The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence Read online

  We predict with some success how a child will react to a warning, how a witness will react to a question, how a jury will react to a witness, how a consumer will react to a slogan, how an audience will react to a scene, how a spouse will react to a comment, how a reader will react to a phrase, and on and on. Predicting violent behavior is easier than any of these, but since we fantasize that human violence is an aberration done by others unlike us, we say we can’t predict it. Watching Jane Goodall’s documentary showing a group of chimpanzees stalking and killing another group’s males, we say the unprovoked attack is territorialism or population control. With similar certainty, we say we understand the cause and purpose of violence by every creature on earth—except ourselves.

  The human violence we abhor and fear the most, that which we call “random” and “senseless,” is neither. It always has purpose and meaning, to the perpetrator, at least. We may not choose to explore or understand that purpose, but it is there, and as long as we label it “senseless,” we’ll not make sense of it.

  Sometimes a violent act is so frightening that we call the perpetrator a monster, but as you’ll see, it is by finding his humanness—his similarity to you and me—that such an act can be predicted. Though you’re about to learn new facts and concepts about violent people, you will find most of the information resonating somewhere in your own experience. You will see that even esoteric types of violence have detectable patterns and warning signs. You’ll also see that the more mundane types of violence, those we all relate to on some level, such as violence between angry intimates, are as knowable as affection between intimates. (In fact, the violence has fewer varieties than the love).

  A television news show reports on a man who shot and killed his wife at her work. A restraining order had been served on him the same day as his divorce papers, coincidentally also his birthday. The news story tells of the man’s threats, of his being fired from his job, of his putting a gun to his wife’s head the week before the killing, of his stalking her. Even with all these facts, the reporter ends with: “Officials concede that no-one could have predicted this would happen.”

  That’s because we want to believe that people are infinitely complex, with millions of motivations and varieties of behavior. It is not so. We want to believe that with all the possible combinations of human beings and human feelings, predicting violence is as difficult as picking the winning lottery ticket, yet it usually isn’t difficult at all. We want to believe that human violence is somehow beyond our understanding, because as long as it remains a mystery, we have no duty to avoid it, explore it, or anticipate it. We need feel no responsibility for failing to read signals if there are none to read. We can tell ourselves that violence just happens without warning, and usually to others, but in service of these comfortable myths, victims suffer and criminals prosper.

  The truth is that every thought is preceded by a perception, every impulse is preceded by a thought, every action is preceded by an impulse, and man is not so private a being that his behavior is unseen, his patterns undetectable. Life’s highest-stakes questions can be answered: Will a person I am worried about try to harm me? Will the employee I must fire react violently? How should I handle the person who refuses to let go? What is the best way to respond to threats? What are the dangers posed by strangers? How can I know a baby-sitter won’t turn out to be someone who harms my child? How can I know whether some friend of my child might be dangerous? Is my own child displaying the warning signs of future violence? Finally, how can I help my loved ones be safer?

  I commit that by the end of this book, you will be better able to answer these questions, and you will find good reason to trust your already keen ability to predict violence.

  How can I say all this so confidently? Because I’ve had four decades of lessons from the most qualified teachers.

  When I called and told Kelly I had decided to devote a year to writing this book (it turned out to take two), I also thanked her for what she’d taught me, as I always do with clients. “Oh, I don’t think you learned anything new from my case,” she said, “but which one did teach you the most?”

  With many to choose from, I told Kelly I didn’t know, but as soon as I’d said good-bye and hung up the phone, I realized I did know. Thinking back, it was as if I was in that room again.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  A woman was pointing a gun at her husband, who was standing with his hands held out in front of him. She was anxiously changing her grip on the small semi-automatic pistol. “Now I’m going to kill you,” she repeated quietly, almost as if to herself. She was an attractive, slender woman of thirty-three, wearing black slacks and a man’s white shirt. There were eight bullets in the gun.

  I was standing off to the side in a doorway, watching the scene unfold. As I had been before and would be many times again, I was responsible for predicting whether or not a murder would occur, whether or not the woman in this case would keep her promise to kill. The stakes were high, for in addition to the man at risk, there were also two young children in the house.

  Threats like hers, I knew, are easy to speak, harder to honor. Like all threats, the words betrayed her by admitting her failure to influence events in any other way, and like all people who threaten, she had to advance or retreat. She might be satisfied with the fear her words and actions caused, might accept the attention she had garnered at gun point and leave it at that.

  Or, she might pull the trigger.

  For this young woman, the forces that inhibit violence and those that might provoke it were rising and falling against each other like stormy waves. She was by turns hostile, then silent. At one moment, violence seemed the obvious choice; at the next, it seemed the last thing she’d ever do. But violence is the last thing some people do.

  All the while, the pistol stayed steadily pointed at her husband.

