By: Trevor Thrasher, Senior Instructor & COO
Lessons learned from carjacking incident:
- Don’t be an easy victim
- Spot trouble before it starts
- Weigh the decision to resist
Awareness & Threat Recognition
- Don’t be an easy victim. Notice the location and awareness level of the victim. If you look like lunch, you are going to be eaten.
- Spot trouble before it starts. Check out the perp. It takes less than a second to recognize the potential threat due to the obvious hoodie and attempt to conceal identity. Any indication that someone is concealing their identity is a great indicator they are looking for trouble. It can be a hat pulled low, a hoodie pulled low, or in this case, nearly covering the whole face in an awkwardly tight fashion.
Notice the perpetrator cases the location and victim a bit before attacking. This is threat recognition.
Next is attack recognition. The perp “vectors” in towards the victim, suddenly changing direction and/or velocity.
Response
- Weigh the decision to resist. This decision needs to be a tactical, moral, and legal decision ultimately weighing your ability to act during a window of opportunity with what you are willing to risk your life for. Certainly, this man could legally resist, he had to morally weigh what he was willing to just let go, and obviously, he decided to resist. It probably was the wrong idea. He didn’t have the ability, a plan, or a good window of opportunity and it only led to him being further hurt with little to no chance for successful defense.
Sometimes being smart is way better than being tough, and being aware gives you a greater number of options to successfully avoid an attack or respond with superior tactics.
Upcoming Car Safe Courses
Some of these items will be covered in our upcoming Car Safe series, which will include a Basic Fighting Around Vehicles course. Learn how to spot trouble, avoid crime, use tactics around vehicles, and the basics of drawing and shooting in and around vehicles when you can’t simply drive away.
Stay Safe,
TT
