3 Tropes

This will be a rant about the state of my country/world. Feel free to walk away.
According to Nielsen, the average US citizen watches 34 hours of television a week. I have read that most Americans aren't readers, but all of my friends are obsessive readers. Yet, within that crowd, I'm the odd man out because I read almost exclusively non-fiction. The obsessive readers I know are reading fiction.

Subtract sleep, commute time, dead time... some people have more interaction with imaginary worlds than they do with the real world. Almost everyone has more intense interactions with imaginary worlds than with their daily grind. And as such, consciously or not, people are influenced to believe in how the world works by imaginary, scripted drama.

So three tropes, brought to you by Hollywood and popular fiction, that I see becoming accepted wisdom in the real world. Perilously.

The Cult of the Passionate Amateur. The new rookie comes on the team and he's just so much better and smarter than the grizzled veterans that they become resentful. Or Castle hires a mercenary to find his daughter and says, "I'm coming with you." Or the plot line of "True Grit." In entertainment, being a passionate amateur is a superpower. In real life...we'll get to that.

Arguably, there are good reasons for it in Hollywood. Working with professionals is high-speed and there are a lot of communication shortcuts. It is a good idea to have a naive character. For plot logic, it gives the experienced people an excuse to explain things to the audience by pretending to explain to the amateur. But, since the amateur is the one the audience identifies with, if you want the audience to give you or your advertisers money, you are probably going to wind up making the amateur the star. The hero.

It probably doesn't hurt that most of the writers, themselves, are passionate amateurs with no direct experience and damn little skill in what they are writing about.

How does it work in the real world? Let me ask you this. You're going in for back surgery. Do you want the surgeon who has done seven thousand similar surgeries or the kid fresh out of school who has never actually done a surgery but is really into it? You tell me.

Amateurs helping with hostage rescue are about as successful as amateur surgeons.

Even worse-- passion. People do not think clearly under emotional stress. How smart are you when you're in love? Or angry? Passion is worse (look at marriages destroyed for momentary passion.) "Chief, he killed my brother! You can't take me off this case!" Are you out of your friggin' mind? Not only could any good defense attorney destroy the prosecution on that relationship alone, but people obsessed with revenge are not thinking rationally. And rational thinking solves problems. Not passion.

Effect in the world? Emotion seems to be considered to have validity equal to rationality. Feelings equal or trump facts. Irrational fears trump science. And, the people doing it, fear-mongeriong  by spreading bullshit, thinks it's okay. If the cause is worthy, it is worth lying about. And they are spreading the lies to people who react to the emotion and don't fact check.

The Virtue of the Unprepared. I blame MacGyver for this one (and a hat tip to Kathy Jackson of the Cornered Cat for pointing this out.) MacGyver was an eighties TV character who did dangerous jobs but didn't like guns so with his trusty swiss army knife would do some kind of field-expedient explosion or something in every show to save the day using household chemicals and bits of trash...

Get this. He had a dangerous job. Where people would try to kill him and blow him up. And because he didn't like guns he purposely denied himself the right tools. This is not genius, this is blatant stupidity. And somehow it became a virtue. I'm all for thinking out of the box, and creativity, and having a basic knowledge of simple chemistry and engineering in case you need to get rid of a stain or pull a car out of a mudhole and you don't have the right equipment...

But to deliberately deny yourself the right equipment? In the real world, that's just stupid. And, through MacGyver (he's the most obvious, but in every episode of the A-team I saw they got captured or trapped without their toys and had to make things) stupidity has become a virtue.

Let me put it in surgical terms again. Who do you want to operate on your back? The guy with the right equipment, or the one who says, "I don't like knives. What we'll do, see, is I'll improvise a scalpel from a tin can..."

Dreamers. This really contributed to me tossing fiction many years back.  The trope runs like this (it was endemic in fantasy fiction, I hope that has changed):
The sweet, gentle dreamer child is always running off to read books and be alone and daydream about making the world a better place. Her mean, narrow-minded, rough and calloused family are always trying to stop her from day dreaming. If the family isn't out fishing or farming, they are trying to force her to become just like them. Then, one day, a magical creature comes by and recognizes the deep wonderfulness of the dreaming child and takes her away to be trained as a special person, elevated well above her parents where she can become a hero...

