«

»

Don’t be the star witness

I thought about this after I blogged yesterday.  In the majority of our details we are dealing with one-off situations.  Meaning, you are the only specialist providing the protection, and in many cases the driving too.  In fact, my company actively does this everyday and the Specialist that is doing the job deals with this all the time.  He does an excellent job in doing so.

Let’s say you arrive at the venue where you’re protectee is giving a speech.  When you arrive do you drop him off curbside and then go park the vehicle or do you park the car and then tell your protectee, “Sir we have to walk back to the building.”  Either way you are in a predicament.  Drop him off, then he’s unprotected until you arrive.  Take him with you to park, then you have to justify why you’re making a CEO walk to his meeting.

Ok, so now you’re in the building and you’re walking with the client looking confident and vigilant, like the private sector version of Larry Cockell [did someone say Larry Cockell], and everyone sees it and knows it, everyone, except the one person that has made the decision to do harm to your protectee.  You know your craft and know that most successful attacks in the US occur within 25 feet.  As you walk through the lobby area you notice one person exhibiting behavior inconsistent to what is normal.  He suddenly lunges towards your protectee.  Do you cover your protectee or do you deal with the gun, knife, pie etc?

You decide to cover and move your protectee, knowing that the attacker has not been dealt with.  The next thing you know, your protectee has been hit.  Same scenario, you go after the assailant and subdue him.  After you subdue him you look over your shoulder with the, “I’m the man look” at your protectee only find him on the floor. Why? The guy you have on the floor was a diversion.

Mark calls this one-off formation the “Witness formation”.  It’s undeniably the worst case scenario in all of the ways you can protect someone.  Even having one additional person increases your odds by 100%.  I don’t like to use statistics, but in this case adding one more specialist, statistics count when you’re dealing in life and death.

I am blogging about this because you need to know you’re strength and weaknesses and make the best decisions after being dealt this bad hand.  Either way you’ll be judged by everyone including your peers who will question why you did what you did.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *