by Rory Miller
At these levels of fear, your kick-ass martial artist’s skills will have evaporated entirely.
NYPD statistics from 1994-2000 show a hit percentage at 0-2 yards of 38%. Trained officers at contact range to six feet miss 62% of the time. At the range, it would be almost unheard of to miss at six feet. At 3-7 yards, they missed 83% of the time.
That’s how badly skills degenerate. The average trained officer under stress shoots worse than the average beginner not under stress.
I once put a deputy through a scenario that lasted probably two minutes and involved a lot of yelling and a single trigger pull. Afterwards, the deputy was gasping for breath, hands on his knees, shaking and sweating, “Sarge, I feel like I’m going to cry and I want to puke. Is that normal?”
This all sounds pretty horrible. The zone is pretty cool, but I have never met anyone who could stay there until they’d had several fights. Even those that can, start over at square one when the type of violence changes.
For me, when it got to the point where I could handle a hand to hand fight without putting my coffee cup down, I got the full adrenaline dump when I shot someone.
Your gunfighter protagonist will turn into a jellyfish in his first knife fight. And probably have nightmares, too.
Given time, you can adjust your hormone level. When we try to raise it to the zone, we call that getting psyched up. When we are too excited, the advice is to “take a deep breath and calm down.” You probably recognize these from your own life.
This almost always means that the attacker, who has had time to do this, has the advantage. Recovering from an ambush requires major skill and conditioned, effective reflexes.
Attacking: The Offensive Point of View
The paradigm I used in "Meditations on Violence" is that attacks happen close, hard, fast, and from surprise. Close, because the threat wants you in a position where he can do maximum damage (next time you hit a heavy bag, notice how close you stand. That's where a bad guy will initiate from. Nothing like sparring distance, huh?) Harder than you expect from training because most people in training either pull their strikes or use safety equipment. A threat doesn't want to dominate you, he wants you out of action.
Faster. Most martial artists are used to sparring timing: feint, play for position, strike, maybe a combination, block and counter. A threat uses a flurry of attack with no thought of defense. Why defend when he knows he is hitting his victim so fast and hard that the victim will be obsessed with his or her own defense? Almost everyone freezes under a flurry of blows. Even if the blows are pulled, the information locks the person into the OODA loop. http:chirontraining.blogspot.com/2006/01/ooda-introduction.html
Completely untrained people hit four times a second. A decent boxer or martial artist can easily double or even triple that.
Becoming a predator is most common in our society with serious addiction. You need drugs. In order to get drugs you need a lot of money (IIRC, the last number I heard was $400 a day. Every day. Just to keep the withdrawals at bay.)
Most people can't do serious violence because they recognize the humanity of others, even animals. When society is or becomes marginal, that is a luxury. If there is not enough food for your family, compassion for others goes down. If someone in the village starves every year, feeding a prisoner instead of executing him condemns innocents to die. If the only way you can feed your babies is to raid another village and kill to take their food, you'll find a way to do it or you and your babies will die. Most of us can't relate to the power of addiction, but might be able to imagine what we would be capable of if starving (Read Elie Wiesel's "Night" for an amazing description of what desperation will do to ordinary people.)
Beginning violent criminals have to learn to dehumanize their prey. First crimes are usually sloppy because of the emotional blocks. They learn harder/faster/closer/surprise either through trial and error, having experienced it themselves, or being mentored.
Recap:
-The first element of the fight is the ambush
-The goal is to make sure it never develops into a fight
-People freeze. They freeze to different degrees and for different reasons, but people freeze
-Fights are dynamic, happen in environments
-The body has certain reactions to stress
-Attackers like it hard, fast, close and from surprise
DISCUSSION: The Murder of Deputy Kyle Dinkheller
The video was taken from the dashboard camera of Deputy Dinkheller. He has pulled over a man for driving erratically. The man gets out of his pickup and begins doing a dance, singing, “Shoot me! Shoot my fuckin’ ass! Shoot me!”
The deputy tries to calm the threat down and orders him to approach. The threat shouts “I am a goddamned Vietnam combat veteran and I am not taking orders from you.”
Deputy Dinkheller calls in that he has someone acting strangely.
The threat (Threat is the typical cop euphemism for someone who requires force) rushes Kyle, shouting, “Who you callin’ motherfucker?”
The next part happens off camera, but it sounds like Kyle draws his expandable baton. Likely he ground it against the threat’s sternum, using pain to drive him back. The threat returns to his pick-up and begins loading a .30 caliber semi automatic assault carbine.
The deputy has been getting more agitated. His voice increases in pitch, rate and volume. He starts to become less coherent on the radio. Whereas before he was ordering the driver to approach, he now orders him to get away, though he is already at the truck.
Kyle begins repeating himself, over and over, “Put down the rifle! Put down the rifle!” When you show this video to a room full of cops, they start shifting nervously. They know Kyle needs to shoot. Some will say it out loud. Kyle doesn’t, at first.
