survival begins in the mind. There is always something that you can do to improve the odds in your favor.
-- Nick Catrantzos
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Nick Catrantzos + Tom Goff
- All Secure
- NICK CATRANTZOS is the lead author of the All Secure website and is the emeritus security director for a large public organization. He has also managed security aspects of corporate takeovers, response to international hostage situations, and finding and keeping secrets. He has been board certified in security management, licensed as a private investigator, and certified as an incident commander. He worked as a case officer for a discreet branch of public service. He protected stealth technology at Lockheed and, later, as a consulting security director for both Kroll and Control Risks, he assisted executives with workplace violence cases and with protecting VIPs and critical assets globally in volatile areas. Nick's partner, TOM GOFF, was a captain in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve and has a law degree from the University of California at Davis. He is a former reporter for Fortune Magazine, was senior editor at New York Magazine and Esquire, and has provided crisis and communications counsel to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, including Lockheed, ARCO, Microsoft, Nissan, and Sony Pictures.