Scaling Force. Rory Miller

LEVEL 1—PRESENCE

      Skillfully doing nothing.

      Level 1 and Level 2 (presence and verbal) and to a lesser extent Level 3 (touch) are intended to make the threat quit being threatening without anyone getting hurt. While higher levels of force are aimed at an adversary’s body, the lower levels work through the threat’s mind.

      In social violence, presence and verbal skills primarily aim at preventing or diverting the attention of someone who wants to monkey dance. Normally, that is easy—just don’t play. Walk away. Disregard the challenge. Don’t get caught in your own little monkey brain.

      In asocial or predatory violence, particularly in a predatory ambush, the purpose of presence and verbal skills is to keep you off the victim list. As such they must become habits. You may never even know if they worked. If a predator scans you—which will happen several times a day in the crowded part of a big city—and decides to pass, chances are good that you will not even notice. Success, in this subject, is often invisible. If your habits of presence—how you walk, how you scan, what you do with positioning and your hands—are good, the bad guy quietly moves on, never even coming to your attention.

      If you are under assault, it is too late to apply Levels 1 and 2 as primary techniques. Go ahead and scream, “Let me go!” while fighting back to help create witnesses sympathetic to your cause, but don’t be stupid enough to scream instead of fighting back. If you are in danger and taking damage, you must be working from much higher up on the force scale than verbals.

      These two lowest levels (and the third level, touch) often come into play when intervening as a third party. That does not always mean breaking up a fight. The simple presence of potential witnesses can prevent much crime. More so if the witness looks like he or she is paying attention or dialing a cell phone.

      Generally, your goal with presence and verbal skills will be:

      • To raise the stakes. The presence of witnesses or involved citizens may make committing a crime too risky.

      • To give the threat a face-saving way to leave. If the threat has ego invested in his bad act, he may be afraid that walking away will make him look afraid. However, walking away from a group or a uniform or whispered advice that the police are on the way is often acceptable.

      • To instill doubt. This can be a very effective strategy in that if the threat does not know who you are or what you are likely to do, he cannot be sure what the outcome of his actions will be.

      • To give the threat a better choice. Sometimes you can get past the emotion and show the threat that his actions will not achieve his goals.

The Lowest Level of Force

       On the second of September 2008, I did something stupid. I hadn’t quite been in Iraq for two months and was still very much a rookie. Lawrence wants me to write down the story because there might be some lessons about presence in there. I’m reluctant for a couple of reasons and the reasons are important:

       1. Lots of things that sound cool happened because there wasn’t a good choice. That doesn’t mean it was a good strategy. Rats don’t swim very well—they only abandon a ship because sinking with it is worse.

       2. Because something worked once, especially when the stakes were high, does not make it a good idea. The fear with anything that makes amateurs’ eyes get all shiny is that they might try to do it. I wouldn’t do this again if I had any choice.

       3. I especially hate telling this story because though amateurs might think it’s cool, every professional will read this and automatically (and correctly) label me as an idiot. I don’t like being labeled an idiot, especially by people I respect.

       But, Lawrence twisted my arm, so here goes… The Records area at Rusafa Prison Complex in Baghdad is enclosed by a chain-link fence and was almost always crowded. It’s a stressful place, with inmates being processed in and out, Iraqi military, police, corrections, advocates, politicos, and sometimes families of the convicts are present and a small handful of American advisors. It was especially crowded that day. Suddenly I heard a loud argument. I couldn’t understand what was being shouted, but it was getting really loud.

       I quickly discovered that two armed Iraqi gentleman were about to go at it. And no one was doing anything. Not the Iraqi officers and not the other Americans, all of whom were backing off.

       This is what I do, right? I’m a freaking jail guard and my primary job is to prevent fights.

       There were a ton of other considerations as well. First and foremost, I only spoke about fifty words of Arabic and almost all of them were either formal greetings or commands, neither of which was appropriate for this situation. You do not yell commands at people you want to calm down. Second, I had no formal authority—I was an advisor and mentor. Third, I had no idea what the argument was about. And, I didn’t know who the guys involved were. They could have been department ministers, tribal leaders, or just about anything else. That means that I didn’t know what would happen if things got messy. Would it stay personal or get really big?

       Other than the language barrier (and the weapons), this is what corrections officers deal with all the time. This is the regular job. Usually I can call for backup first and know it is on the way, but not today…

       There were two other factors that I thought were very important. The biggest was that if things got really out of hand, we were all screwed. I could handle two people. But if one pulled a gun and the other responded and a few friends got involved and the armed security guys got nervous, there would be a bloodbath inside a chain-link enclosed area. The second was probably less logical, but important to me. The Iraqi officers we advised were under a lot of pressure from criminals, militias, and secretly loyal members of the old regime. They were not paid very much and were constantly being threatened or tempted by bribes. One of our primary missions was to teach them to stand on principle, do the right thing. It was dangerous and took a lot of guts for them to avoid corruption,