The threat charges, firing. Kyle returns fire, but the threat has the superior weapon, mobility, and tactical training and experience. The threat closes, bobbing and weaving. Kyle screams when he is shot. He is still trying to scream for help into the radio. He is back in the fight, but it is too late. He is shot again and screams.
The threat has either a jam or needs to reload. As he turns away Dep. Dinkheller, who is not yet dead, shoots again. The threat turns, flanks the deputy and kills him. The last shot, according to reports, hits Kyle in the eye.
The threat drives away.
It is chilling the way a good horror/suspense movie is chilling. The camera is not pointing at the point of action and so you do not see anyone get shot or die. But you hear it, and it is real.
This video is important. By all accounts, Kyle Dinkheller was a good man. He was a good shot and considered a good officer. There is nothing in my history or his to indicate I am the better man. That means if he can freeze, so can I. If he can get caught in a loop, so can I.
Chapter 4: Bad Guys and Violence
As already stated, bad guys use violence because it works. They want something. Violence is a quick and often a safe and efficient way to get it. If it looks like it won’t be safe or won’t be efficient, the criminal gives the whole situation a pass.
That’s criminals. We’ll get back to them, but let’s talk about some other potentially violent people.
Altered states of consciousness. Mentally ill people are not more criminal than others. People with altered states of consciousness, whether caused by mental illness, drugs, or extreme emotion can be dangerous and unpredictable.
With schizophrenia, the person may be responding to a world that only they can see. They may be told what to do by voices that wear them down. They may see some connections that make no sense to us—that high-pitched noises come from the devil and therefore babies cry because they are possessed and the only way to save the babies is to remove their voices…
The man was driving his head into a concrete wall. Again and again, he would stand, back up to the limits of his ten by twelve foot cell and run, driving his head into the concrete wall. He said he was trying to “knock myself to heaven. I want
to see my grandfather.” The challenge was to use a type of force that would stop him without increasing his head trauma. A Taser saved his life.
Most fights with the mentally ill happen because the mentally ill person is terrified. They may not be able to interpret that someone is trying to help, and the fight often turns into a frenzied, frantic flailing. Lots of thrashing and biting.
Follow the dynamic. If someone who is not acting ‘right’ (your protagonist is unlikely to be able to tell at first glance if the person is drugged or mentally ill or in a severe emotional state) does something dangerous either to others (like breaking down a door and demanding honey) or to themselves (like running into traffic) they need to be stopped. The nature of the altered state of consciousness is that they cannot be expected to stop or control themselves. So someone intervenes.
The person in the altered mental state sees the intervention but is unlikely to see it as help and quite often sees it as an attack. They fight, in a panic. When they start to lose, it doesn’t occur to them to surrender, they fight harder. More force is used.
(Non-mental illness, like a diabetic reaction, can also trigger erratic and violent behavior. Graham V Connor, one of the cornerstones of police force law was a US Supreme Court decision stemming from a diabetic crisis).
In some cases emotionally disturbed people have fought to heart failure. Just like a horse can be run to death.
This brings up a point that affects a lot of officers but doesn’t get a lot of play. The truth is that force is used to stop force. But we want force to be used ‘justly’. If someone dies after a use of force, we want it to be a bad guy, not a poor disturbed kid who panicked. That can be really hard on good people who had to use force.
Here’s the deal. Hardened, experienced criminals know how to surrender. They know how much fight they can give without being hurt. They talk tough knowing that as long as they keep their hands in plain sight, they are safe. Some, many, actually, actively try to provoke the officer into an act of unjustified force. They might be able to sue or put pressure on to get charges dropped. We rarely use force, and rarely much force, on serious criminals. Serious criminals know how to behave when the police show up.
Regular citizens don’t know how to behave. Some fight when they have no hope of winning or even when it will be a crime to do so. Many stand on rights they do not have or demand to be treated in a way that the officer won’t or maybe can’t (by law or policy) do. If you go to jail, the officers will take your wedding ring… because if you are housed with someone who is willing to bite your finger off for something shiny, the officers will be responsible. The officers will take the ring even if the arrestee is willing to fight for it. So force is more likely to be used on a regular citizen in a bad situation than on a serious criminal. In "The Code of the Street" Elijah Anderson makes a similar observation from the other side--people who live in the inner city rarely get injured in robberies because they know the etiquette of being mugged.
The EDP (emotionally disturbed person) is the worst case, as described above. And the least deserving of pain or injury. But, to repeat, force is not about justice. It is about stopping people.
Like anyone else, a bad guy uses violence socially or asocially.
Social violence is for the (perceived) good of the group. It is used to establish a hierarchy, to enforce the rules and norms of a group, to establish boundaries of membership or to strengthen bonds.
When two young males start with, “What you lookin’ at?” They follow the specific steps of the human dominance game. Exactly the same way that Big Horn Sheep rams butt heads. It is designed to be safe.
