Our primary goal here at The CP Journal is to get our content into the hands of people who truly want it and need it.  We continue to hear from countless people that have used our training to save a life, build their own training program, prevent a crime or violent incident, or help land a job by improving their interpersonal skills.  However you plan to use our processes and content is great, as long as you are using it for good. One of the greatest parts about the work that we do that is that we get to hear from people that read Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life, spend time on our blog, train with us online, or attend an in-person seminar.  This feedback loop is crucial in helping us remain steadfast in our goals of growing and expanding our program options and training schedule.    

All of the feedback we receive is excellent, even when it isn’t positive.  We realize that we can’t be all things to all people, and the notion that the work that we do will resonate positively with everyone in the world would be naive.  So we do in fact like and appreciate when people don’t like our training or think the book could be better, because it usually leads to a thoughtful discussion about human behavior, observation, or pre-event indicators.  One recent Amazon review of the book Left of Bang recently brought up a great point about what’s happening out in the world today and how the concepts that we teach can help make the world a safer place.  

The review mentioned that the only thing the book is about is how to explain when someone is “acting hinky.”  When we hear the term “hinky,” we generally think that the definition involves a person acting suspect or appearing to be dishonest in some way.  This review and comment is so important to the larger conversation about behavioral analysis and can help organizations around the world better understand some of the struggles that exist in interpersonal communication today.  In Left of Bang, the term is used to explain an incident that involved a customs agent in the state of Washington.  The agent used the term to describe someone that stood out, and she included the phrase in her report.  She then used that concept as a catalyst for further questioning and eventually preventing a potentially major incident.   Continue reading »

We get a lot of e-mails from students after they complete our online course letting us know a little bit more about the work that they do, why they were drawn to our content, and how they plan to apply it to their everyday processes and routines.  We recently received one such e-mail that brought up a great point that will be helpful for readers of our blog.  While it isn’t a frequently asked question, other professionals may have this issue come up, so we hope this post clarifies the idea and helps you make your processes more efficient. 

The person that completed our course works in loss prevention for a large retail chain in the United States.  He has begun using our program as the foundation for a system of safety measures at his store and is very satisfied with the improvements his team has made.  His question was in regards to retail theft and if his team can apply the program to catching and spotting people stealing. If so, what would a recommendation be for the hasty search and building a system to recognize anomalies in those instances?  

The question of loss prevention is particularly poignant, as we currently partner with multiple clients working to aid loss prevention using our observation and decision-making processes. The answer is yes, this process can definitely be used in loss prevention situations, with “Bang” being the act of a theft.  If you haven’t yet seen our piece that outlines the Hasty and Deliberate searches, here is a link to our “Tools, Guides, and References Page,” where you can find explanations of these processes.  By using the flow chart and processes, you should be able to build a consistent baseline for the various environments that you are tasked with protecting.  Using those baselines, you will then want to practice observing anomalies using the specific language that we teach in our programs to ensure that you are remaining unbiased and using the brain and the body’s response to the situation as your guide.  

For the purposes of building your process and training program, it is important to remember that theft is not the typical intent for most patrons to your business.  The normal flow of customers will be the baseline.  For instance, in a grocery store, the “normal” flow that a person operates under may be, that he or she enters your store, moves to the area where the baskets or carriages are located, then takes the carriage around the store to different areas to select items.  After selecting their items they will move to the checkout area of the store, pay for their items, and leave.  During each step in this process the human body will display a series of normal behavior indicators.  These indicators at each state become your baseline.  In many cases involving customers, the baseline for individuals will be the comfortable cluster, but not always, so it is important to set your baselines using observed behavior and not inherent expectations.  Continue reading »

Ah, the age-old phrase “the clothes make the man.” The premise of this phrase is the notion that you can dress a certain way in order to transform yourself into something. For instance, if you want to be seen as someone who knows what they are doing at the gym, you would wear gym clothes. If you have a big job interview, you would put on a nice suit that’s been tailored and dry cleaned for the occasion. The clothes, in these examples, can help you fit in with the established expectation for whatever it is you are undertaking. In behavioral analysis, the clothes are an active choice, not uncontrollable human behaviors, and should therefore not be used to make decisions on their own. Clothing can be a distraction during the observation process and should only be included in your description, after you make your observations, not as sole indicators to base decisions off of.

