Resiliency in a Time of Fear

The Soufan Group, an international intelligence security firm, offered this in their daily intel briefing yesterday, entitled Resiliency and the Terror Threat in Europe:

“On March 27, a group of approximately 300 far-right protesters clashed with riot police near a memorial for the victims of the Brussels terror attacks.  The incident underscored the fear and tension brewing throughout the EU in the wake of the second successful Islamic State-directed mass-casualty attack in Europe in less than six months. In a heightened threat environment, it is common for security concerns to lead to increasingly hawkish and insular policies. 

It is critical that EU policymakers strike a careful balance between strong and effective counterterrorism measures and policies likely to produce the unintended consequence of expanding sympathy for violent extremist causes in Europe.”

Europe just suffered it’s second mass-casualty terrorist event within six months. The Soufan briefing is a call for calm, balance and rationality as Europe, and the world, consider a response and strategy to deal with rising concern of terrorist attacks. That call  is spot on in my estimation. Yet, “balance” does not mean blind avoidance or playing the ostrich with our head in the sand.  Indeed, we should target and call out all acts of group sanctioned violence, including terrorism, for what it is and by the unique qualities that drive, at least in part, it’s goals and methods.  In this case, that is Islamist radicalization, but the nuanced and highly important point that the briefing hits upon is we can call that dynamic out by it’s name while still guiding our response and policies to target those unique aspects, and not subject an entire group of people, here namely non-radicalized Muslims, to unwarranted sanctions and alienation.

So what is this briefing calling for?     Resiliency.

Finding that balance is a type of resilience.

Resiliency: noun [re·sil·ien·cy]   [\-yən(t)-sē\]
Resiliency is a quality in objects to hold or recover their shape, or in people to stay intact. This is a kind of strength.

Indeed, a kind of strength. History is replete with examples of both heroic and cowardly examples of resiliency and lack of, respectively. My mind reflects back to the Blitz occurring in London during WWII, and the steadfastness and tenacity that the Brits showed in weathering a blithering bombing campaign and massive destruction at the hands of the Nazi regime. There are many other examples on both sides of historical conflicts: Germans in Dresden; Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Americans after Pearl Harbour and 911; Chinese at Nan-King; many nations after the 2004 Tsunami.  And so on.

The curious thing about resiliency is it impacts both in it’s presence and it’s absence. Resiliency when present allows us to navigate the pains and challenges of life, to strive forward and find a way through the darkness – darkness which is almost always temporary, and which almost always has a human solution. It allows us to find that strength, balance and rationale decision making that the Soufan briefing is calling for above.

Yet, resiliency, when absent also increases our risk as individuals to resort to violence and hate as the means to solve our problems. Endemic to active shooter and mass shooter profiles is a lack of resiliency to navigate the stressors of life.  It’s NOT the lack of stressors, it’s the inability to navigate them – or more precisely it is the perceived inability to navigate them which leads the individual to objectify an entire group and say to himself (almost always a “he”) “Yes, this group did me some wrong, they don’t recognize my greatness, and my solution is to harm them all because I have no other alternatives to resolve my problems.”

No one starts out there, that is a trajectory that some steadily move towards, but the direction of that path towards destruction and hate is paved by the degree of resiliency we bring to the journey, and the degree to which we allow it to come forth.

Resiliency is easily found in the super courageous stories of survival, such as the story of Louis Zamperini in Laura Hillenbrand’s book “Unbroken”, and certainly our Armed service men and women sacrificing everyday. Those are incredible examples of resiliency and heroism, but often difficult to “touch” from those of us not living in those “worlds”. Often in those extreme life conditions, such as combat, we show resiliency, press on, or we die. Not easy, but the choice is more clear cut.

Yet, resiliency really shows when we have the choice to stop living and just exist, but we choose to shine anyway, in the day to day “getting on” with our lives, doing the work, loving as we love, supporting where and when we can.

For me, resiliency is best captured in this picture from September 14, 1940, London England.

This bombed out church in England did not stop Fusilier Tom Dowling from marrying Miss Martha Coonig. After the ceremony, Father Flynn, who performed the ceremony helped the newlywed couple over the rubble to exit the church.

We give our veterans much well-deserved thanks for their service, and sacrifice, and heroism, which also often is placed in the context of the Combat theater. But it’s important to recognize the greater sacrifice and challenge, which is their returning home and getting on with their life. Picking up from the ashes of war and continuing to love, and share, and open, and sacrifice in myriad, banal and petty ways every day. That is the real battle so many fight. For me, this picture captures that essence and the indomitable strength of the human spirit to rise again and again.

Hope floats , but it don’t swim. To move forward and join again this bumbling tribe after returning from war, or trauma, or tragedy such as in Brussels this past week – that is true resiliency, that takes real courage.

Resiliency is in all of us, no matter how barren you feel your soil is.  Water it, it will grow.

