Shawn Vincent:
All right, gentlemen, we’re back at it. We’ve made it to Lesson 9 of the 36 Lessons for Armed Defenders. We’re going to be talking about situational awareness today, and for those who haven’t been following along episode by episode, and for the benefit of our special guests today, what we’ve done so far in the 36 lessons for armed defenders is we’ve established the legal thresholds. Well, first of all, we established the goal of self-defense, which we say, and Claude, I think you’re the one who taught me this, that the goal of self-defense is to break contact.
Claud Werner:
Exactly. That’s true. One of the few things I will take credit for.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. As early as I heard that, I decided that’s lesson number one. You got to keep that in mind. What we’re trying to do is end the confrontation and get away with the safest means possible with the least legal jeopardy. And so we hit that first, and then we hit get training, which is Steve hammers that into me all the time—that if you’re confident and competent, you can avoid so many circumstances. And then we get into, Don, the legal definition that the use of deadly force and self-defense is justified only when you face the imminent threat of great bodily harm or death at the hands of another. And Steve, Claude—tactically, that translates into: “Does the perceived attacker have the ability, the opportunity, and the intent to cause that great bodily harm or death?” And once we cover those bases, then what we do is we’ve moved into this tactical mindset portion of the discussion, which is framing this idea that there’s this window of justification that might open when you face that imminent threat, but close once either the intent or the opportunity or the ability of the attacker changes.
And then—knowing that self-defense and these life-or-death situations are so dynamic, and they change so quickly—the only way to adapt is to build as a discipline, as an armed defender, a mindset that’s going to guide your decisions. Here’s another quote from you, Claude. The best decisions tend to be made in advance. Yes. So we have to really think about these scenarios in advance so that when we see things crop up again, now that you’re here in front of me, I keep thinking of all your quotes. You can have a plan, and the generals will say that the plan, as soon as the first shot’s fired or the first punch is thrown, goes out the window. But if you have a plan that you can improvise from, you’re so much better off than just walking into a blind, right?
Claude Werner:
Right, exactly.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. So great. So now that we’ve led up to this and we’ve identified the jeopardy and the peril that an armed defender faces in these life and death circumstances, a foundation to this mindset is making sure that everywhere you go, whenever you go there—and especially if you’re carrying, and you are at that point an armed defender—that you’re maintaining situational awareness, that you’re looking out for the situation you’re in. So we’re going to dive into that in a minute, but before we do, Steve, for our listeners who haven’t met Claude yet and don’t know him, would you give him a brief introduction, and how you know Claude, and how you brought him to our podcast?
Steve Moses:
Oh, absolutely. I met Claude at least 20 years ago through one of the tactical conferences. I believe the one that I met him was held at what they refer to as “The Mothership in Memphis.” I sat in on one of his classes, and I realized, okay, this is a person I need to get to know, and I need to pick his brain whenever I can. So I just have kind of a cheat sheet here. So here you go. Retired Army captain with 10 years in special operations. Market research director for three commercial real estate firms, national director of real estate research at a big four accounting firm. His skills and ability to conduct research when he applies it to encounters in which persons were forced to defend themselves, he’s come up with some phenomenal statistics, and there’s a lot to learn about, okay: “How do these things typically take place?” This gives us an opportunity to kind of go ahead, play the what if game and speculate, okay, “How would I handle this?” And I think that’s of value. I don’t know anyone else that probably does this as well as Claude. He’s an IDPA area coordinator for Georgia and Alabama and …
Claude Werner:
Not anymore. I was at one time, but not anymore.
Steve Moses:
Okay. All right. Thank you for that correction. This is something that people who are very big into competitive shooting, defensive shooting … is at one time he had master ratings in the International Defense Pistol Association, in stock service pistol, stock service revolver, enhanced service pistol, custom defensive pistol. There’s probably only a handful of shooters out there that have all that. I mean, that is a very high level of competence. He’s an NRA-certified instructor, and he was a former chief instructor at the Rogers Shooting Skill. And the thing about Claude that I like is that every so many years, he appears at the tactical conference. He gives a great up-to-date presentation on things that are of tremendous use to armed defenders. And so that’s why it was really important to me that we invite him to come back, and I saw him at this year’s tactical conference, at which time I did exactly that.
Claude Werner:
And I appreciate the invite.
Shawn Vincent:
I was so glad you do. While you were explaining Claude’s military credentials, I was overtalking. Claude, would you flesh us in there briefly your military experience?
Claude Werner:
I started out as an enlisted man. I was with the 101st Airborne Division as an infantryman when it was still an airborne division—giving my age away there a little bit. Transferred to the Rangers, went from there to Special Forces. In Special Forces, I was a team commander, operations and intelligence NCO, an intelligence officer, and went up through command and general staff college as an officer. So both on the ground and at a theoretical level, the government invested a lot of money, time, and effort in training me. And that’s one of the things that I try to bring to the community … is to give the benefit of that back to people who haven’t had the opportunity to do that like I did.
Shawn Vincent:
I like that you made a difference between the on-the-ground, which I’m going to read as a tactical expression of this knowledge, and the theoretical expression of the knowledge. I like to quote the joke about the University of Chicago since you mentioned your time in Chicago. Their physics department, the joke is: “Sure, it works in practice, but doesn’t work in theory?” One thing I’m trying to do with these gentlemen and the Armed Defender’s Dilemma is … there’s a lot of conversation about what is good advice for self-defense, but we go, I think this speaks to your tactical professor side of things, your statistical analysis. I don’t really care what people think. I care about what jurors would think. I care about outcomes, and what we’re trying to do is look at real-life situations and say, “Did this outcome, was this good for the defender or bad for the defender? And what can we learn from that? ” Steve, this is something that I think I was subconsciously aware of but didn’t have a term for it until you introduced me to the concept. So I’d love for you to describe what situational awareness means to you, and then we’ll throw it over to Claude to respond to that.
Steve Moses:
Well, to me, situational awareness means that I have proactively checked in and I am aware of what is taking place in my surroundings, and I’m especially looking for anomalies, whether that’s something that’s happening that shouldn’t be happening or something that should be happening that’s not. And for me, it is something that I make that commitment, I’m going to live my life and that condition doesn’t mean I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean I’m always amped up to the same level, but if something happens that sends off this little, what they might say, that spidey sense, that little tingling that, man, things aren’t right, well then I am prepared to focus in on that and do whatever it takes to either say, “Okay, that’s not an issue.” Or if I think it might be erring on the side of caution and act upon it, which in many instances means let’s not go there. It’s time to leave, or we need to prepare to perhaps go to something greater than just physical presence. We may need to deal with this person, but the whole time, my objective is to, first break contact, and if that’s not possible, force the other person to break contact
Shawn Vincent:
Well, since you took … It’s so funny, Claude, we joke in this industry for the training industry that everyone plagiarizes from everybody, but I’m confident also that breaking contact is a goal of self-defense is yours. So take that and springboard off of what Steve said and flesh out this idea of situational awareness for me.
Claude Werner:
One of the things that I find very useful from my military background is a concept of what we called area of interest and area of influence. So area of interest is the area beyond you where you can be influenced by the enemy’s weapons. And once again, I’m sticking … Let’s just put this initially in the military. It’s a common metaphor. Sure. Right. So area of interest, I can be influenced by the enemy’s weapons. Area of influence, I can influence the enemy with my weapons. So when I translate that into the private sector, I think about my less as weapons and more as tools. Now we have weapons that are tools, but we also have other tools that we can use, especially in our area of influence, such as our voice, body posture. I had a girlfriend who one time said to me, “Nobody’s going to mess with you. You look mean.” And I was like, “I don’t look mean.” But I realized what she was talking about was my resting bitch face that … it’s just when I’m out, I’m looking around and seeing what’s going on, and my face is kind of neutral in that regard. I think I’m neither … not antagonistic and I’m not welcoming on either end of it. It’s just I’m very neutral because, as another girlfriend said, she goes, “When I look at you, I can tell you’re thinking all the time, and it’s kind of scary.” I love that. And I think that that influences people around us. So that’s one of the tools that I am perfectly willing to use. If someone’s a predator, I hate to say it, but sometimes I would rather they look at me and go, “There’s something about him I don’t like. I like the idea of that girl in the flip flops over there better.” So that’s the way I …
Shawn Vincent:
You’re deselecting yourself as the target.
Claude Werner:
Exactly. I’m influencing the deselection decision.
Shawn Vincent:
I’m lucky I have this face because, to that point, I was in Houston one time, and I saw a guy kind of look at me, and I was wearing a suit. I was walking from court, but I was in the sketchy part of town, which I didn’t realize, and he was about to approach me and be like, “Hey, can I ask you a question? Can I get some whatever?” And I just looked at him and I just did a little … And with my eyebrows and my beard, that was enough to let him know that I was onto him, and I’m just not your guy right now, but I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t already been sort of on alert and I was managing my contacts and paying attention to what’s around me.
Claude Werner:
Exactly. So then what you have is sort of an overlap of your area of interest where, as you said, you were aware of him and saw his approach, and then by virtue of your body language, your facial expression … and I teach my students, take your hand and just put it up in the stop sign gesture. People get that, and when they don’t, then the FBI calls that a clue that they’ve got something going on. So that, again, is another one of our tools that we use in our area of influence. And the area of influence from the standpoint of the science of proxemics, probably in the non-lethal tool area, probably extends out to about 25 feet. So really, the way we want to think about this is: where do people start to come?
And as my colleague Craig Douglas puts it, situational awareness is a noun. How do you do a noun? And I think that’s one of the things that we have not done in the industry well enough. We teach people how to be great marksmen, but not so much about actually what are the physical steps that you use to dissuade a predator before being a marksman is necessary. And that’s one of the things that I try to emphasize when I’m teaching people is things like, see what’s going on around you to emphasize what Steve said, see what’s going on around you. I like to think of it as, “What’s wrong in my right world?” and then influence what that person’s decision is and cause the deselection to take place, where they’re just going to decide either I’m not going to do anything today … I think in a lot of cases predators are opportunistic and they realize, well, there just might not be anything going on today. It’s like a salesman that, well, I don’t make a sale today. Okay. And in other cases, they recognize, well, I’m still working today, so I’m going to go work on somebody else, and that’s really what I want them to do is go, whatever they’re going to go do, go and do it somewhere else. And I think that’s, as you mentioned with breaking contact, that’s our goal. Just go somewhere else. I don’t care. I just don’t want you around me.
