How to Stay Safe In a Hostage Situation

The chances you will become a hostage are remote.

On the other hand, if a café in Sydney can become the site of a hostage crisis that’s watched by the world so could a coffee shop in Topeka, Kansas or a library in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin.

Zealots of all stripes and what law-enforcement officers call “lone wolf terrorists” may decide to seek attention for their causes anywhere, at any time. Bank robbers and other criminals confronted by police may think they can bargain their way to freedom if they hold the innocents around them at gunpoint. Emotional disorders may lead others to commit similar acts. As CNN Security Analyst Juliette Kayyem put it this morning, “There’s no shortage of sociopaths and no shortage of soft targets.”

Here are some thoughts on how to react if you are taken hostage.

• Stay calm. That’s tough to do in any crisis but absolutely essential if you become the target of someone with a gun and a grudge. The first ten to thirty minutes of a hostage taking are often the most panicked. “Remember to breathe,” says a friend at the CIA. “Inhale to a slow count of ten. Pause. Exhale to a count of ten. Repeat as long as it takes to slow your heart rate and bring back your ability to focus.” Calm is contagious. If those around you see you keeping cool, it will help them maintain their composure.
• Fast moves may get you killed. But if you see a clear chance to escape during the first moments, take it. You’ll give yourself more opportunities if you routinely practice awareness of your surroundings. Any time you enter a public space make it a priority to find the exits and decide how you’ll reach them if there is an emergency.
• Even as the threat develops, stay alert. Continue to focus on your surroundings. What’s the physical layout of the room you’re in? Is there just one bad guy or more? What do they look like? How do they behave? How are they dressed? Are they wearing body armor? How are they armed (pistols or long guns like rifles or shotguns)?
•   Keep in mind the hostage-taker may be just as scared as you are.  Move slowly. If you are told to produce identification or valuables comply but act with deliberation. Speak only when spoken to and then speak softly and do not make aggressive statements. Tough talkers are often the first to be killed because hostage-takers view them as threatening and unpredictable.
• Don’t try to be a hero. Considering escape is one thing. Trying to rush or overpower an armed individual, unless you have been specifically trained to do so (police, military, covert operations) seldom turns out as well as it does on TV. As former FBI hostage negotiator Clint Van Zandt puts it, “It’s better to be a live hostage than a dead victim.”      
• If you have a health condition or require medication, state your needs politely but firmly at the first opportunity. If you have a safe opportunity to engage the hostage taker in conversation, be respectful. Listen carefully to what he says, and the tone. Don’t discuss politics or religion. Talk about your life or family.
•  If you think you are about to be killed, act decisively. Use the escape plan you’ve been considering or use any weapon you can find and do so with as much noise and violence as you can muster. Fight without stopping until the threat is neutralized.
• If rescue begins, hit the floor and stay there. Standing up suddenly as police or other tactical responders come through the door may get you shot.

Staying alert is the key to staying safe. Learn more ways to protect yourself by reading my new book, Escaping the O-Zone: Intuition, Situational Awareness and Staying Safe.  It’s available on Kindle and wherever eBooks are sold:  http://ow.ly/FVB8S

Be Careful How You Lock Your Car . . . and One Other Thing

Deputy Chief Harry Cork of the Wisaka Police Department (and protagonist of the novel EASY EVIL) has graciously agreed to stop by the blog occasionally to discuss personal safety and crime prevention. Our topic for this session is vehicle security.

DOUG: Given all the electronic countermeasures car manufacturers have devised, do we even have to worry about keeping our vehicles secure anymore? Once we lock the doors, that is…

HARRY: “Actually Doug, thieves have come up with counter-countermeasures to what car manufacturers have invented. For example, how do you lock your car when you’re going into a store?”

I generally just hit the “lock” button on my key.

“Exactly. That sends a radio signal over the air to the car’s electronic locking system. Very convenient, right? Problem is, those radio signals aren’t secure. Anyone who’s nearby with a device capable of capturing that code can then retransmit it to your car once you’ve walked away. The bad guys know you’ll be gone for at least a few minutes, and that gives them time to open the doors and steal your stuff.”

So what should I do instead?

“Use the lock button that’s inside your car instead of the one on your key. That doesn’t require a radio signal so it can’t be read remotely.”

