Predicting Violence Through Movement

I’ve written about Synchronizations of Movement before, however I want to put these pre-violence indicators into the context of victim selection and being targeted for surveillance (themselves pre-violence indicators that can help us predict violence). This week, CCTV footage of a woman being kicked down a flight of stairs in a Berlin subway started to do the rounds on social media (N.B. the man responsible for the attack has now been identified), and there are several personal safety and self-protection lessons that can be learnt from this. This article is not attempting to blame the victim in any way, but to illustrate those of her actions and behaviors that helped facilitate the assault.

Victims are not selected at random, and violent crime is not purely opportunistic. When making a risk assessment, whether personal or professional, one of the areas I must look at and consider are the vulnerabilities that exist to whatever asset I am trying to assess, and ultimately protect; an asset could be myself, somebody I am protecting, a building and its contents I am looking after, etc. Opportunities are periods of time, moments when/where vulnerabilities can be exploited, however opportunities don’t exist unless there are prior vulnerabilities. At first glance, this may seem a matter of semantics, however there is an important difference between the two. If there are no vulnerabilities, there are no opportunities – and no risk. The violent criminal in the video was looking for opportunities to cause harm to someone, and the reason he chose this individual was because she had several vulnerabilities that he could exploit.

One was her clothing. Her hood was up, both obscuring her vision and her hearing. Even by turning her head, her large and expansive hood, would have prevented her from looking behind her. Her attacker understood that he could gain access to her without her being aware of his presence. A 1981 study by Grayson and Stein, where they showed film of people walking along a New York street, to convicted felons and asked them to select potential victims, revealed that people walking with their heads towards the ground were much more likely to be selected than those looking ahead. None of the felons interviewed consciously recognized this vulnerability, and verbalized it, they simply knew – like the attacker – that if a person’s sight lines will not pick them up as they approach/synchronize their movements to them, then they will have a much easier time making an assault (attackers will always try to deny you time and distance to react and respond). If the woman who was targeted had pulled her hood down whilst she was in the subway, she would have gone some way to hardening herself as a target – we know that subways attract different types of criminals due to the large number of potential victims; whilst it may be impractical to suggest that people walk around in the winter time without wearing a hood to keep them warm, when we enter known locations that criminals select for their crimes, we may want to take them down – or perhaps choose headgear that doesn’t obscure our eyes and ears so greatly.

The fact that she had her hands in her pockets – again it may be safer to wear gloves, than walk around with our hands in our pockets – also made her vulnerable to this type of attack. In the video, you can see her attacker hold on to the hand rail as he kicked her. He understood, that the environment compromised a person’s stability (made them vulnerable), and this was something that he could exploit. Within an environment, an assailant/criminal, will chose or exploit a location, that compromises our ability to respond. I personally, never stand on an escalator, I walk it, holding on to the hand rail. Being stationary on a platform where there is only just enough room to stand, makes you vulnerable, as you have no room to physically respond to any threat or danger e.g. if a person puts a knife in your back on an escalator, think about how your “traditional” knife controls and disarms would work (have you even considered that this is an environment where you may have to physically defend yourself, and do you have a plan for doing so? The woman who was targeted had probably never thought about the possibility of being assaulted as she walked down a flight of stairs).

Walking in a straight line, made it very easy for her attacker to synchronize his movement to hers. Imagine if instead of walking straight down the stairs, she walked down them diagonally from right to left, and then changed her movement back to right as she descended. How difficult would it have been for her assailant to have followed her and correlated his movement to hers? He’d been drinking (evidenced by the bottle he had in his hand, and the one that fell out of his pocket), and may well have needed to hold on to the hand-rail to stay upright as he kicked. Trying to launch an attack on somebody whose direction is not predictable and changes complicates matters; it also gives the observant person a chance to see who is carrying out surveillance on them, and moving into a position where they can make an assault (synchronizing their movement).

One of our primary senses that our fear system utilizes is sound. Historically, when our predators were more likely to be wild animals that would ambush us, we would more likely hear the danger before we saw it – this is why we often flinch and freeze when we are startled by loud noises. Her attacker was part of a group who had been and were drinking – groups of drunk men, make noise. It maybe that she didn’t hear them, or heard them and tried to ignore the potential threat/danger, discounting it, hoping/believing that if she hurried away they’d leave her alone (staying in a state of denial and not acknowledging potential threats, isn’t just a vulnerability, it’s something that stops us even making a risk assessment of our situation). It may seem paranoid to “always” walk down a flight of stairs diagonally, changing direction, but in the presence of a group of drunk, young men who are moving behind you, this may be the time that you want to consider putting such a preventative measure in place. I know some people who will make the argument of “why should you have to do this”, or that “you shouldn’t do anything which lets a potential assailant know that you have identified them and are making a response because of them”, etc., however these thoughts and ideas are motivated by ego, and not by survival.

If the woman’s hood had been down, her adrenal system would have been alerted to the sound of her attacker’s footsteps behind her. In 1884, William James changed the way we understand the process of fear, and how we are alerted to danger. He postulated that you see a bear, you start running, and because you are running you realize that you’re afraid – this was contrary to the established view, at the time, that you saw a bear, became afraid, and then ran as a result of understanding the danger. As her attacker broke away from the group he was with, sped up, and synchronized his movement with hers, the woman’s fear system should have recognized the movement as containing harmful intent, and started to adrenalize her; at that moment, she would have become conscious of the threat, and could have done something about it e.g. turned round, reached for the handrail, changed her direction, etc. - as long as she accepted that her adrenalized/emotional state was telling her to act. Two things would have needed to happen for this to have worked as nature intended:

1. She would have needed to be able to hear the footsteps (something her hood, earphones or anything else that covered her ears would have prevented her from doing),

 2. She would have needed to accept that becoming adrenalized meant there was danger in the environment.

Unfortunately, many people deny and discount what becoming adrenalized means, and try and explain away the possible reasons why their emotional state has changed. If you could never imagine and accept that somebody might attack you in a relatively populated place, on a stairway, accepting what your emotions are telling you will be difficult, even if your auditory senses pick up the movement.

The clearest warning sign that you will have in the moment, that somebody means to harm you or somebody else (if you’re working close protection), is their movement – even a shooter who can cause harm at distance needs to move to a position where they can make their shot. Be interested in who around you, has interest in you – the drunken group may have selected the target together, talking and laughing about her, on the subway or as they walked behind her – and especially when they change their movement to match yours; her attacker sped up to catch up with her. All your senses are required for this to happen, along with a curiosity about what is happening in your environment.