Shawn Vincent:
Let me get it right. So we’re talking about, you’ve introduced two concepts to me that are related. There’s area of awareness and area of influence or area of-
Claude Werner:
Area of influence and area of interest.
Shawn Vincent:
Of area interest because this reminds me of, I had this circumstance where I was driving some rural highways, I was starting to get low on gas, I needed some gas. I finally found a gas station, and I’m pulling in, but I noticed that there’s a fellow there who’s dirty, and he’s got a backpack on, and he’s got, actually, a knife in a sheath dangling from the backpack. And I hate to admit this, but if it hadn’t been for all the work I’d done with CCW Safe and all these conversations, I would have thought, “Well, I need gas. I’m going to stop here. I hope this guy doesn’t come in and accost me, and I don’t have to deal with him.” Because of all of this work that I’ve done with you fellas, I thought, “I don’t need to get gas here. I don’t need to even open up the door that I’m going to be having to deal with this guy.” And that was, as you say, somewhere around, for me it was in the car, 25 to 50 feet I was able to, he entered in my area of …
Claude Werner:
Interest.
Shawn Vincent:
I’m going to say it wrong again. Yeah, my area of interest. He was in my area of interest. I didn’t like him. And so, before I allowed myself to become inside his area of influence, I decided I had another 15 miles before I needed gas, really, and I could pick another choice.
Claude Werner:
Exactly. Perfect example.
Shawn Vincent:
Don, this is, I think, the deepest we’ve gotten into a podcast without hearing from you. We’re almost 20 minutes in.
Don West:
That’s fine. My goal today, frankly, since we have the esteemed Claude Werner with us and, complimented by the esteemed Steve Moses diagonally on my screen, I thought I would just kind of sit here and look pretty today, but …
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, that’s great. When I edit these podcasts, I have everybody’s audio signatures as, I think at this point, most people are familiar with what that looks like, and everyone has a color. The podcast where I have the smallest bits of audio signature I consider my best podcasts. I’m failing terribly today. But Don, we talk about situational awareness, and these are mindset tools that can help keep armed defenders out of trouble, to avoid situations before they even get close to the point where a lethal force would be contemplated. The law does not require armed defenders to maintain such an awareness in order to file or to have a valid self-defense claim to be considered by a jury, a prosecutor, or some other decider of fact. But boy, if you can demonstrate that the defender had been paying attention, that sure helps, doesn’t it, from a legal defense point of view?
Don West:
I think you’ve hit on something very important there because while the moment that the decision to use deadly force is made may focus primarily on what’s happening at that second or two surrounding that—if you have situational awareness, that essentially is just doing some stuff that keeps you from being caught off guard, then you have a lot more time and a lot more options and something as simple as seeing the shady character at the gas station and deciding not to get out of the car then puts you in a much better situation if this guy comes up to the car and becomes aggressive. You’re already aware of this guy, you’ve already made some decisions on how to stay away from him and how to be more safe. Likewise, in virtually any scenario, if you’re in a parking lot or in a bar and you get that sense that there might be something wrong here, and instead of ignoring it or disregarding it in the sense that you just keep on trucking, then you have put yourself in a better situation to make better decisions if you are forced to do it.
I think your premise is absolutely correct legally, but we all know from looking at the cases we’ve looked at, and talking to the experts, that the best legal decision isn’t necessarily the best practical decision, and we all know that the goal of breaking contact and avoidance is the one that is the absolute safest way to navigate a potential self-defense scenario.
Shawn Vincent:
I’d rather be not guilty on the ground, Claude, than not guilty in theory.
Claude Werner:
Yeah, exactly.
Shawn Vincent:
So here: I briefed you guys on a couple of the cases that I wanted to talk about today, and Claude, I know you’re familiar with a couple of these. So I want to dive into … I want to get on the ground and see some real-life scenarios, and we can kind of walk them through, and this first case I’m going to bring up, you know about Claude. This is one of the top three touchstone cases that we talk about in the Armed Defender’s Dilemma and that is the Michael Drejka case—that’s the Clearwater parking lot shooter case for anyone who was paying attention a few years ago when this hit the news. I’ll paint the scenario real quick. Michael Drejka, he’s got a pet peeve about people parking in handicapped parking spots. Britany Jacobs, with some of her kids and her partner, Markis McGlockton, they do.
They park in this handicap parking spot. She’s in the car, standing as they call it, while he goes in the store with his five-year-old son. Drejka picks an argument with her. So it’s not a physical confrontation. He’s three to five feet away from the car window. The car window’s open. He’s given her the business for parking in the handicapped spot. McGlockton comes out, sees him, and doesn’t like that he’s giving his girl the business. He walks up to him, oh gosh, maybe 15, 20 yards, and then shoves Drejka to the ground. Drejka had no idea what hit him. He tumbles over on his butt. He sees this big guy who’s coming back towards him. Drejka pulls his pistol, draws it. Our listeners know McGlockton sort of changes his posture, takes a couple of steps back. Drejka fires is a single fatal shot. Whether at that point it was justified or not is for a different conversation on another day—we’ve already had those conversations. But what I want to throw to you, Claude, is: “Shame on Drejka for being caught completely unaware in that circumstance.” Is that unfair criticism?