Then I’m safe, right?

“In most cases, yes. If you have a luxury car, you could face a different problem. Some police departments in our area have reported luxury cars stolen by thieves using cloned keys.”

They copy them the same way?

“No, actually cloning the key to be able to start the car requires higher-end software usually only available to car dealers. What we’ve discovered is that thieves are either obtaining the software illegally or by working with colleagues at car dealerships outside the area where the cars have been stolen. It’s a significant problem and, as of yet, I’m not aware of any solution by the manufacturers.”

So if I own a luxury car, I’m screwed?

“Talk to your dealership. But, remember The Club? It’s a solid steel bar that can be locked in place across your steering wheel. It won’t stop thieves with the capability to tow your car but it may slow down the others, even those with cloned keys. One more thing. Park your car inside a secure garage at night. That’s always a good idea, no matter what make or model of vehicle you own.”

You can find more safety tips on my website, www.dougmcummingsauthor.com or in my new book, Escaping the Ozone: Intuition, Situational Awareness and Staying Safe available from Amazon or any eBook retailer.

Ride along with Harry Cork in Easy Evil, in paperback or eBook (http://ow.ly/Fhxfo)

Who Benefits When You're Heads Up?

"Heads up" is shorthand for situational awareness, that place of being alert to what's going on around you but without paranoia or fear.

In my book, Escaping the O-Zone, I compare it to defensive driving.  When you first slid behind the wheel in that first drivers' ed class, you started training your brain to stay alert to changing conditions on the road and to the actions of other drivers. Think of situational awareness the same way: it's defensive living.

The first person who benefits from a defensive living strategy is you. Staying aware of your surroundings lets your intuition work freely to spot trouble. And by "trouble" I don't necessarily mean  a mugger with a gun coming out of an alley. The other day for me it was something just as simple as noticing a bunched up throw-rug that nearly sent me sprawling. I tell my safety team at church all the time that physical hazards in the building, slippery floors in a rest room, broken asphalt patches in the driveway, even a light fixture that isn't working, could pose a danger to them as they pursue their duties but especially to our aging population.

So who else might you help by staying aware of your surroundings? Your family, of course. Every time you remember to lock the door between your house and garage, to install a timer that turns on your outside lights at night, or just to remind your son or daughter to keep enough gas in the car when going for a long drive, you're keeping others safe.

A friend of mine recently called the park district to report a light out, and broken glass on the ground, in a field where children play. A neighbor alerted the rest of us to the presence of a strange car parked on the street. In the news recently, I read that a husband and wife buying lunch at a burger joint noticed a teenage girl's bruised face and notified police, who subsequently discovered she had been kidnapped by a cross-country truck driver.

You may not disrupt a terrorist attack when you tell authorities about an unattended suitcase in an airport. The guy loitering near a school may just be a father waiting for his child. A senior citizen might never trip over that debris you see on the stairs.

But you never know.

Movie Review: The Judge

The Judge with Robert Downey Jr and Robert Duvall is one of those movies that you may walk out of the theatre talking about. I did, but it wasn't so much out of wonderment and appreciation as confusion because it tries to do way too much. It's a coming home film...Downey returns to Indiana from Chicago to attend his mother's funeral. He happens to be a crackerjack attorney so when his estranged father, the judge, is arrested, it falls to Downey to defend him. That plot was fine, as was one, maybe two of the subplots. But The Judge bites off far more than it can chew and a good part of the extraneous gunk gets stuck in the throat. Duvall as the judge is brilliant, maybe even Oscar worthy. Downey Jr. shows more range than I expected. All the acting is excellent but the script falters at the end...which takes about forty-five minutes too long to arrive. 3/5

My Five (Plus One!) Favorite Safety Tips

I’ve been tweeting personal safety tips for about a year now (@dougcummings3) and just followed those up with an e-book, Escaping the O-Zone: Intuition, Situational Awareness and Staying Safe which will be released Nov 1. The “O” in O-Zone stands for “oblivious” . . . that happy, unaware place in the clouds where a good portion of us put our minds while we’re not otherwise occupied. It’s nearly impossible to react to a threat from the O-Zone. By the time we hear our intuition sounding an alarm, that speeding car, angry dog, or armed predator, is already upon us.

