Violent Criminal Actors - Changing Your Mindset

William, this information can seem overwhelming. When people look at what they're up against in the worst case scenario with a violent criminal actor. How do you suggest people start to deal with the transition or a change in their training, change in their mindset now, based on what, what they know? It can seem overwhelming and I'm glad you brought it up. It's when we go up against a finely honed sort of strategies, are honed through repeated trials, but also through their developmental path, the violent criminal actor brings a very challenging, set of knowledge, skills, and behavior.

One of the things we can do is start focusing on things that work. And stop focusing on other things that aren't really relevant. That mean we can't worry about everything with equal intensity. If everything is important, then nothing is important. So we have to figure out a way to prioritize.

And you can do that by an honest assessment of what is going on in your area. What is the kind of violence that seems common in your area? And it's different everywhere, and focusing and training, that would, you know, start there. Focusing and training that would start with those kinds of problems. But, all of this data is, you know, thinking about people that I don't want to think about.

And then you tell me that my training to do it has to revolve around things I don't wanna do. That's a hard sell. We're limited in our ability to prepare for things though, by our inability to think about them. The sheer abnormality the circumstance is makes it very difficult to plan for. You know, we're all to a certain extent prisoners of our own experience.

And we know what we think is likely, but moreover, we're prisoners of our own expectation. We think we know what is going to happen, when we really don't. So incorporating this kind, of this kind of data is really, calls for a paradigm shift. And that, and that shift toward a more experimental focus, trying to find out what I need to do and pursue it, more aggressively rather than presume that I know what I'm doing. How do people approach that problem?

What mechanisms do they use? Well, the, the problem of sort of data overload like this, is it challenges our what we call schemata, which is plural of the word schema. A schema is a vision of the world. It's a kind of an essential, shortcut in processing, vast amounts of information and uses what we call like associations. Well, this is like that.

When you explaining a flavor, you can say, well, it's like almonds. And people automatically know, roughly in the ballpark. But schema can become, a trap and that, it becomes a model of what is to come, rather than a model for what has come to pass. And so challenging schema is risky because they provide security. If I know that, most dogs don't bite, that doesn't mean that every dog doesn't bite.

And so the schema can be a trap because it doesn't allow for much new information. It excludes information as much as it allows information through. And some schema when they're challenged, actually cause resistance. Folks, if you try and convince them, that what they believe is wrong, they'll cling to it even more tightly. And so telling people that you need to work less on their shooting, and allocate more of the time and resources to other defensive skills, it's actually gonna cause him to cling harder to shooting.

And that's tough to manage from your point of view, as you know. And I think, in any area of specialization, so if we tell someone that, what they've, maybe preferred to believe, isn't the case. I think it's, if it's just what you believe, and someone presents the facts, okay, well I've got new facts and move on. But if it's really a, a preference, there's an emotional tie in information. How do you start to overcome that?

It, we have a presumption that our gut feelings are right about most things. There's, you know, we even use that expression, our gut feelings, but when you sort of encourage people to unpack them a little bit, there's a really, disturbingly common baselessness to people's beliefs about safety and security decisions. I can tell you how many people will, will even on a gear level, buy gear, and put it on. Sure. And step out into the world, without any notion that works, but they don't need to know that it works, because it's good.

And that's a value judgment, and an emotional attachment to something that far exceeds any kind of evidence in its favor. And so convincing people to examine, what their gut is telling them, is very difficult. But we'd like to think that, you know, your audience is more self-selected that they're willing to figure out and to go on that quest, looking in the corners of their knowledge base and their skillset, for things that need work. Because if we're not careful, our schema can lead us to prepare for what we would prefer to face, not what is likely or even possible. You know, the example of George Zimmerman I think is a classic.

George Zimmerman did not sit, in his living room and decide I'm gonna go out tonight and get beaten to death. That wasn't on his to do list at all. He went out to enforce law and order, it seems, and almost got beaten to death for it. Because in his mind, he was fully prepared. He went looking for trouble and found it, but it wasn't at all of the scale that he thought he was looking for.

His schema led him astray the kind of trouble he thought he would encounter, he didn't. He get an entirely different kind of trouble and almost got killed for it. And that would, that was the criminal watch, member, community criminal watch member in Florida, who really was, was mad about trespassing, or is that a suspicious character, and ended up needing to shoot, to defend himself as you say, because the fight that he thought he was gonna have, cause he knew there was gonna be a confrontation, but the confrontation he thought he was gonna have, wasn't, the one he got. That's right. And if you were gonna ask him, you know.

What are you likely to encounter? His conscious answer might've been anything, I'm prepared for anything. But his preparations made it clear that he didn't expect much. And he got quite a bit more than he expected. And it almost had a fatal outcome for, for himself.

You know, the, I often try and engage folks that are really wedded to their schemata with a joke. I say, it's important that you remember that your gut has crapped for brains, you know. But people are wedded to their sense of how the world is. And it is difficult, to get them to go counter to it. The power of schema when faced with novel experience is staggering.

A very experienced homicide investigator from the mid Atlantic States told me a story of a witness to a murder, at her neighbor's home. Her memory of the event was that she thought it was odd that a man was in the yard gardening at night. He was actually murdering her neighbor, but in her mind she could not process what she saw. And so she had a schema for what people do in the grass and that must be gardening and all our logical objections about no one gardens at night. And what was all the screaming about that didn't enter her into it.

She did not have a parking space for that reality. And it was rejected. It was filtered through this schema into something non-threatening. And the power of schema it can almost seem delusional from the outside. And if you think about the passion of arguments people have on the internet, about this technique or not, this gun or not, this caliber or not, this gear or not.

You can see the attachment that the schema sort of drive. So, it's almost that same level of irrationality that we've been talking about with the violent criminal actor. It's not abnormal in human experience to look at someone else and say, "wow they really don't think like me". They have a whole different basis for the way they act, the way they train, the gear they select in our community. And maybe that is the beginning of that open door to understanding it, that violent criminal actor maybe thinking completely differently than we are as well.

And we need to be ready for that. It might be there both epic, they're both kinds of perspective taking and inability to use perspective taking functionally is what causes a lots of trouble for the, on the good guy side of the ledger. The inability to understand the perspective of the violent criminal actor, let's say in in matters of disrespect, the inability to understand their sense of physical threat. And also the inability to understand that someone else's gear can be perfectly adequate. You know, those are strange because one seems so critical and one so trivial but they're both examples of perspective taking that.

We need to practice better as a community. Yeah I think. And that's really what you're talking about is differences in human behavior. In the worst case scenario criminal behavior needs to be trained for. If you're going to take this seriously at all, you need to be taking these kinds of steps to shift your schema so that it accepts the potential for the violent criminal actor.