Claude Werner:
No, especially because of the fact that, really, he was doing the confrontation at that point. It’s really easy to become, especially when you have an emotional issue, which, obviously, in his case, for whatever reason, he had this emotional issue with people parking in handicap spots. It’s easy to get bound up in that and then focus your attention on the object of your attention, if you will. And another one of Craig Douglas’s techniques is when he’s talking to someone that he’s having, if you will, a field interview with, which is how I like to think about that, why are you parking in this parking spot? Well, that’s a field interview. He’ll actually move …
Shawn Vincent:
Sure. And for those who don’t know, Craig was an undercover narcotics cop for a long time. So, field interview, I like that.
Claude Werner:
Yeah. So what Craig will actually do is move his body sideways. So then his peripheral vision starts to see things around him in case that person has a friend coming up on him, just exactly as occurred with Michael Drejka. So simply somehow changing our physical stance, and it’s interesting to me how often I’ve seen where a small change in posture, stance, or some other physical attribute kind of alters the situation for both people. In that case, you can say that if Drejka had moved himself in such a way that he could perceive the Markeis, I believe his name was, coming up on him. If he had seen him where he could see that he was coming up on him, for one thing, that would have then clued him that I am not alone in this or the object of my affection is not alone in this situation, but also it sends a message to the other person, “I’ve been seen.” And when people who are in that aggressive mode, when they realize they’ve been seen, it changes the dynamic somewhat. It won’t necessarily stop it, but it very often causes a pause, which then in John Boyd’s OODA analysis, which I like to call Boyd’s Process, gives you an opportunity to then initiate your own action that’s a counter to what they’ve done by inducing that pause to them, if that makes sense.
Shawn Vincent:
But would you say what that stands for? What does the OODA stand for …
Claude Werner:
We Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. And that whole concept had been so butchered by the community, which Steve, I think you were at my presentation this year at the tactical conference where I spent two hours dispelling all of the popular myths about what John Boyd said versus what he actually said, but that goes John Boyd’s one of his main concepts and the first one that he actually wrote about was the idea of planning in advance to deal with situations that we might anticipate as you were talking about earlier, Shawn. So in the case of any of these things, what we might plan in advance is maybe, if I get into a confrontation, follow Craig’s protocol and maybe just move myself around a little bit so that I have a chance to look in other areas or at least our peripheral vision, we’re not necessarily looking in other areas, but we become aware of them, and we see movement in them and that can be very useful in a lot of circumstances where there are two parties involved.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, you mentioned a couple of key terms in this, and you mentioned the word pause, and this was famously the case where the sheriff of Pinellas County noticed that when Drejka pulled the firearm and pointed it at Markeis, that he paused before he fired. So he was in that observe, orient, decide, act loop. And so he observed that Makeis was stepping back, he I think failed to reorient himself to the situation and decided to do the action that he had already went to start, and then executed that action. And the jury held, they basically said he had the opportunity not to shoot him, and he didn’t take it, but to go back and, Don, we talk about this all the time, that there’s this decision made before the decision to use deadly force that makes all the difference in these cases, to go back to that OODA loop.
If he had, side of his eye, seen McGlockton coming out and moving towards him and did that, put his little hand up and step back from Brtany, now he’s just given McGlockton something to observe and an opportunity to reorient and decide to take a different action. And that may have alone, because until McGlockton pushed Drejka to the ground, there was no interrupter to his decision that he had already made to push him. A change in posture, being seen, being acknowledged, now all of a sudden would reframe the whole confrontation before Drejka is on his butt thinking I got to shoot this guy.
Steve Moses:
Man, that was a brilliant observation by Claude. I’ve done some training under Craig, and much of the stuff that I’ve learned under Craig, I teach that to my students. In terms of Drejka’s positioning to … I believe her name was Britany, is that correct?
Shawn Vincent :
Britanyy Jacobs, yes.
Steve Moses:
Britany Jacobs. So I think of it as Drejka’s at the six o’clock position and Britany’s at the 12 o’clock position. Now, if Draca had done this: moved around to the three o’clock position, because that doorway was off to the left, basically, he could have actually had his eyes on her as well as the eyes on an area from which a threat would come. So we teach people, if you’re involved in a shooting, rather than stand there and just fixate on the threat, if you do basically the same thing, move either to a three o’clock position or a six o’clock position, you can both keep your eyes on that person that you just dealt with and also pick up on anybody or anything that might’ve been approaching from what otherwise would’ve been your back.
Claude Werner:
Exactly.
Shawn Vincent:
To how we prefaced this conversation—that means thinking about that kind of thing in advance and especially if you’re going to … It’s one thing just navigating a parking lot at a gas station, but if you’re going to deliberately start an encounter with somebody, then that you have to be prepared right off the bat to broaden your perspective if you feel like it’s an engagement you have to enter into.
Steve Moses:
Well, about the only way to do that, I think, consistently, is to incorporate that into your training. Thank you. Thank
Claude Werner:
Thank you, Steve. That was exactly what I was going to say.