In the work that we do at The CP Journal, we are often asked to consult on observational processes and behavior pattern recognition with businesses and organizations both within the United States and internationally. One of the benefits of taking a behavioral analysis approach to observation and recognition is that you can use our methodology and principles of universal signs of human behavior anywhere in the world, as long as there are people. And people, all around the world, dress differently. This doesn’t mean that we can’t observe and identify anomalies based in part on clothing. However, whether I am wearing a bathing suit or tuxedo, dominance is dominance and comfortable is comfortable. The clothing may change, but the behaviors do not.

There are many differences between controllable and uncontrollable human behaviors. It may seem Continue reading »

While chatting with my mother-in-law recently, we got to talking about The CP Journal and the work that we do.  She is a great supporter of us and is always interested in what we are working on. In our conversation, she said that our content is very interesting but she sometimes has trouble taking our writing and using it herself because she is a civilian and doesn’t work in security or law enforcement.  Because we spend a significant amount of time training professionals that are already well versed in the basics of observation and threat recognition, we tend to gloss over how everyday people can put these same skills to work for themselves.  Based on themes we’ve noticed in student questions through our online training platform, we are spending the month of February digging into a particular step in our observational process called the “hasty search”.  The purpose of this post will be to frame what the hasty search is for civilians and put some simple steps into your hands to be able to conduct a hasty search everywhere you go.

The hasty search does not have to be complicated.  In plain English, the hasty search is the first thing people do when they walk into any environment. Everyone already does it, they just might not realize it. Everyday civilians probably spend about one to two seconds subconsciously conducting their own hasty search when they step foot into a new environment. The first step is to ask yourself when you walk in to a place, in terms of your personal safety and security, are you Continue reading »

While traveling in New York City recently I noticed signs for the “See Something, Say Something” campaign around town.  For those who haven’t yet seen a sign or poster in their neighborhood, the slogan is intended to remind people that, when they see something that is out of the ordinary or suspicious, they should say something to someone of authority to raise awareness of the potential issue.  The program was originally implemented by the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 2001 and is now licensed to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a nationwide campaign.  You can get more info on the campaign and ways to help drive the message here.

This campaign is a crucial step for getting the public involved in the process of stopping potentially dangerous events from occurring.  It also raises awareness and reminds people of their role in keeping themselves and those around them safe. While the concept itself is broad enough in scope to serve as a great reminder, the purpose of this post will be to expand on details of the program that also align with the work that we do here at The CP Journal. Together, this campaign and the work that we do, both serve as helpful tools to help build community involvement in threat recognition and this post will expand on a prior writing that outlined the three pieces to the threat prevention puzzle.

Many of the types of suspicious activity outlined in training programs and literature for the “See Something, Say Something” campaign revolve around physical actions, like stealing information, data acquisition, and weapon discovery.  These are all obviously important suspicious activities to report that have been gathered based on the study of prior threatening events, but the truth is that they don’t tend to Continue reading »

Events involving people occur at every moment of every day. In just one day alone you may say hello to a neighbor, meet a friend for coffee, make small talk with the teller at the grocery store, or sit in a movie theater with people that you don’t know. Throughout all of these interactions, it is highly unlikely that any will result in a threatening event or violence of any kind. With that in mind, however, Chapman University recently released their 2016 study of American Fears, which reveals that the threat of violence is something that the public pretty actively fears.

One fear that is prevalent for the American public that stood out to us at The CP Journal is the public’s fear of terrorism and their role in thwarting it. Based on the report, 38.5% of the American public is either afraid or very afraid of being a victim of a terrorist attack.[1] While the fear of terrorism currently sits at the top of the mind for many people, it is important to note that most interactions between people do not result in terrorism or violence of any kind. By working together to observe, actively and accurately, we can improve our ability to prevent violence between people, including terrorist acts. Using a recent event from the news as a framework, I will outline the three primary parties involved in threat prevention and how we can better work together, as an engaged public, to observe and report suspicious activity.

To serve as context for this post, we will share some recent articles that reported a recent situation that took place in Canada. The situation involved a person operating outside of what was normal for the area, a local resident calling the authorities, and law enforcement responding. In this example there was Continue reading »