Leaving aside all the family issues in this, WTF? You have a family living a hard life-- and if you've ever subsistence farmed, it's a metricfuckton of manual labor. I can only imagine that fishing from small boats would be worse--hard, cold, wet and dangerous. And they have one kid who is just pure lazy. Living off the labor of others, contributing nothing unless forced to, ranting that being forced to contribute to keeping herself and her family fed is a horrible injustice and beneath her. Crap, am I talking about the fictional trope or modern protesters?

If humanity is a body, the dreamers are the fat cells. They are the soft underbelly of society. The ones the shark can eat first before it tears into something useful. Maybe good for emergency food supply.

This is not a rant against dreaming. Dream big, go for it. But dreaming without sweating is worthless. Dreams and sweat combined? Cool. The Dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do. To quote myself.

But, somewhere, somehow, the people raised with this trope not only believe that fantasy is just as effective as labor in making people's lives better. They honestly believe it is morally superior. That doing nothing works. That making unexecuted plans is just as much a contribution (and without the possibility of error, that's a nice bonus) as doing something. "Visualize World Peace" How's that working for you?

Surgery again. Do you want the lady who has put in the years and hours of medical school and residency? Or the one who has been daydreaming about how cool it would be to do the exact same thing without pain? Especially if some magical animal told her she's special?

A Working Professional

Steve just posted something.  It might not appear directly relevant to the stuff I discuss here, maybe, but something in it resonated and it is running parallel to a lot of things that go on here.

"I'm a working pro, I've been involved in half a dozen major universes, doing TV, books, comics, game tie-ins, all like that, I've never spilled the beans before and it would be professional suicide to do so now. Why would you think I would?"

That.  Right there.  I am a working professional.  I get paid to deal with bad guys or to teach other people how to deal with them in high-risk environments.  There is a small chance on any given day that a citizen will get ambushed or targeted by predators. I put myself in that environment. For money.

A working professional in  Steve's profession knows about 'the bible'.  I know about P&P.  P&Ps change and are just as different as bibles; force laws change state by state by country by ROE. 

Steve gets impatient when a newbie writer who has a few Creative Writing classes and some time in a critique group under his belt starts telling the old man how to do it, or telling Steve that he's wrong.  Or that the leader of his writer's group has sold a couple of stories so the newbies opinion is just as valid as Steve's.  Too many aspiring writers take the classes and do the critiques groups and never have careers.

Same same.   Your years in a class or the people that you know who have won competitions or the fact that one of your fellow students or instructors has prevailed in an assault won't impress me.  I could make a list to parallel Steve's above- I've worked booking, max and psych, been ambushed and conducted tactical operations; survived attacks with knives and faced down shotguns, gone hands on in facilities, on the street in homes and in war zones ...  I made a conscious decision to quit counting my Uses of Force at three hundred and that was over ten years ago.

Professional writers don't think about writing the way amateurs do.  Maybe that goes for everything that clearly has hobbyists and professionals.  You do anything long enough, well enough, you start learning things that a hobbyist can't know- which editors hate stories that begin with dialogue; which religions and ethnic groups don't flinch when they see a knife.

And you can write, as Steve did, long pieces that are obvious to you but new and valuable information even for people who consider themselves 'writers'.  Also, as a working professional, you have a better insight into when someone is being stupid... and sometimes it buys you a plane ticket to Hollywood or a chance to statistically show that something your officers need is good, safe and cost-effective.  At least you get funny stories, even if only the other professionals really understand them.

Thanks, Steve, for showing connections. That is always good.

Sometimes...

Sometimes people die.  Actually, everybody dies- but that's not the point.  Sometimes people die and you go over the situation examining decisions and what-if's and sometimes you find the place where something different might have saved a life.  Sometimes that is valid and sometimes it is NOT.  Sometimes the examination is a serious debriefing, professionals trying to learn lessons and find a better way to do a risky job.  Often it is one or more amateurs with an agenda trying to place blame... (and that's not fair. The real mechanism, often, is that someone who they love brought on his own deaths through his own actions... and that's too much, too much love and anger, too much to feel for one dead person. If they can remove at least the little piece about his responsibility for his own death maybe they will sleep better at night.  Maybe they can forgive the dead for dying if they can remove the need to forgive them for what lead to the death.) The amateurs will go to unbelievable lengths of twisted logic to believe that they have found a way.

There was a recent news article that enraged me, and maybe I will dissect it later- but Dave asked about the comment that sometimes people die no matter how hard you try.  A long time ago I mentioned without following it up that if a threat cannot feel pain, it almost guarantees a serious injury.  Those are all connected.