Steve Moses:
So it’s just your default. Okay. It’s down, I move. It’s down, I move. Now, if you’re in a class, of course, it’s very, very difficult to do because everybody’s on the same line, but there’s no reason if you’re out at a range, in which it’s not like an indoor range, it’s something where you can move even a little bit, then this is how you default to that stuff. So it’s just like, okay, well, okay, I’m going to default to a reload. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. Also, move. And the other thing is, it works not only well after being involved with a person, it works if you’re having to hold someone at gunpoint, which may very well be the case, could be that, yeah, we’d like them to leave, but they’re not able to leave, but they’re still potentially a threat. Or I want to make sure that I don’t get attacked by a tailgunner, but in our world, also being concealed carriers, I don’t want to be shot by some well-intentioned carrier or police officer with poor judgment and good aim.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. Claude, since you mentioned that the training part was exactly what you were thinking. Do you want to add anything that you said about that?
Claude Werner:
One of the things that I emphasize in my training is training is, and I stole this from Ken Hackathorn, training is merely to give you an idea of what you should practice. And so in this sense, like when I get into my car, I don’t walk up to my car, just unlock it, open the door, and get in. I will actually do exactly what I described with moving from three o’clock or to nine o’clock just real briefly. So I’m used to the idea of moving my feet when I’m in some positions that I might ordinarily just think about, focusing on going forward into the 12 o’clock. And where I work, I work until 10 o’clock at night. So the parking lot, I’m in a parking lot. It’s not particularly dark, but it’s not crowded and that’s one of the things that I do is I walk up to the car and look around me when I get it and I unlock it before I get in, because what I don’t want to do is get in and then suddenly have some predator beam down from the starship Enterprise and appear right next to my door with a gun pointing at me. If I see him, once again, if I’m observing my area of interest, then around, then he does not have the opportunity to spring upon me. And I stole that analogy of “beam down from the starship Enterprise” from Tom Givens, who uses that as an example of how most people treat the fact that a predator has come up on them unexpectedly.
Shawn Vincent:
That’s great. And I think it was Tom Givens who told me that everyone in this industry plagiarizes from everyone else.
Claude Werner:
I just like to acknowledge who I plagiarize it from.
Shawn Vincent (00:36:05):
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s going to be my whole book—is going to be stealing other people’s good ideas and giving them credit for it, one quote at a time. But yeah, so for Michael Drejka, it was as if Karkeis McGlockton had been beamed next to him, and he faced it. So let’s flip that. That’s a great transition because I wanted to talk about the Kristen McMain’s case with you guys. And this is a case that I’m sort of loath to criticize the defender because this is a woman, a young woman who was attacked by a hardened criminal and fought her way out of it and succeeded. Now her gun misfired, and she ended up having to rip all of her fingernails off to fight this attacker that she had already, I think, shot twice to get him to give up the attack and leave, where he was later arrested and prosecuted, and he’s in prison now.
So a triumph of her spirit, and her grit, and her determination and willingness to defend herself, but there are always lessons to be learned, and here’s where I want to go: I’ll give you the scenario real quick. Kristen McMains, she’s in her early mid 20s. She’s an attorney, a young attorney working at this firm. She leaves a little late from the office building. There’s a skybridge that goes across the street to a parking garage that services access to this office building. While on the skybridge, she notices … she thinks some guy’s following her … he’s a little creepy. She gets the elevator to go to her proper floor in a parking garage. The guy joins her at the elevator, doors opened up. They both step in, she hits her floor, he does nothing. And she said afterwards that when she saw that he didn’t push a button, she knew she was in trouble.
They go up to her floor, the door’s open. She immediately runs towards her car. He runs after. She gets caught in, sort of this famous situation where she’s trying to get in her car, and the guy catches up to her. He shoves her into the passenger seat. He’s going to drive her away to someplace. She fakes like she’s going to give him money, is able to get her off-body carry gun out of her purse. It misfires. She manages to clear that, shoots twice. Then it’s this melee I described. Here’s the point. When it comes to situational awareness, she had suspicions that this guy wasn’t right. You had a great term, but she didn’t fit into her world or something, right?
Claude Werner:
He was wrong in her right world.
Shawn Vincent:
He was absolutely wrong in her right world, and she knew it, or she at least felt it intuitively on the skybridge. And with the caveat, we say this is a triumphant story of someone who had the grit and tenacity to save herself and to come out on top—without legal consequences, by the way. She could have pretended like she had forgotten something in her office and just walked back on the skybridge. There were people that way. Situational awareness does us no good if we don’t respond to it.
Claude Werner:
And if we don’t train ourselves to do exactly what you said and simply turn around, this is one of the things that I learned in basic training that I have found one of the most useful things that I’ve used in my life in terms of personal protection: rear march. I can turn on the balls of my feet and just walk the opposite direction very easily, and without thinking twice about it. In fact, a friend of mine, Brian Hill, says, “I can instantly tell somebody who has police or military training simply by the way they walk and turn direction.” And that’s another thing we don’t do in training very much, which is to teach people, “Look, just turn around and go the other way.” And as you say, it was truly a triumph for that young lady, and she could have made it even more of a triumph if she had just turned around and gone back to her building.
So that’s a very useful skill. And once again, it’s something that is not just training, but it’s practice. I’ve done so much close order drill … turning right and left into the rear, and it’s been very useful because I could just pivot my direction. Going back to the Draca case, doing that kind of a pivot is very natural to me simply because I practiced it so much.
Shawn Vincent:
Did you call that a reverse march?