  Except for the rapid, shallow breaths he was taking, the man in the gun sights didn’t move. His hands were held out stiffly in front of him as if they could stop bullets. I remember wondering for a moment if it would hurt to be shot, but another part of my mind jerked me back to the job I’d taken on. I could not miss a detail.

  The woman appeared to relax and then she became silent again. Though some observers might have viewed this as a favorable indicator, I had to assess if her quiet pauses were used for a rallying of reason or a contemplation of murder. I noticed that she was not wearing shoes, but discarded the observation as irrelevant to my task. Details are snapshots, not portraits, and I had to quickly determine which bore on my prediction and which did not. The mess of papers on the floor near an overturned table, the phone knocked off the hook, a broken glass likely thrown when the argument was more innocent—all assessed and quickly discarded.

  I then saw a detail of great significance, though it was just a quarter-inch movement. (In these predictions, the gross movements may get our attention, but they are rarely the ones that matter most.) The fraction of an inch her thumb traveled to rest on the hammer of the gun carried the woman further along the path to homicide than anything she had said or could have said. From this new place, she began an angry tirade. A moment later, she pulled the hammer of the pistol back, a not-so-subtle underscoring that earned her new credibility. Her words were chopped and spit across the room, and as her rage escalated, it might have seemed I had to hurry and complete the prediction. In fact, I had plenty of time. That’s because the best predictions use all the time available. When effective, the process is completed just behind the line that separates foresight and hindsight, the line between what might happen and what has just happened.

  It’s like your high-stakes prediction about whether the driver of an advancing car will slow down enough to allow safe passage—a fantastically complex process, but it happens just in time. Though I didn’t know it that day, I was automatically applying and re-applying the single most important tool of any prediction: pre-incident indicators.

  Pre-incident indicators are those detectable factors t
hat occur before the outcome being predicted. Stepping on the first rung of a ladder is a significant pre-incident indicator to reaching the top; stepping on the sixth even more so. Since everything a person does is created twice—once in the mind and once in its execution—ideas and impulses are pre-incident indicators for action. The woman’s threats to kill revealed an idea that was one step toward the outcome; her introduction of the gun into the argument with her husband was another, as was its purchase some months earlier.

  The woman was now backing away from her husband. To someone else, this may have looked like a retreat, but I intuitively knew it was the final pre-incident indicator before the pulling of the trigger. Because guns are not intimate weapons, her desire for some distance from the person she was about to shoot was the element that completed my prediction, and I quickly acted.

  I backed quietly down the hall through the kitchen, by the burning and forgotten dinner, into the small bedroom where a young girl was napping. As I crossed the room to wake the child, I heard the gunshot that I had predicted just a moment before. I was startled, but not surprised. The silence that followed, however, did concern me.

  My plan had been to take the child out of the house, but I abandoned that and told her to stay in bed. At two years old, she probably didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation, but I was ten, and knew all about these things.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that gun go off in the house; my mother had accidentally fired it toward me a few months earlier, the bullet passing so close to my ear that I felt it buzz in the air before striking the wall.

  On my way back to our living room, I stopped when I smelled the gunpowder around me. I listened, trying to figure out what was happening without going back into that room. It was too quiet.

  As I stood straining to hear any tiny sound, there came instead an enormous noise: several more gunshots fired quickly. These I had not predicted. I quickly rounded the corner into the living room.

  My step-father was crouched down on both knees, my mother leaning over him, seemingly offering care. I could see blood on his hands and legs, and when he looked up at me, I tried to reassure him with my calm. I knew he’d never been through anything like this before, but I had.

  The gun was on the floor near me, so I leaned over and picked it up by the barrel. It was uncomfortably hot to the touch.

  In terms of predicting what was coming next, the scene before me was good news. My initial thought had been to grab the gun and run out the back door, but because of a new prediction, I hid it behind a cushion on the couch. I had concluded that my mother had discharged much of her hostility and frustration along with those gunshots. At least for the moment, she was not only reasonable, but was shifting to the role of supportive wife, nursing her husband’s injury as if she’d played no part in it. Far from being someone to be apprehensive about, she was now a person we were grateful to have in charge. She would make sure my stepfather was all right, she would deal with the police and the ambulance, and she would put our lives back in place as surely as if she could draw those bullets back into the gun.

  I went to check on my little sister, who was now sitting up expectantly in her bed. Having learned that the time after a major incident offered a period of safety and the best rest, I lay down next to her. I couldn’t take a vacation from all predictions, of course, but I lowered the periscope a bit, and after a while we fell asleep.