You see you wouldn’t ask why the rose that grew from the concrete had damaged petals.
On the contrary, we would all celebrate its tenacity.
We would all love it’s will to reach the sun.
Well, we are the roses – this is the concrete – these are my damaged petals.
Don’t ask me why, ask me how.

~ Tupac Shakur

From Brussels to Cyprus – Finding the 1 in the Million Threat

“Risk is like fire: If controlled it will help you; if uncontrolled it will rise up and destroy you.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt

 

A Needle in the Haystack – We only have to find the one needle
Imagine this.  You awake one dry winter morning, feeling slightly tired but not overly so. You have been slightly “under the weather” recently but otherwise your day has not been slowed down. During your morning hygiene you begin coughing and think to yourself you may have a slight cold coming on.  (Here, we insert two scenarios that diverge, but for sake of this exercise we’ll get to those in a moment).  A few moments later your spouse walks in, alarmed, and suggests you get that checked out soon.

What do you do?  Do you cancel your day and immediately see the doctor, or disavow the concern?

Well, its depends on the concern doesn’t it, and your feeling about the concern, and what data you have about the apparent problem.  Now let’s add some more data, and back to the scenarios.

Scenario A: You cough a few times, blow your nose and a minor trace of blood is in the Kleenex tissue. You’ve seen this before on dry winter mornings.

Scenario B: You cough a few times, followed by several retching coughs and find copious amounts of blood on your tissue, in your hands, and splattered on the vanity. You have not seen this before.

You value your spouse’s input, do you take their input blindly or does it depend on the scenario? At what point on the continuum of possible “scary signs” from scenario A to scenario B do you take action and seek immediate medical consultation? When do you simply say “it’s nothing” and go back to your morning coffee?

Here you are walking that fine line that threat management professionals do every day – determining what risk factors are present, how serious are the risk factors, and what course of action should or should not be taken, and at what “cost”. In the above situation maybe you know that esophageal cancer strikes roughly 1 in 23,000 people per year in the U.S., or maybe you don’t and you’re guessing at odds more like 1 in a Million. Arguably many of us apply the same logic to risk of falling victim to violence as we ask “What are the odds?” and “What is reasonable to protect myself?”

Surprising as it may seem we are living in the most peaceful time in recorded human history, by history standards so to speak. Steven Pinker unpacked this counter-intuitive notion in his masterpiece work The Better Angels of Our Nature. Yet, at the same time we are also living in a time when any single person with ill intent can do the most damage given our technological advancement. (For a terrifying divergence into how easily accessible nuclear fissile materials are to obtain, read yesterday’s NYT article here, and bring some comfort food.)

The Statistics Problem and Why We Need a Structured Approach
In either case, the statistics are misleading, because 1 in a Million sounds like a very rare chance, and it is in the aggregate.  The problem is that violence doesn’t occur in the aggregate,  violence occurs in the up-close personal space of our daily lives, and it is eruptive and (for most of us) it throws us into a space that we have never been before. What 1 in a Million means in the personal space of violence is that 999,999 people are 100% safe, and 1 person is 100% in danger. Are you the “1”, is this situation the “1”? To flee, or not to flee? That is the question.

That relationship between the 1 and the Million is not without a judgment call.  In our lives and in our society we have to decide on where we fall between False Positives (FP)  (concluding there is a risk when there is actually not one; i.e., false imprisonment of an innocent person; going to the doctor only to waste a visit and your co-pay) and False Negatives (FN)  (concluding there is not a risk when indeed there is a risk; i.e.,  releasing a violent person to kill again; not going to the doctor when indeed you have cancer). There is a sadistic little trick the universe has played on us in this regard – when we decrease the chance of FPs, we invariably increase the chance of FNs. We can’t have it both ways.

As societies our decision making in mitigating violence risk falls on a continuum, with two   fundamental choices on each end:

1. Minimize the chance of FNs (such as releasing killers to kill again) and erring on the side of locking more people up, even innocent people;OR
2. Minimize the chance of FPs (such as locking up non-dangerous people), and erring on the side of setting more free, even would-be assailants.

Navigating this continuum is not easy and requires a balanced approach. We all intuitively understand this. Most of us would agree that a “3-strikes” ruling that makes mandatory life sentencing for even minor drug offenders seems overboard. Here we intuitively want to minimize FPs such as excessively imprisoning people who pose no real or lasting danger.

Yet we may see it differently in other cases, particularly those of child sex offenders, or in the case of parricide or familicide. Such as the case of a 12 year old boy who killed his parents and siblings, and sentenced to minimum of 7 years in juvenile detention; or the case of 14yo Lionel Tate in Florida, sentence to life without parole for killing a 6yo relative while emulating professional wrestling moves. Here we intuitively may not be so forgiving.  Although arguably we may still think the sentence is excessive, we are more open to longer sentences to “prevent future harm” given the heinousness of the act.

Here’s the rub. Our intuitions are correct about the minor drug offender, as they show low risk for violence into the future.  But our intuitions are wrong about parricide, those offenders show lower risk for future violence than even the general population (See Cornell).

Intuition and “gut feeling” can be useful to identify early screening signs which require more investigation, but should never be a key component to any rigorous assessment of risk where the stakes are high and lives are in the balance. Gut feeling is just too inaccurate. In fact, confidence in clinical judgement or “gut” is inversely correlated with risk assessment accuracy – the more one feels confident in their gut feeling, the less likely they are to be accurate in estimating risk (See Murray).

The job of threat professionals, and increasingly the job of civilized societies , is to maximize finding that 1 in a Million, and doing so upstream when there is still time to prepare and proactively respond in order to save lives. We maximize the accurate hit rate of that search by using what is referred to as a Structured Professional Judgment (SPJ) model– a method that uses well-established statistical actuarial risk factors, which are applied through clinical judgment to the unique context of the case at hand. It is the best our current science has to offer in combining the statistical and clinical models.

An SPJ model has 6 key components, which I will review in more detail in subsequent blog entries.  For now, those components are:

1. Identify the Presence of key risk factors
2. Consider the Relevance of risk factors
3. Develop a Risk Formulation
4. Narrow the Context of increased violence risk scenarios
5. Offer Recommendations to mitigate risk
6. Communicate findings clearly

These components, when used systematically across multiple data sources narrows the window of error in assessing risk, increases defensibility in legal challenges, and increases the chance of honing in on that 1 in a Million risk. Another shift in the risk assessment area has been to de-emphasize static historical risk factors (male gender, childhood abuse, early poverty, etc.) and emphasize behavioral pathways that are indicative of one’s movement on a trajectory of violence (approach behavior, active violent ideation, energy burst activity, weapons acquisition, etc.). That will also be addressed in detail in a future blog, but for our purposes here it highlights the importance of knowing what to look for and where to look for it, as the events unfold and as the risk factors emerge.

From Brussels to Cyprus
On March 22, 2016 at least two radical Islamist terrorist assailants, Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, attacked two separate targets in Brussels, Belgium- the airport and the Maalbeek Metro station.  As of today the death toll has risen to 35, with more than 300 injured, additional possible assailants are being pursued and investigated. This was a sophisticated and coordinated attack, with various degrees of warning signs which may or may not have been known to authorities (investigation still pending and new information emerging daily).  The human, societal, and political toll was immediate and very impactful. Leslie Bolt, a consultant with Crisis Care Network, does a solid examination of the human impact and response, and The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins examines the political response (or lack of). The Brussels attacks are the 1 in a Million situation that many are crying in outrage that we “should have seen coming”. There is mounting evidence that the warning signs were there, that we should have seen more, but there remains debate about  what was reasonable to have noticed and to have done. More security? More infringement of civil liberties? More profiling? Less tolerance and more exclusion? And so on . . .

Then there is yesterday’s hijacking of EgyptAir Flight MS181, which was taken over by Seif Eldin Mustafa,  claiming to be wearing a suicide explosive belt. There were many tense moments in this encounter. Mustafa boards the plane, shows some kind of belt with wires coming out of it, claiming it is loaded with explosives. A fugitive and convict, he was on the run for 5 years when for reasons yet unknown he decided to take extreme action. In the current global culture, it was easy to assume another terror attack was underway, albeit slightly dated in its methodology of a plane hijacking. In the end the belt was fake, the man had a note written to his estranged wife, and he reported his motives were to see his estranged family. Arguably a distraught, if not mentally ill, individual was at work here. This was not the sophisticated coordinated attack we saw in Brussels or in Paris.

“Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight it’s great. The problem is there’s a million dots at the time that need connection.”
~ Louis Freeh, Former FBI Director

Hindsight is most people’s favorite sight, and everyone is an expert on their last crisis event. At face-value, both of these events look the same leading up to and during the actions, and both needed to be taken seriously. Yet despite appearances, the underlying motives, the behavioral indicators, and full context of the changing dynamics required very different responses pre-event, during, and post-event. Both events challenge us to weigh the pros and cons of the FNs and FPs, among safety, societal freedom, and respect for our fellow citizens and humans.

At it’s core risk assessment is about understanding human behavior, and the trajectories that human behavior can show on the path to violence. Each of us do that intuitively every time we walk through a dark parking lot alone, or drive through a high-crime neighborhood. But to do that effectively and accurately as a professional, one needs the proper training, experience, and methodology to minimize errors, avoid any FNs to the extent possible, and reduce the FPs to the extent feasible.  Risk assessment and threat management work, when the methodology includes proper assessment protocols and management approaches to mitigating the potential threat.

“With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.”
~ Steven Pinker, Cognitive Psychologist/Author