Claude Werner:
Rear march. In the army, it’s rear march.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. Yeah. I like that because there’s sort of a pride obstacle to suggesting to concealed carriers that they retreat, but a rear march, I think we can sell better. So it’s good PR for us. It’s a good branding.
Steve Moses:
Shawn, something we’ve talked about in a recent podcast, also, is the value of suddenly walking away from a potential threat in terms of discerning whether or not they had evil intent or not, just disambiguating the circumstances. And I think that’s something that once you say, “Okay, if I turn and this person suddenly tries to cut me off, that’s not normal. And so now it is time to, what are my options for a response? And if I act upon that, I need to see what their response is. ” And I think one of the things where Drejka really made a big mistake was in terms of situational awareness, he was not aware, or he did not act upon the thought that Markeis took a step back and he did a rear march.
Claude Werner:
Right. Yes.
Shawn Vincent:
And he responded to it properly. And so Don, from a legal standpoint, here’s one thing I’m thinking about. All these tactics that Claude and Steve are talking about, if Drejka, for instance, had said, “You know what? I saw Markeis come out of the store, and I put my hand up, and I stepped backwards, but he kept coming at me anyway after I knew he saw me. And even when I stepped backwards, he still came up to me and pushed me down. If he were able to articulate that in his legal defense, he would have been on much better standing, right?
Don West:
Yes. I think you’ve used the word before, haven’t you? Disambiguate …
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. If Claude gets break contact, I want disambiguate.
Don West:
Yeah. I think that was all of that mixed into that one thing, that Drejka was completely caught off guard because his focus was on Britany. He didn’t see McGlockton coming, and he was way too late to react to McGlockton when he got right up on him. So everything he did was after the fact of him being pretty viciously and violently battered and knocked to the ground. So he was clearly on the defensive in the true sense of the word from that moment. He had no opportunity to exercise better judgment and be more proactive in protecting himself.
I like the idea of the situational awareness you’re talking about, just being more aware of your surroundings in a situation where your focus may be on one person, but you don’t want to get so wrapped up into that moment that you aren’t aware that there may be friends or relatives or interested strangers coming and injecting themself into this. I believe, Shawn, you’re exactly right. Had Drejka seen him coming and simply taken a step back or two and held up his hand, I think just from what I know, having watched a lot of the trial and having watched the video 50 times or so, that McGlockton’s clear interest was separating Draca from Britany, and that as soon as Drejka backed away, and got away, and was no longer confronting his fiancée, then I think from McGlockton’s eyes, the situation was largely deescalated as well.
I think he just got there because he saw them basically nose to nose, even though it was Drejka outside the car, and that he just wouldn’t put up with that. So I think Drejka made a mistake in being an easier victim than he needed to be of McGlockton’s assault, but he also contributed, I think, to the way McGlockton was viewing it by not being aware of McGlockton’s presence and taking some steps to retreat—the rear march. Let’s not forget that we don’t know as much as we think we do about this because McGlockton was absolutely blitzed on drugs. So we don’t know how his thinking would have been, but he didn’t act as if he were completely incapacitated or psychotic, but we do know from the toxicology that he had a substantial amount of intoxicants in his system, which is even-
Shawn Vincent:
But if Drejka had made those steps, the jury would have had a better understanding of what his thinking was, if they had seen it, and he could articulate it.
Don West:
Well, isn’t that the key, I think, to self-defense is that you have to be able to explain what your thinking was at the moment and the more you do to put yourself in a situation where you were exercising better judgment, being cautious, being conservative in the way that you were acting, you’re in a much better position for the jury to want to give you that break. And I think Drejka did so much wrong, he took the chance he had away from the jury to want to cut him a break in that situation.
Shawn Vincent:
We just talked about Kristen McMains, which is a triumphant self-defense story, and we’re going to go to another one where the armed defender was legally justified, and his use of force of deadly force was understandable. Did you have something to add Don?
Don West:
I was just thinking since we’re talking about that parking lot case, I’m interested to know from Claude and Steve, it seems to me that part of training might or should include how to get people that are trying to improve their own self-defense skill, not to worry about being rude to people in a situation because she could have been wrong, she could have been completely wrong and said something or backed away and she may very well have been afraid of offending someone. I know even if it wasn’t exactly that scenario, I think lots of people are hesitant to tell someone to back off or to do something that’s perceived as rude because …
Shawn Vincent:
When you say “she,” you mean Kristen McMains?
Don West:
Yeah. Or anybody in a similar situation, they don’t want to make the other person feel uncomfortable because they’re not completely sure that they’re right that this person is a threat, so they’re confused and don’t act when … I think Steve, if you can train someone, put the hand up, walk out, say, “Get back.” And if you’re completely wrong, you just apologize and laugh it off. But if you’re right, then you’ve taken an affirmative step that may very well save you.
Steve Moses :
Well, I tell you what, I’m a huge advocate of what I learned from Craig Douglas in his Managing Unknown Contacts class. There’s a lot of instructors that have trained under people like him and Claude, Paul Sharp, Cecil Birch and others in terms of Chuck Haggard of, okay, if I am confronted by someone that I think might be dangerous or, “Hey, it’s just not safe to let this person come up.” In many instances, just simply walking away and saying, “Sorry, I can’t help you. ” And if they continue to encroach upon you or move towards you, you contend … you doing that arc, increasing distance, and then saying something to the effect of, “You need to stay back.” And then finally, if they haven’t reacted favorably to any of those, then you hit them hard with a real guttural from the diaphragm: “Stay back. And I’m talking about yelling literally at the top of your lungs. I mean, I bring it from the diaphragm. And so if you have something like this that is a script, and we did discuss that at one time with Craig Douglas, that’s a very good way, but just simply starting off as, “Sorry, I can’t help you, ” is a good way of initiating that break in contact. What do you think, Claude?
