We teach people this in the Active Shooter Response courses for when they are fleeing to escape and meet the law enforcement officers arriving at the scene. Make sure the police can see your hands. They don’t know who is a threat, and ensuring your hands are visible allows them to help discern you are one of the good guys. Police learn to watch the hands, and they are one of the first things a police officer will look at when doing a threat assessment.

If you can’t see the person’s hands, for whatever reason, pay closer attention as you assess the threat. Pay particular attention if it appears that the person is intentionally hiding his hands, or trying to prevent you from seeing something.

Hands In Pockets

The last time I visited the INS (Now called U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.) office it was chilly out and I was wearing a jacket. I nonchalantly placed my hand inside my jacket pocket and the security guard politely asked me to remove it. As a security professional myself, I understood his concern and immediately did as he asked. There was nothing to be upset over, he was polite and professional, and more than that, RIGHT. I should have known better.

If someone has there hands in their pockets, attempt to determine why. Is it cold out? Is it just the person’s habit? Are they concealing something? Are they reaching for a concealed weapon? Many times it is very difficult to tell the difference. Don’t be afraid to ask a person to remove their hands from their pockets if it is making you uncomfortable. Do just as the INS security guard did with me. You can’t watch the hands if you can’t see them. This goes for someone hiding their hands behind their back as well.

Body Language Cues

It can be beneficial to study body language and understand what certain signals might represent. Through our awareness, instincts and knowledge of body language, we can become better at threat recognition. We want to assess both verbal and physical cues of aggressive body language in conjunction with watching the hands. Most of the time one cue isn’t enough, unless that cue is a weapon aimed in your direction in his hand. It is the combination of different cues combined that alerts us to the potential threat. Once alerted, we can then act accordingly.

This article isn’t about body language, but it is definitely a topic you should study and practice. I find it has helped me with both security work and as a mediator. It is also useful for threat identification as a civilian. And besides all that, it is a fascinating topic that can be fun to practice when out “people watching.” I’ll put a couple of the resources I’ve studied at the bottom of the page.

Deception Drills

You can get with a training partner and do drills to enhance your perception and threat recognition skills. For example, one person will approach using some kind of distracting dialogue to divert his partner’s attention before drawing a weapon. See how quickly you recognize the threat and act.

Role play with your partner, giving body language cues that you must react to. Start slowly so you can begin to recognize what certain moves look like. For example, hide a training knife tucked into the waistband of your pants. Have your training partner recognize what it looks like as you go for the draw. This can be done hiding the knife in a variety of places and covered with a shirt, jacket, etc. The key is to learn the body language of a person presenting a weapon, and more importantly, what he does just before presenting the weapon.

As you get better at this, you can increase the speed to a more natural and realistic tempo. The goal is to get where you immediately go into action at the first sign your partner is reaching for a weapon. The specific action will be dependent on your training, and is beyond the scope of this article. The important point here is to act immediately upon threat recognition and that if you watch the hands and body language of your opponent, you can recognize the threat more quickly. Hopefully in time to do something about it.

A few of the resources I’ve studied that relate to this article:

Click to become a member of Survive and Defend for much more!

The post Watch the Hands – Threat Recognition appeared first on .