Staying out of the O-Zone takes work. Here are five (plus one!) tactics I use to stay focused on my surroundings.

·      Approach every new environment, whether it’s a restaurant, a bar, the lobby of a building or a busy street, as though you’ve arranged to meet someone there. Keep your head up and your eyes moving. Listen for sudden sounds that break the pattern of ambient noise around you.

·      Look for a way out the moment you walk in. Mark in your mind where the exits are in every building and the fastest way to get to them. Outdoors, imagine where you could reach quickly in case of an emergency.

·      Always know your location. Whether you stop for gas, use a parking garage, duck into a coffee shop or go bar hopping, note the address. If it’s not posted, ask.

·      In your cellular phone’s address book, add ICE as a prefix to the names of relatives or friends who you would want first responders to contact In Case of Emergency. If you lock your phone, use an indelible pen to write the number of your closest contact on the case (will also help recovery if your phone is lost).

·      Avoid using headphones or texting while walking, running or biking. Eyes focused on a screen aren’t watching your surroundings. Listening to music and/or audio books places you in the O-Zone.

·      The most basic tip of all: at home, in the office, in your car, in hotel/motel rooms, lock your doors and latch your windows. That simple act may be enough to keep out an intruder.

My Advice to Aspiring Writers: WRITE. EVERY. DAY.

That most excellent site for writers and readers, Goodreads, has a section that offers the opportunity to ask questions of the writers. One question I chose to answer: What advice would I give to an aspiring author?

I said, Write. Every. Day.

It all counts, whether it’s a blog post, a long email to a friend, an imaginative shopping list, a short story, a poem, or a novel. Exercise your creative muscles for as long as you can, as often as you can. Asa Baber, the late, great Playboy columnist was the first writing teacher to tell me that creative muscles atrophy from lack of usage the same as all the others. I have found that to be true a hundred times.

Even if all you're doing is sketching out scenes in your notebook, play with ideas. Write character descriptions on bus, train or plane rides or during your break at work. Take notes on locations every time you go somewhere new. Watch for interesting things, or listen to intriguing conversations that take place in your vicinity and write them down. Don't be afraid to reconstruct the ordinary stuff that occurs every day. Have a fight with your boss? Do as my novelist friend Linda Mickey did. Kill him . . .on paper. Her furious imaginings became the plot for her first book, Greased Wheels. By the way, in every state, murder on the page is considered an acceptable alternative to punching someone's lights out. Or worse.

But let me add a caution. Writers write. They don't spin out their plot ideas at cocktail parties. In my humble opinion, talking about what you plan to write is the best way to suck all the energy from the idea and/or lose it to someone who may be suffering from writer's block. The only time to share your work is when it's reached written form and you're asking for an opinion from your significant other or a group of your fellows in a writing workshop or class.

That reminds me: by "writing," I don't mean endless polishing and re-polishing the opening page of your novel. A new writer in one of my first workshops did that and it drove the rest of us bonkers. The sad thing was...she had a wonderful, lyrical way with words. She just couldn't bring herself to move forward. I've always believed the saying, "You can't steal second if you insist on clinging to first" and it applies to writing just as it does to life. Even if you think what you've written is complete cow manure, push ahead. Finish your manuscript. THEN go back and edit the darn thing. Or throw it in a drawer to re-visit in a month. Given a little distance, you may discover it's not nearly as bad as you thought it was.

Here are two last points One comes from my Hard Earned Lessons file. Once your novel is finished, unless you've paid for a critique session, don't go to a Bigtime Writers Conference and ask your Favorite Author of All Time to read your work and provide feedback. First of all, she likely has her own manuscript to finish. Second, many publishing houses advise their authors NOT to accept reading requests from writers they don't know to avoid potential allegations of plagiarism.  My final point . . . finish your manuscript AND have it professionally edited (no, your nephew the English teacher doesn't qualify as a pro in this case...you want to be published, not graded, right?) before you start looking for an agent. The "why" comes from an agent who shall remain anonymous because she was drunker than a skunk in the bar of a New York hotel when she spoke this line, which I quote exactly: "I ‘spect to shee shit from these firsht time assh-holes and, you know what? You know what? They seldom dishappoint me."

So don't dishappoint. Write until you can write no more every chance you get.