Claude Werner:
Well, Don, to your point, several of my students have commented, “Claude gives people the permission to be rude.” And I do it all the time, actually had a very formative moment in my thoughts about that when I was at Deloitte, that there had been an incidence of several car breakins at the parking lot across the street from our building, and Deloitte is a very good firm and so what they … to allay people’s fears, they hired a pretty competent self-defense instructor to come in in the evening for about four weeks. I think we did it once a week or twice a week. And so finally he took us out to the parking garage and had us do a very scripted role play of … he was going to approach us and we were supposed to tell him, “Stop, don’t come any closer.” And there were a little over a dozen people in the class, and initially, I was the only person who was able to do that because they’re all nice people—they’re accountants, secretaries, and they just weren’t used to being rude to somebody and saying, “Stop, don’t come any closer.” And actually, that was my nickname in the firm for about six months afterwards, where people would just laugh about that, that I could do it and they couldn’t.
But eventually, after an amount of rehearsal, they could. And I started taking that into my classes and just teaching people, “Look, this is something you have to be able to do. ” So to your point, yes, I think that’s very important that we teach people at times to make someone else feel uncomfortable or to go back to Kristen McMains.
Let’s throw a little bit more back into this with the military intelligence term of intelligence preparation of the battlefield. There are points on the ground where the enemy has to make a decision ahead of time, or it has to make a decision about which direction they’re going to go, especially when you’re dealing with armored vehicles in Europe, there are places you can take them and places you can’t. So when you analyze this on a map, it’s called a decision point, and that was always very important to me to look at that. And I think about it now in our context of how do we force the decision point on the situation where it’s to our advantage as opposed to the predators. So in Kristen’s case, forcing the decision point on the skybridge as opposed to at her car changes the whole dynamic because, if it’s out on the skybridge, well, people can see it. People are nearby. In the garage, not so much. There, she’s decisively engaged and has to fight the engagement to a conclusion by herself.
Shawn Vincent:
And you have to maintain situational awareness so you can even recognize where decision points might be.
Claude Werner:
Right, exactly.
Don West :
Yeah. Which, of course, we’re talking about some very sort of detailed, even nuanced situations that people are trying to interpret and respond to appropriately and within social conventions when they can, and that sort of thing. But I never had the problem when I was growing up of having my face in a cell phone. I would daydream a lot and people would accuse me of not paying attention, but I didn’t have all of those ongoing distractions that seemed to be a very fundamental level of how people can improve the likelihood of them making good decisions is simply, Claude, I’m sure when you walk up to your car and you’re looking at the three o’clock and the six o’clock positions to be sure that you’re safe with your next decision point, you’re not with your face in your phone or doing something that is consuming all of your attention.
Claude Werner:
I put my phone in my sling bag before I walk out of work, and I don’t take it out until I’m in the car and I’ve actually moved it slightly across the parking lot. Then I take it out in case I … And I recognize the fact that the cell phone may be useful to me in my car, if nothing else, to take a picture of the license plate of somebody that came speeding through the parking lot and crashed into the rear of my car, and then was uninsured and drove off. Ask me if that’s actually a personal experience.
Steve Moses:
Hey, Don, something I might throw in is that particular script that we teach—I have actually used that multiple times down in East Dallas and some of the more low-income areas. And if you do that almost every time when someone is coming up and trying to approach, and you say, “Sorry, I can’t help you, ” they almost always, especially if they’re a panhandler, they’re going to keep pushing. And what I’ve found is just as soon as I say, “You need to stay back,” the majority of them break off, and only once or twice have I had to go ahead and go to just full bellow.
But the other thing that I think is really important is that people that are going to try to use these, you need to come up with a script if you will, that’s not personal and you can actually disrespect a person to the extent, most especially if they’re in others where they were only going to try to hassle you to a certain amount to that point, okay, they have no choice but to defend your honor. And so you’d be basically created a combative situation between the two of you when it was really not necessary.
Don West:
Good point.
Shawn Vincent:
That’s fascinating. You know what worked for me one time in Boulder, Colorado, under a bridge where some vagrants were. Someone came up to me in a sort of conversation. I just pointed to my headphones and said, “I’m trying to concentrate.” And that ended the conversation, and they put their hands up and apologized for interrupting me. There are some other cases that we could have talked about, but I think we hit all the big lessons in what we covered so far. And I just want to mention this: my work as a legal consultant is divided between civil plaintiff’s law, which deals a lot with liability and negligence that big companies do. And then the other part is split to defending armed defenders in self-defense cases. And I find the two have amazing overlaps because there’s contributory negligence in plaintiff’s law, and we’re always pointing out things that a big company could have and should have done differently to protect their workers or passersby or whoever is affected.
