Chapter 3 | Do you stay or do you go?

Situational Awareness and the Decision That Determines Your Safety

This article is part of The CP Journal’s Individual Readiness Playbook.

When you are in a situation where safety has become a consideration, the decision usually comes down to one question: Do I stay, or do I go?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in an office building, at a crowded parade, in your home, or in a parking garage.

It also doesn’t matter whether the threat you are facing is a shooter, severe weather, a wildfire, a power outage, or a house fire.

In any of these situations, the question you are trying to answer is whether you will be safest by leaving (evacuating) or staying (protecting yourself “in place”).

There is a third option: intervene.

For public safety professionals, that may be a sworn duty. A police officer responding to an active shooter does not get to “stay or go.” Security providers may have job expectations that require them to move toward danger. There are times when people with specific skills—military training, medical experience, defensive capability—may act.

And there are rare situations where survival requires confronting an attacker.

For most people, though, intervention is the last option—only when no other way to ensure safety exists. For the purposes of this playbook, we will be focusing on the two primary options: evacuate or protect-in-place.

This playbook doesn’t recommend one over the other. This is not “run-hide-fight” in sequence. The correct choice depends on what you know and don’t know, who you are with, the environment you are in, the nature of the threat, your capabilities, your resources, and your constraints.

There are almost always tradeoffs, but your goal is to make the decision that best protects you, based on the information you have available at the time.

Situational Awareness

This is where situational awareness comes into the picture.