Professionals, Predators + Potential Bad Guys

The first thing to know about the non-random nature of violence is that all Bad Guys, no matter what their crime of choice, fall into one of three categories: Professional, Potential, and Predatory.

Professional Bad Guys

Professional bad guys are a category of Bad Guys that include, first and foremost, all mass killers - school shooters, workplace shooters, and domestic or international terrorists.  To me, all of the above are fundamentally terrorists, as the only differentiating factor is ideology - some are personally motivated, while others are politically motivated, but what they hope to achieve, how they plan and execute their attacks, and ultimately what they are most afraid of are all fundamentally the same. 

This category also includes organized crime, child molesters, serial killers (who are relatively rare), serial rapists and child molesters (who are unfortunately not rare). The Bad Guys that Ben and Lauren met with on that terrible day we would describe as Professional, despite their relative incompetence.

This is because I do not define these Bad Guy as “professional” by virtue of them being necessarily any good at what they do, rather, I define them as professional by virtue of their “mission” orientation.  Mission oriented bad guys choose very specific targets for specific reasons and often engage in a meticulous level of planning or grooming of the target prior to taking action.

Potential Bad Guys

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have what I call Potential Bad Guys.   I half-jokingly say that this category represents anyone on a bad day. Unlike the high-level predisposition to violence evident in Bad Guys in the Professional category, Potential Bad Guys are are rather affected by prevailing situational factors. 

He’s drunk, or high, or just got dumped by his girlfriend or just lost his job.  You may be fully unaware of these situational factors, but if you look at them sideways, or cut them off in traffic – for example – you have the potential for violence to erupt. This is the closest we come to describing someone who seems to “just snap,” although the truth is that no one “just” snaps.  Potential bad guys still follow a predictable and observable process to their escalation of behavior, and they are still careful in the selection of their targets.  Given the nature of situationally driven violence, most interactions with Potential Bad Guys can be diffused, mitigated or disengaged from – as long as you recognize them for what they are and manage them correctly.

Predatory Bad Guys

Predators encompasses the criminal element that comes to mind for most people when they think of a Bad Guy—namely, those looking to commit rape, robbery, murder, or assault, or some combination thereof. Some attack their targets using brute force, while others use charm and persuasion to create the right circumstances for an attack.

Some Predators may be actively hunting for a victim, while others might be going about their everyday life when a suitable target strolls across their path and they choose to jump into predatory mode. Whatever their crime of choice, Predatory Bad Guys absolutely have a mission in mind, but they fundamentally need the right situational factors in play to pull it off.

The combination of these two dynamics we define with the word “opportunity.”

Threat Assessment

In the highest echelons of the personal security industry lies the process of “threat assessment.” The purpose of threat assessment is to determine if someone who is making threats, or acting threatening, in fact poses a threat. There is a significant difference between the two.  Lots of people make threats, very few actually pose a threat.

Posing a threat goes far beyond simple access to weapons or a history of violence. It is fair, after all, to assume that everyone who has a motive can access a weapon of some sort, and as you will see, just because someone has no history of violence, that does not mean they cannot become violent.

True threat assessment lies in the interplay between a perpetrator’s predisposition – or Mission orientation, as we can evaluate it, and the Situational factors surrounding the case.

Pop Quiz:

If your goal was to predict the potential for violence in a given situation, which of these two elements—predisposition or situation—would you guess carries more weight on the scale of whether violence may actually occur? Both are important, but which do you think is more predictive?

Some jump to predisposition, because we like to believe that only bad people do bad things, but most intuitively recognize that situational factors carry far more importance. There are three key reasons why this is the case:

1. Some violence is situationally driven alone.

   Picture a twenty-five-year-old woman pushing a stroller in New York. She has no history of violence. No criminal record. She doesn’t own firearms and has never practiced martial arts. She doesn’t even like to watch violent movies or TV shows. There are no indicators that she possesses even a small degree of predisposition toward violence.

   But in the stroller sleeps her newborn baby.

   If someone were to come along and try to take or harm her baby, could you predict a violent outcome? You better believe it! Not only could we predict that violence is likely to occur; we could even go a step further and suggest that someone who previously had no violent predisposition, given the situational factors might, in fact, want to do violence.

   This alone tells is that situational factors trump everything.

2. Just because someone wants to hurt you doesn’t mean they can.

   Consider the would-be terrorist. The world suffers no shortage of people who have become radicalized by religious or social fundamentalism, but relatively few take the leap to committing acts of terror. Mission-oriented Bad Guys like terrorists are almost always deterred by situational factors that cause them to question their ability to successfully complete the mission.

   In most cases, the desire to commit violence does not by itself lead to violence. Bad Guys still need to have the ability to pull it off.

3. YOU can control the situational factors.

   No matter what the dynamics, and no matter who you are or what your training, as long as you understand what the situational factors are that you can control—and you never relinquish control of them—you can control, or at the very minimum, significantly influence the potential for violence and the outcome.

In Part 3 we will explore a proven process for controlling the situational factors, and further explore the Myth of Randomness…