And when they fail to do things that are clear, obvious steps that would produce a better outcome, then we can really put them on the line for millions and millions of dollars. And so what that causes me to do … like there is a Publix grocery store that I can see from my office. I go often to get a salad for lunch, and there’s this little indentation of a parking lot where it’s a shorter walk for me, but to do it, I walk behind some parked cars. And I know that at any given moment, there could be someone in that car that backs out and could hit me. And so I take an extra eight seconds, I think, Claude, to walk around to the front of the car and go in front of them instead of behind them. And this is the most minute decision, but I was walking in front of one of these cars not long ago and the car backed out and the person was distracted, and if I had been on the other side of it, they would have hit me and they would have technically been at fault. But wouldn’t I really have been at fault because I know better? I knew better, and I did something that was slightly inconvenient for me on a minuscule basis to avoid what could have been a catastrophic consequence for me that could have changed my life and theirs
Claude Werner:
That is an example of intelligence preparation of the battlefield. You’ve looked at the battle space to see what the danger areas are, and you’ve plotted your route to make sure that you’re not going through them to the extent that you possibly can. Sometimes that’s not possible, but as you say in your case, well, it’s an eight-second difference that eliminates that possibility of injury to me, and to me that’s a positive outcome.
Don West:
Hey, Shawn, I call bullshit on just a small part of that story, and that is …
Shawn Vincent):
It’s a salad, isn’t it?
Don West (00:59:38):
It is.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. I go other places for the burgers, tacos, and fries. Publix is for the salad, but that’s fair, that’s fair. I’ll tell you, when it comes to that, Don’s traveled with me a lot, and when I eat fast food, I have a tendency to get two cheeseburgers from whatever the fast food restaurant is. We were doing a self-defense immunity hearing with a colleague and friend of ours, and we went to a Burger King, and the Burger King had this “double baconater”—this gigantic burger. We were going to order one for our colleague. I ordered two, and Don leaned over and he said, “Hey, remember you were going to get one for Mike.” I said, “Don, I love that you know me well enough to know when I order two double cheeseburgers that you assume both of them are for me. ” All that said, we’ve been talking for a little bit more than an hour now, and that’s about all I can ask our listeners to tolerate when it comes to the self-defense analysis.
I learned more than I even bargained for today, but Don, before I go, while we have Claude here, did you have anything you wanted to ask him or anything you wanted him to expound upon or just anything you wanted to underscore about what he’s taught us today for our listeners?
Don West (01:01:16):
Well, I think the part of it to underscore, and I hope Claude will expand just a little bit more before we finish is as we begin to appreciate the importance of situational awareness … that it’s probably not that hard, but you just have to discipline yourself to think about it, put it in your daily routine, make it part of your life and pretty soon with enough practice you’ll get better and better at it. And then I’m expecting, speculating, there will be a point in time where you surprise yourself when you aren’t as aware as you had been. And that doesn’t take time at the range. It doesn’t take money. It just takes concentration, focus, and priorities, it seems to me.
Claude Werner:
Yeah, absolutely true. It’s just a question of practicing it on a daily basis. I would draw the analogy to working out a little bit every day or every other day as opposed to having one big workout at the gym once a month. It really doesn’t help you. And that is one of the issues with that distinction between what I call training and practice when people think, “Well, I’ve gone on, I’ve taken a class, and that’s good, but you need to practice what you’ve learned at the class. And when you listen to something like this, think about, okay: “What’s my takeaways from this and how do I incorporate those into my everyday life?” And I think that’s an important part of what we in the training community would like to impart to people, and the part that will give our students and our clients a better chance for a positive outcome.
Shawn Vincent:
Steve, is there anything that you were hoping that we’d get from Claude today on this that we didn’t answer anything you’d like to reinforce?
Steve Moses:
No, I thought he did a phenomenal job, and I was excited to get him on again, and of course, he proved me correct by making that suggestion. One of the things that a lot of us don’t realize is that we’ve probably had more saves because we use situational awareness than we were aware of. And that persons that were speculating on doing a victim interview took one look at us and said, “Not that one.” And that’s kind of what we want to do. This all sounds great. We want to be prepared for that day that we hope that never comes, but by the same token, being situationally aware the majority of the time will maybe perhaps keep that day from ever coming around.
Claude Werner:
Absolutely true.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah, that’s funny, because I know you study statistics and you study a whole bunch of encounters, and one thing I’ve had people ask me about is, like: why don’t you talk about more cases that went well? And it’s because they’re not controversial and they don’t show up in the news very often.
Claude Werner:
Exactly.
Shawn Vincent:
And also to Steve’s point, the cases that went really well never happened because they were avoided in the first place.
Claude Werner (01:04:54):
And I’ve been cited in two amicus briefs to federal court, and both, oddly enough, both on the pro-gun control and on the against gun control side. And one of the things that I had to put in a rebuttal to everyone’s petition to the court was that my analyses don’t include any negative outcomes that aren’t reported because nothing happened. They’re all positive examples of shootings that took place as opposed to the … And oddly enough, I was talking with John Hearn just yesterday about this, that out of defensive gun uses, somewhere between ten and 100 occur that don’t involve any shooting for everyone that does. It depends on the statistics you want to choose, but when we have something that doesn’t occur, yeah, just as you said, Shawn, it’s not in the news, nothing happened, there’s nothing newsworthy about it, so it just gets swept under the bridge, but it’s a safe.