Dave was concerned that it might be personal to talk about.  Less for me, but I have restrictions based on confidences and other things, so this post will probably seem more oblique than most.

The force is over when the threat decides it is over.  That simple. Humans almost always give up.  Unless every long bone in the body is broken or the Central Nervous System is shut down the human machine is still capable of fighting.  The whole point of pain compliance (joint locks, pressure points and Taser) is to deliver enough pain that the threat decides to quit.  The next step above that does damage, but it takes a truly horrific amount of damage to make it impossible for a human to keep fighting.  It is some damage + a fear of more damage that makes the threat quit fighting.  The threat quits because of the fear. They quit psychologically.

The next step above this is lethal force. If it is imperative to stop the threat and damaging force has failed, that may indicate lethal force (that is not legal advice).

More often than not (and in almost every case that has made the papers lately and locally) though the officers could justify lethal force, they try to handle the situation at a lower level. Often a much lower level.  One example is "the swarm" where as many officers as they can get pile on the threat.  The idea is to tire the threat out. Use friction and body weight to cause an exhaustion that will do what pain and fear failed to do.  It is dangerous as hell. If you are trying to wrestle and the other guy is biting, clawing, blinding and may have a weapon, it sucks... and I know officers who have been permanently injured trying hard NOT to injure a threat.  Even if the threat doesn't have a weapon all the officers do, and the threat could work one out of a holster and turn it into a bloodbath just by chance.  So it is dangerous. It would be far safer and often justifiable to stand back and use firearms, but most officers are so reluctant to kill that they try this technique.

Usually it works.

Sometimes (look for "excited delirium") it doesn't.  Excited delirium is a condition that most officers are familiar with, but it is hard to pin down exactly what it is or what causes it.  It usually follows heavy stimulant use (PCP or cocaine) but sometimes not.  Often the threat has a history of severe psychiatric disorders, but sometimes not.  Sometimes it is just rage taken to a point that is inhuman.  The weirdest part, to me, is that some of the liver temperatures taken at autopsy, well after death have been higher than the body can withstand without brain damage, so there is something physiological going on.

What presents (and none of these are 100%): is someone who often strips naked, sometimes howls like an animal, attacks almost anything that moves and likes to break glass.  They don't respond to pain.  They fight when any normal human would long have collapsed into a heap.  They shrug off bullet wounds that are clearly lethal.  The ones I have dealt with have gone relatively well, but close friends have been involved in instances where a relatively small threat was literally throwing (in one case eight, in another five) officers around.

And that's the thing, Dave.  Because sometimes the threat just suddenly quits and you get handcuffs on and start to take a breath and realize that he isn't breathing.  He didn't give up, his heart gave out.

At great personal risk the officers addressed the threat at a lower level of force than they could have justified and he died anyway.  In the end, to the amateur debriefers, it's all the same.  If they hadn't fought so long and so hard, the poor boy would have lived.  They should have done something else.  What?  Taser?  But all of the cool tools that come under fire- Taser, VNRs (Vascular Neck Restraints, the fancy word for a hadaka jime), ankle to hand restraints, even OC tend to be used more often when you need the edge.  You need the edge most of all with excited delirium.  As seen from the liver temperature, some of the people in ED are on the fast track to death or brain damage anyway. 

 Here's the thing- it's possible that a certain percentage of these cases would die anyway, even if they never came in contact with an officer.  A rough analysis shows that the percentage who die in custody hasn't really changed with the LVNR and when the LVNR was removed from many agencies; when hog-tying was common and when it was discontinued; when the Taser and OC were introduced.

There's an international study working on in-custody deaths right now.  It may be years before they have solid numbers, but then we may have an answer.  Until then, the amateurs with an agenda will blame whatever tool or tactic was used, completely ignoring the fact that the officers had no choice about getting involved and risked their lives trying not to use deadly force.

Rambling About Amateurs

There is a subtle but powerful difference between professionals and amateurs.  People who play (or fight) for money don't think about it the same way as people who play (or fight) for fun.  People who put out cars on assembly lines don't think about it the same way as people who restore cars as a hobby.  Engineers don't think the same way as hobbiest/inventors.

I had the opportunity to work with a very skilled martial artist last weekend.  Yes he had decades of training, all the right credentials... but that really doesn't mean anything.  What mattered is the way he felt- his structure and movement- when we played.  He was good.  Not many people can hold structure while moving.  In the course of a few minutes I had finger locks fail, very reliable spine/face moves get slipped and was taken off balance (taken down if not for a convenient wall) in a more perfect and more controlled way than I have experienced in a couple of years.

