Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected by Miller Rory

Author:Miller, Rory [Miller, Rory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: YMAA Publication Center
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5: THE FREEZE

Ralph was a veteran fighter, both skillful and experienced. Also a pretty nice guy with good awarenes and good verbal skills. As a sergeant he had excellent rapport with both inmates and other officers. He was just doing his job.

An inmate took his words, his expression, something as an insult. This was an inmate who had honed the blitz attack to a fine art. Ralph was hit three times before he was aware an assault was underway. Then his first instinct was to grab the Threat to try to slow down the situation and buy time to think.

It all ended well. There was a fair amount of blood, mostly from the Threat. Ralph’s injuries were cosmetic. The other 56 or 57 inmates watching chose not to get involved. Minor injuries all around.

The sergeant was mentally torturing himself for a long time. Because he froze. It wasn’t much of a freeze—three hits for an average blitz attack is less than half a second. He’d turn it over in his mind, wondering how he let his guard down and how the Threat had opportunity and why he didn’t see or feel it happening in time to react.

This is the thing, the difference between a fight and an assault, the victim is behind the curve, trying to play catch up, trying to figure out what the situation is and how to respond while the Threat is already well into the steps of his plan. This is where you start in an assault: fifteen points behind, halfway into the fourth quarter, and you don’t know if you’re playing basketball or football and you aren’t dressed for either game.

Because he’s done this for decades, Ralph thought he should have done better. He’s alive and mostly uninjured. The Threat was dragged away in cuffs. It honestly doesn’t end much better than that. But that freeze, that half-second, didn’t let him rest for a long time .

If you play with snakes long enough, you get bit. It’s natural. But the human animal has to ask “why me, why that time, why, why, why?” A skilled officer will prevent 99% of what could happen, but when that 1% breaks through, he can feel like a rookie all over again.

Ralph did well. We all hate it, but freezing is normal and natural, and bad guys rely on it, they expect it to last for the entire assault. Anyone who thinks they can’t be surprised or won’t freeze for an instant when they are caught off-guard is wrong.

Whether you did well in the counter-assault phase or not, the next thing you will do is freeze. If you are lucky or well-trained, the Operant Conditioning may have kicked-in and the Threat may be down, lying on the ground trying to figure out what just happened. If things didn’t go so well, you may be the one lying on the ground as boots slam into your ribs, wondering what just happened and trying to remember what to do next

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