Street Level Interdiction: Baselines, Behaviors, & Contacts
ESTABLISH BEHAVIORAL BASELINES
The key to being able to accurately identify criminal intent is to understand what is "normal" behavior and what is not. This requires you to first establish the baseline of the specific environment you patrol.
Once you establish the baseline (normal behavior) you can begin identifying anomalies (suspicious behavior).
What's the baseline?
The baseline is what's normal for an environment, situation, or individual. The normal pattern of behavior that includes movement, emotions, and interactions between people.
Ask yourself, "What is the general feel of my environment?" and "What is typical behavior here?"
That could include where people congregate at certain times of the day, what type of activities occur at specific locations, and what the common emotion of the people involved in those activities is.
Once you've established a baseline, you can identify persons that are suspicious because their behavior is unnatural, abnormal, or inconsistent with the environment they're operating in.
The ability to speak to why certain behavior doesn't fit within an environment is what helps officers distinguish between a mere "hunch" and reasonable articulable suspicion.
And reasonable articulable suspicion establishes the facts and observations needed to support an investigatory stop (i.e Terry Stop).
Every criminal will give their intentions away at some point.
It's up to you to be paying attention when they do.
Establish your baselines and actively assess what stands out to you.
This isn't about jumping to conclusions.
It's the practice of being aware of your baselines, observant of the activity going on around you, and actively assessing what doesn't fit the picture.
Do this persistently and over time you'll refine your abilities to detect the crime before it occurs.
LEARN COMMON INDICATORS OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
Once you've established the baseline of your environment and can differentiate between "normal" and suspicious behavior, you can focus on picking out the most common behaviors associated with the criminal element.
Keep in mind that single behaviors may mean nothing.
However, it is the combination or sustained observation of these behaviors that create the totality of circumstances that give rise to reasonable articulable suspicion.
Many of the behaviors you should be looking for would fall under the broad collection of natural reactions to stress commonly categorized as fight, flight, or freeze.
The part of the brain that directly affects nonverbal behaviors is the limbic system (or the "honest" part of the brain).
When a person feels threatened, stressed, or uncomfortable, the body reacts automatically and uncontrollably. Because these reactions are automatic and uncontrollable, they're reliable indicators of what a person is feeling at the time
Situational awareness is the extent to which an individual is aware of , evaluating, and reacting to his environment.
One of the most identifiable behaviors for someone engaged in criminal activity is that person's observable attentiveness and focus on other things occurring within their given environment.
This awareness generally involves the continuous movement of a person's eyes and head as he or she is scanning for a perceived threat or assessing the potential threat from another individual:
- Scanning Hyper awareness about the environment ("head is on a swivel")
- Hunching forward Trying to get "closer" to a potential threat to examine
- Threat Assessment Actively assessing a person or change in environment with focus and attention
- Target Fixation Part of a threat assessment including the inability to stop staring at the source of fear ("eying an officer up" or staring at the location of contraband)
MAXIMIZING NUMBER OF CONTACTS
Police officers must be comfortable interacting with all types of people in all types of situations.
The outcome of most encounters you will have as a police officer is dictated based on your ability to communicate effectively. It's the key to de-escalation and handling difficult situations.
But many cops avoid interacting with people until they're forced to.
These cops are ill prepared to effectively engage with other human beings at a moment's notice.
Actively avoiding interactions with the public also breeds distrust which can lead to poor decision making and even poorer outcomes in high-stress encounters. It diminishes your perceptiveness, slowing your ability to detect important details and assess solutions.
Unfortunately, avoiding interactions is many times a result of an officer's emotional exhaustion or burnout. But withdrawing from any non-mandated interactions only acts to deteriorate your ability to deal with dynamic situations.
The more interactions you have with people, the better you get at it and the more fluid you get with your conversation and the more natural it becomes.
And then the conversation becomes second nature. You expend less mental energy on it allowing you to focus on maintaining vigilance and situational awareness.
By making lots of contacts you have the opportunity as a street cop to acquire valuable information from human sources that live and work within the environment you patrol.
These individuals become willing to share information when they trust you.
A contact can be a traffic stop, subject stop, consensual encounter, accosting, or any other means of further investigating the behaviors you observed.
The more contacts you make the more relationships you're going to build and the more information you're going to get about what's going on in the neighborhood.