Very nice, but like everyone there were glitches too.  You could feel his energy as he tried to think of the right thing; watch comfort level rise or fall based on interpretation instead of damage and control; feel the separation of mindsets between flow and staccato bursts.

This is hard to put into words.  As skilled as he was, he processed things through a filter. (We all do- don't get smug) He wanted to do the 'right' thing, apply his skill efficiently.  That had two effects- sometimes he would focus on moving right instead of moving well, he would try to maintain a sticky-hands control while striking instead of just unloading.  The second, and the probable basis of the subtle difference between someone who fights as a hobby and someone who fights professionally is that he tried to win, not to end it.  At any moment I could have frozen the action and asked: "If you had to kill me right now, right this second, how would you do it?"  He would have an answer, he had the skill... but it would not be what he was actually doing.  What he was actually doing was what he had trained.

So here's another difference: It is almost true that you fight the way you train, but never quite.  Simply in a real fight you want it over and the threat incapable of harming you.  In training, you want the experience without the uke ever actually being injured.  You need to train with the same people next class.

The good professionals, this is never far from their minds.  They don't use the table, maybe, but they know it is there...

And they are always cataloging, remembering, probing:  I know some of what this guy likes, what he avoids even when it isn't tactically necessary to do so; the opportunities that are invisible to him; what patterns he will fall into as familiar ground; what patterns will make him cautious; what patterns will take him a second to interpret...  It's just a way to think.  Fighting minds is separate from fighting bodies and even separate from fighting skills.

Another difference- everything in the last paragraph was tactical skill, a tactical game.  Time to make those judgments almost never exists in the real thing.  It becomes a habit, but when it is ON, it is OVER, with those niceties of thought and interpretation just things that the broken amateur was maybe planning on doing.

Yet another difference- the amateur always has a personal stake.  'This is about me'.  The questions are there- am I good enough?  Can I win?  Will I ever get laid if I lose?  Bullshit masculinity issues and esteem crowding in, messing with a brain that needs to get a job done.  Getting over this (and it is hard: personal violence pushes a huge amount of issues to the fore) frees up a great deal of brain power.  The hobbiest wonders if he can beat the reigning champion.  The professional just has to decide how.

So here is the question- on most of the levels we played at, I believe that my friend showed superior skill.  My advantages were mental and attitudinal.  Can this be taught separately?  Can I graft the professional experience, the way I think, onto his skill set?  Wouldn't that be cool.

Point Man

http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/search?q=Professionals+and+amateurs



Look at "Professionals and Amateurs" from September 2005. Just the first couple of paragraphs, the rant.

Marc wrote some dark and secret thoughts and shared them. I want to think about them here. He wrote about being on point because you run a little faster to the call for help. That some of the professionals who talk tough always seem to take a second to tie their shoes or check their radios... just long enough for the real meat eaters to get a lead and start to get the situation under control.

I've only noticed this a few times in my career. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, it might have meant that I was usually so far in front and so busy juggling options that I never paid attention to the possibility that other people's slowness was a tactic.

The tendency to run towards trouble has had one profound effect- not just on me but on the agency and maybe the world. It is a key reason why real experience concentrates in so few people. A small percentage of people go into professions where violence is common. Of those a surprisingly large amount develop a skill at finding and staying in desk jobs. Of the remainder, most work shifts or districts where very little happens. The last winnowing is that even in a bad shift in a bad area, you can almost always slow down and let someone else take point.

So experience concentrates in a very small percentage of people- the 'meat-eaters'. But the perception of experience is spread with a very broad brush. Readers can't tell if the "expert" is a desk jockey or a political player who has run units without ever being in them or a part-time reserve. I've known training officers, many of them, who went into training because it was easier and safer than doing the job they were training others to do. Sometimes the best do teach, but sometimes people teach to avoid doing.

Full disclosure: I've been in a desk job for five months now. It's driving me nuts. If not for tactical team calls I'd probably be chewing off my leg.

So I haven't noticed it very often, and honestly less at work than in my civilian life. (Though at work I have developed the habit of at least listening for cover officers to be on the way, more for witnesses than for safety. I will end it and I will end it quickly so the aftermath is easier if there are corroborating reports.)

In civilian life I have counted to three with a close friend before jumping off a bridge only to look up and see a confused, "I didn't think he'd really do it," look on his face. Long nights with college friends working on our plan to save the world we realized that the military was the best way to get initial and free training, so I joined... and heard, "We didn't think you'd really do it."

It can be lonely on point. Especially when it becomes real and other people want to deal with the dreams.

But one time at work, a cell extraction on a psych in full excited delirium I realized that my cover officer outweighed me by over two hundred pounds and was a Hall of Fame wrestler... and I was taking point. And that was fine. The way it should be. I still tease him about it, though.

Looking for the Skeleton

I've been working on a book. It grew out of some lectures and a pamphlet on the difference between martial arts and violence. It is the hardest thing I've ever tried to write. Not because of prose or subject matter or dedication or research or knowledge. It's because violence is still a natural history, not a science.

Once upon a time, 'natural history' was a collection of facts and observations and specimens. It was a body of literature gathered by amateurs and professionals all over the world. Then Darwin came along and found the underlying theme to all life and biology was born as a science.

At one time there was a loose collection of facts, processes and experiments with various far-fetched but detailed theories on what each thing meant... then Dalton postulated the atomic theory and philosophy of alchemy became the science of chemistry.

This manuscript deals with what I have learned about violence and it is a collection of observations, a few theories of small parts, systems that have worked for me and my students. It is very, very hard to format.

Normally I'm good at finding underlying patterns and connections. Finding the key that makes entire classes of technique work. Tying everything together so it is easy to learn and remember and extrapolate from... not with this. I see big pieces, such as the effects of adrenaline, where control must be learned as a technique, but it affects perception and affects both threat and victim but in different ways as well as men and women and professionals and everyone else. It is also a big piece of the aftermath and that is different for single events versus sustained exposure...

And I see small pieces that affect these big pieces and may, if I come to understand them, be bigger than I ever realized. Breathing. The touch of a palm on your face.

Grrrr. So I come up with a framework that works hopefully for the reader and with luck, stuff won't fall between the cracks. My attempt to organize the soul of chaos.

We'll see.

Professionals and Amateurs

There are degrees of professionalism. My colleagues and I are paid, and paid well, primarily to deal with violent and dangerous people. The rest of the job could be done better by a decent secretary- but to deal with violence, to judiciously control it or avoid it or prevail as appropriate is a skill and an art.

Not all professionals are the same. We all get paid to deal with violence and all that that means- the injuries, sure, but also the mental after-effects, the social effects and the possibility of infection- but the majority really don't. If we know or suspect that a situation is about to go bad, we call for a handful of select individuals. These are people that maintain their cool and have a reputation: the common reputation is that most of the time the fight doesn't happen, when it does it is over very quickly with minimal injury. I'm one of those people for my agency.

This has an odd effect in that it really concentrates experience in a handful of people- I've been in a room with a dozen senior deputies with perhaps 150 years of experience between them and less than a hundred "uses of force"... I quit counting mine at 300. As much as there is an acknowledged gap in experience and attitudes between the people on "the Job" and "civilians" there is almost as big a gap between the "average officer" and the "meat eater" within the Job. I've trained in advanced first aid, volunteered with Search and Rescue, acted as a peer counselor and crisis debriefer, trained for hostage negotiation, design courses, research and write and been the point sergeant for the mental health team for the last couple of years and I still get told "You're just a tactical guy." or "The idea of you working at headquarters makes people nervous." Meat eaters make sheep nervous.

Sorry about the vent.

Back to the point- Amateurs in violence (think martial artists) do not have the same idea of a fight as a pro does. The amateur thinks 'winning'. The pro thinks 'going home'. To the amateur it is a contest. To the pro, if it ever becomes a contest it's because he didn't cheat enough or early enough. To the amateur, it is a game and to the pro it is a job. Like any other job you do it as quickly and as lazily and as safely as possible. Could you imagine if a factory worker looked at each car as a challenge with a risk of injury? "Whew! It was tough, but we got the new Camaro out today. I may need to get a cast on my wrist but we won!"

There are levels for Pros, too. That's what I learned today. An inmate pretending to be crazy threatened to attack any officer who came into the interview room he was in. The person in charge of the area, a very, very good sergeant had come up with a plan to be sure we would win the fight. It was a good plan. I ignored it completely because I had no intention of there ever being a fight. (Side effect of being considered a go-to guy for trouble is that people don't get their feelings hurt if you have a better plan). The sergeant who came up with the plan was a pro, but he'd let the threat decide that there was going to be a fight and he went with the threat's basic game plan. To my mind, that was absurd- there's only going to be a fight if I say so and on MY terms. Hence no fight.