Baselines

One component of situational awareness is recognizing abnormal actions and behaviors that individual(s) within an environment may engage in. To understand the abnormal - what is out of place, or an exception – you must first be able to recognize what is normal; this means establishing baselines. At the moment, as I’m writing this, my view overlooks a parking lot, and I have a “baseline” for what are normal activities to take place in a parking lot e.g. people moving to and from cars, loading the trunk up with shopping, fastening children into car seats etc. These are normal actions and behaviors for people to engage in when in this setting, and having established this baseline, I'm able to identify what are unusual activities e.g. groups of people standing around, individuals loitering, people running etc. All of these things may be legitimate activities with easy explanations; a person could be running because it is raining and they’ve forgotten their coat, a group may form if friends agreed to meet in the parking lot before going to a restaurant etc. Having this baseline, allows me to recognize abnormalities, and investigate them. At this stage I would try and make a dynamic risk assessment of the situation, in order to ascertain whether any of the individual’s actions/behavior contain a threat, that could exploit one of my vulnerabilities (or any of the “assets” I am trying to protect, such as my kid, who happens to be with me).

One of the issues we may have with establishing baselines, is when we find ourselves in unfamiliar environments. In such situations, we may find ourselves focusing on perceived “threats” that are actually harmless, and failing to identify potential dangers because we don’t actually know what a particular threat looks like. If we can establish baselines, we can avoid this happening. The first danger we must avoid in understanding our “new” environment, is to accept that another baseline we have may be inappropriate to use e.g. if you are a teacher in a middle school, and try to apply a baseline appropriate to a schoolyard setting, to a rough part of an inner city district, you may find yourself ignoring or discounting certain actions and behaviors that could signal danger; the warning signs for conflict in one setting, don’t necessarily equate to another. Another danger with inappropriate baselines can be seen with travel security, where people visiting a tourist destination see all friendly approaches by locals as being genuine – the baseline has been created from expectations, rather than from reality. Part of travel security is learning and educating yourself as to the different methods criminals in a particular location use, so you can establish an accurate baseline as to what is normal behavior and what is abnormal e.g. is it normal for a taxi you are in to pick up other travelers on route – may be a normal activity in a certain part of Africa, but may signal the setup for an “Express Kidnapping” in South America etc. What is normal in one setting may not be normal in another, and it is only by establishing baselines that we can spot these abnormalities.

Baselines, are flexible, and can change over time. Fifteen, to twenty years ago, asking somebody for the time could be categorized as a normal behavior i.e. not everybody wore a watch. Today, few people don’t have a mobile phone, and access to the time, making such a request questionable. Of course there are legitimate reasons why somebody might not have access to the time; they are one of the few people on the planet without one, they may have inadvertently left it in the car, the battery may have died etc. however these are exceptions, that require an explanation, and so deviate from the baseline, where most people have a mobile phone and therefore access to the time. If you have to come up with a reason or explanation for somebody’s actions or behaviors – why are they doing that? Why would they be asking me that? Etc. – then you know that their activities are not consistent with your baseline.

An action or behavior that deviates from the baseline, can also be something that someone is not doing rather than something they are. One of the things that marked the two Boston Marathon Bombers out on the CCTV (Closed Circuit TV) footage, was the fact that the two bombers had no interest in the race. Whilst everyone else in the crowd were looking at the runners, the Tsarnaev brothers were faced in the opposite direction. The baseline for any sporting event is that the crowds focus should be on the athletes, anyone not doing so is acting in an abnormal fashion. If you are involved in a physical confrontation, and you see somebody moving towards you, they are not doing what most people will do, which is move away from a fight (at least to a distance where they can watch without the danger of inadvertently getting involved); maybe it is security personnel coming to break up the fight, maybe it’s a friend coming to assist you, but it could also be a second assailant coming to assist the first. In such a fast paced, dynamic situation such as this you will have to make an effective decision on what to do, rather than evaluate all options, till you get the best.

It is not possible for us to experience all the environments that we may find ourselves in e.g. it is good advice to not walk down a dark alley, but it is not always feasible not to. It is great advice, to not be in a bad part of town late at night, however a wrong turn, roadworks, the need to pick up a friend etc. may mean that this is unavoidable. Although you may not be able to have a baseline based on firsthand experience, if you understand the common processes that criminals use, you should be able to create one e.g. if you understand the different types of synchronization of movement, you will be able to ascertain if a person’s general movement contains harmful intent etc. We will never have perfect and complete information of a situation, but we should be able to recognize the essential components.