  By the time our family moved from that house a year later, there were nine bullets embedded in the walls and floors. I imagine they are still there.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  When the U.S. Attorney General and the Director of the FBI gave me an award for designing MOSAIC™, the assessment system now used for screening threats to justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, I am certain neither realized it was actually invented by a ten year-old boy, but it was. The way I broke down the individual elements of violence as a child became the way the most sophisticated artificial intuition systems predict violence today. My ghosts had become my teachers.

  I am often asked how I got into my work. If viewed in cinematic terms, the answer would cut quickly from scene to scene: running at eleven years old alongside a limousine, clamoring with other fans to get a glimpse of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, would cut to me inside that limousine working for the famous couple within eight years. Watching President Kennedy’s inauguration on television would cut to standing with another president at his inauguration twenty years later, and with another twelve years after that. Watching in shock the reports of Kennedy’s murder would cut to working with our government on predicting and preventing such attacks. Watching in shock the reports of Senator Robert Kennedy’s murder would cut to developing the assessment system now used to help screen threats to U.S. Senators.

  Trying unsuccessfully to stop one of my mother’s husbands from hitting her would cut to training hundreds of New York City police detectives on new ways to evaluate domestic violence situations. Visiting my mother in a psychiatric ward after one of her suicide attempts would cut to touring mental hospitals as an advisor to the Governor of California. Above all, living with fear would cut to helping people manage fear.

  My childhood wasn’t a movie, of course, though it did have chase sequences, fight scenes, shoot-outs, skyjacking, life and death suspense, and suicide. The plot didn’t make much sense to me as a boy, but it does now.

  It turns out I was attending an academy of sorts, and though hopefully on different subjects, so were you. No matter what your major, you too have been studying people for a long time, carefully developing theories and strategies to predict what they might do.

  Even some of my clients will be surprised to learn what you just learned about my earliest training, but those who visit my office are surprised in many ways. It is, after all, a very unusual firm. The clients of Gavin de Becker & Associates are a wide-ranging group: federal government agencies (including the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Central Intelligence Agency), prosecutors, battered women’s shelters, giant corporations, universities, television stars, television stations, police departments, cities, states, movie studios, cultural figures, religious leaders, champion athletes, politicians, recording artists, movie stars, and college students. Clients include the world’s most famous and the world’s most anonymous.

  People from my office attend Presidential Inaugurations on one coast, the Oscars and the Emmys on the other. They stroll observantly through crowds of angry protesters one day and are whisked into an underground garage at the federal courthouse the next. We have toured Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and the South Pacific learning about violence in those places. We have flown in Gulfstream jets and hot-air balloons, paddled down the Amazon, been driven in armored limousines, ridden on elephants and rickshaws, been smothered by hostile crowds, and smothered by adoring crowds. We have testified before Senate committees and toured secret government installations. We’ve had staff meetings while floating down a jungle river in the dead of night. We’ve ridden in presidential motorcades one week and in busses used to transport prisoners the next. We have advised the targets of assassination attempts and the families of those who were assassinated, including the widow of a slain foreign president. We have been chased by tabloid reporters and we have chased them right back. We’ve been on both sides of the 60 Minutes cameras, hiding out with their crews for one story about a national fraud, answering Ed Bradley’s probing questions on a murder case for another.

  We are called by our government when some zealot shoots an abortion doctor or opens fire on federal employees. We are called by Larry King when he needs a guest to discuss whether O.J. Simpson fits the profile of a stalking spousal killer, and we are called by Simpson’s prosecutors for the same reason. We visit murder scenes to counsel frightened survivors—sometimes just minutes after the crime. We advise people who have been threatened, and we have ourselves been frequent targets of de
ath threats. As I said, it is an unusual firm, one that could only exist in America and, in most regards, need only exist in America.

  What binds all of this together is prediction. My firm predicts human behavior, behavior in one category mostly: violence. It’s methods are highly confidential on the one hand, yet played out i. What binds all of this together is prediction of one thing: violence. Far more often, we predict safety. We counsel cultural and religious leaders on how to navigate between being hated too much and being loved too much. We advise corporations and government agencies on managing employees who might act out violently. We advise famous people who are the targets of unwanted pursuers, stalkers, and would-be assassins. Most people do not realize that media figures are at the center of a swirl of desperate and often alarming pursuers. Fewer still realize that the stalking of regular citizens is an epidemic affecting hundreds of thousands every year.

  Among all the weird ventures in America, could you ever have imagined a literal warehouse of alarming and unwelcome things which stalkers have sent to the objects of their unwanted pursuit, things like thousand-page death threats, phone book-thick love letters, body parts, dead animals, facsimile bombs, razor blades, and notes written in blood? Would you have imagined that there is a building containing more than 350,000 obsessive and threatening communications? Many of my forty-six associates work in just such a building. There they cast light on the darkest parts of our culture, seeking every day to improve our understanding of hazard, and every day helping people manage fear.