Spanking, a smack on the head for a rude remark, or killing someone in the barrio because he tried to molest your sister are all the same dynamic: violence to make sure that everyone knows the rules. Domestic violence is usually perceived this way as well.
When an officer shows up to a domestic violence call, frequently both the aggressor and the victim will turn on the officers. We are hard-wired to resent an ‘outsider’ getting involved in ‘insider’ business. At a higher level, this violence to the outsider or especially an insider who has betrayed the group, can turn into a horrifically violent contest. The group members, in order to prove and show their loyalty, try to outdo each other in how much damage they can do to the begging, pleading victim.
It both establishes membership and increases group bonds.
A special case is a young member in certain subcultures who wants a reputation for being ‘hard’ or ‘crazy’. In almost any violent culture, such a reputation carries a degree of safety. Crazy people are hazardous to threaten and better left alone.
This person will try to put on a show, usually by using extreme violence that would violate the local social rules or by attacking a victim that would normally be off limits—different gender, the very young or old.
Asocial violence is what happens when a person is able to completely or partially dehumanize a victim. It changes a fight to a hunt. I’m not sure I can put this in words. Most people can fight another human. An asocial predator can hunt one. We kill animals for food efficiently—whether hunting with a high-powered rifle or the quick throat-cutting of a halal butcher. A predator, someone who is in the asocial mode, can apply this efficiency to another human.
This is rare. Most people can’t do it. Some can fake it and some, with intense training can act like it for short periods of time (a war or a battle), but the humanity of their victims tends to bubble up and they pay the price later—in nightmares, separation from others and, all too often, addictions.
For those who can, violence is a completely different experience than most of us imagine it. It is a tool. With proper planning, it is an efficient and safe tool. It often makes a truly asocial bad guy feel like a god (or asocial good guy, for that matter). When something very bad and violent happens to a group of people, most run around like screaming monkeys. They cannot just shift to survival mode but cling to each other and try to figure out what it all means. Humans mix their physical survival mentality with their social survival mentality.
To be asocial, whether naturally or trained or inured over time, is to walk into that situation without hesitation. When everyone else is spraying fire in an attempt to make others duck and not get shot, the predator is methodical… aiming, firing, murdering.
Some people, the process predators, use violence for its own sake. They enjoy the feelings of control and domination in a beating, a rape or a murder. They may fantasize about torture-murders and work to live out their fantasies. That’s rare. The risks are high and the rewards are generally intangible.
More predators use a subconscious (or even conscious) risk-reward analysis. Aggressive panhandling for a dollar is low payoff, but it is very nearly zero risk. Showing a weapon and ordering a potential victim to obey (if you have analyzed the victim) is lower risk than using force (sometimes people panic and fight when hit; in any case using force influences prosecutors to be more vigorous).
I mentioned early on that in some cases the death penalty or minimum sentencing standards are deterrents. It is in these cases. The more professional and experienced a criminal is, the more likely sentencing possibilities are on their mind when planning or conducting an assault. Two examples from my local criminals:
“Normally after I beat him down I would have gone through his pockets, but that would turn it into robbery and that’s a measure eleven charge.”
And:
“I held his head with my other hand so it wouldn’t hit the wall. I know how you guys trump up charges…”
No one is merely their criminal acts. Hard core violent criminals don't have a lot of friends and most addicts have ripped off family so much that family doesn't trust them ... but their moms still love them and so, up to a certain age even with horrific abuse, do their children.
Part of it is that parents and children are conditioned to love. Part of it is that in the attempt to make sense and normalize life, peop
le can go through amazing justifications for a family member or friend.
The number of times that a local criminal well known by us to be a brutal pimp, drug dealer and extremely violent finally met his end (usually at the hands of another pimp or dealer) and his family came out of the woodwork to say that "He was a good boy" "Very gentle" "He had some trouble when he was younger but was turning his life around" and the like leaves me cold.
I always wondered if they really believed it. In a few cases I know the family members were terrified of the subject and had sworn out Restraining Orders... but they sounded sincere. They were genuinely grieving.
I used to remind rookies that each of our inmates was three people-- the one who did the crimes; the one the family knew; and the one we saw in jail. Some of the most violent criminals were good inmates. They knew the system, knew how little they could get away with and tried to do the time quietly. Some whiny little low-level hustlers tried to play big guy in jail. It never ended well, but some never learned. And at visiting every week, you would see a four-year-old on his crack-addicted prostitute mother's knee looking through the plexiglass and talking into the phone saying, "I love you daddy. When are you coming home?"
Recap:
-Social violence is used to establish place in a hierarchy; to set the boundaries of in and outside the group or to enforce the social rules
-Asocial violence depends on an ability to ‘other’
-Asocial violence is for a specific goal- to get stuff or to enjoy the process
-The humanity of the victim does not enter into asocial violence
-Experienced criminals/predators use a risk/reward analysis