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Zach Zinn
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my (recent) self-protection story

Given the last couple of posts here, i thought i'd share my recent experience with the forum:

I was out in front of my house a few weeks ago, just as the quarantine/lockdown was setting in. I recently decided to teach my kids to ride bikes during the lockdown, so they were riding in the street while I was out in the driveway practicing random martial arts stuff, a quiet afternoon up to this point.

Suddenly I see a guy come down the hill on a bike going straight towards a car coming slowly the opposite direction on our little street, he jumps off his bike and slams it hard into the car.

My kids are five feet away from this happening so I react as (I think) most fathers would and I ask (from about 10 feet away) "is there a problem here, do I need to call someone". The guy who had been on the bike runs up to me screaming at the top of his lungs about kicking my ass, he comes onto my driveway and ends up at one to two feet from me. At this point I have my hands up in a fence position and am telling in my most authoritative "cop voice" "I Need you off my property now, please get off my property, I can't have you on my property near my kids, I'm not going to let you be here". He gets close enough that I was about a second from a pre-emptive strike, then decides to back off into the street.

The gentleman who had been in the car was in my perhpheral vision on the phone, I had assumed he was a stranger and could tell he was on the phone with the police, but I was so engaged with the threatening person that I could not track his conversastion at all. Eventually, the guy (now 3 or 4 feet away) starts making random threats to burn down my house, hurt my family, destroy my property, how he is a gangster, spits at me and all sorts of things. He's also doing some Monkey Dance stuff after moving closer to 4 or 5 feet away including removing his shirt for our upcoming fight, evidently, pacing back and forth with his arms open, etc. My kids went inside at some point, but amusingly did not say anything to my wife, who was exercising with headphones inside and was completely oblivious to what was happening until after the fact.

I'm standing here not knowing what to do about this guy ranting in the street, wanting to fight me and threatening my family, so I decide to basically try to get him to leave, and I keep telling him things like "get on your bike, get out of here please, I can't let you sit here and threaten my family, cops are on their way", and similar things, he continues with his monkey dance thing and I am unsure what to do, other than to get him as far away from my house as possible verbally, he is keeping about a five feet distance, but still being physical threatening..at one point he starts barreling at me and I'm thinking "ok, this is it", and right at that point the gentleman on the phone steps up to me and quickly says "he has mental health issues, please don't do anything to him".

The second he says this the guy making the threats totally deflates, and stops moving towards me. Almost like he's another person. it turns out the gentlemen in the car was his caretaker, and that this guy has significant mental health/developmental issues. I have worked around mental health for years, and would not have known that this guy was anything other than just a thug, nor did I realize the relationship between the two men until I was explicitly told. He was in his late 20's, near as I could tell, and did not present in any way as having "typical" mental health disorders.

Eventually his caretaker took him home, and the police came to talk to me. Apparently the young officer who dealt with him knew this young man pretty well. She assured me that he never follows through on threats, is not even capable of planning things, and that these threats were a regular part of his mental health disorder when he decompensates in stressful situations - such as Covid 19, obviously. Apparently there is a home for people with mental illnessnesses right near me. I ran into the caretaker out biking recently, and he asked if he should come by with the young man and apologize. I said no, unless he he thought it would be helpful for the young man. The caretaker also thanked me for handling the situation well..which I did not realize I did!

It ended up being a very surreal experience. I grew up in a fairly rough place and my only context for this sort of thing was an actual threat, I was in "its going down" mode. There is some possiblility that this guy was a threat I suppose, but according to multiple people, he was not. Again, I have even worked around people with mental health issues, including conducting more interviews than I can count in our local Jail as part of my job. I had the complete wrong read on this situation, and I am very glad the gentleman in the car stepped in when he did.

Anyway, it's the only sort of event I've had in years that set off the adrenaline and kicked in reflexes to do things like use the fence and set verbal boundaries, and set myself up for possible physical confrontation. People used to pick fights with me as a kid, I've been in fights when younger, as well as being jumped/mugged and victimized by crime a couple times, but nothing like this for many years. It also made me realize I need to delve more into de-escalation, particularly with inebriated people and people with mental illness. However, the fence and allowing him to use distance to save face worked exactly as it's supposed to. It was almost uncanny how once he got close enough, the hand position and firm tone made him back into the street and keep his distance. I've used it before, but with less escalated people, where the result was less clear cut.

So, just thought i'd share a strange and relevant experience. Any input, similar experiences etc. are welcomed.

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

Hi Zach,

Zach Zinn wrote:
Given the last couple of posts here, i thought i'd share my recent experience with the forum:

Thanks for sharing. First person case studies are always really useful; especially when they are a little out of the ordinary.

Zach Zinn wrote:
At this point I have my hands up in a fence position and am telling in my most authoritative "cop voice" "I Need you off my property now, please get off my property, I can't have you on my property near my kids, I'm not going to let you be here". He gets close enough that I was about a second from a pre-emptive strike, then decides to back off into the street.

This is the vital stuff that most entirely ignore or fail to see the importance of.  This is especially true when we see combat sports masquerading as self-protection; and when self-protection is falsely seen as being synonymous with “street fighting”. Any worthwhile approach to self-protection needs to include these skills.

Zach Zinn wrote:
He was in his late 20's, near as I could tell, and did not present in any way as having "typical" mental health disorders.

In this case, I think the issue of whether he had mental health issues or not is a little moot. Threats of violence were made, and those with mental illness can still carry out those threats.

Zach Zinn wrote:
The caretaker also thanked me for handling the situation well..which I did not realize I did!

I think the fact that you were ready to act but chose to employ “soft skills” is the thing. The caretaker probably realises that you could have physically harmed the young man, but instead chose to firmly ensure he kept his distance. Of course, you only had this option because you know how to employ such skills. That’s why a “street fighting” approach to self-protection fails. It does not give people any option other than physical force; irrespective of whether that is the most effective or appropriate option.

Zach Zinn wrote:
I had the complete wrong read on this situation, and I am very glad the gentleman in the car stepped in when he did.

I’d not say you read it “wrong”. It was correct based on all the information you had at the time. The mental illness could mean that de-escalation had little chance of success, but you were ready to go physical if that proved to be the case. With prior knowledge you may not have said anything initially, let the caretaker deal with it, usher the kids inside, watch from a distance in case you needed to intervene, call for help, etc.

However, based on what you saw, it could just have easily been a violent and unprovoked attack on the guy in the car. I think you did exactly the right things based on the situation as it appeared.

Here in the UK, the law judges our actions on the situation as we believed it to be. For good reason, I think. We don’t always have all the information and can only act on things as they appear to be.

Zach Zinn wrote:
Anyway, it's the only sort of event I've had in years that set off the adrenaline and kicked in reflexes to do things like use the fence and set verbal boundaries, and set myself up for possible physical confrontation.

Good to know it’s all still there when needed though.

Not as interesting as yours, but I also had my first de-escalation experience in a while during this lockdown. People are on edge. Fence up, a convincing apology (wasn’t in the wrong, but counterproductive to say so) and a show of empathy was all it took to calm things down to the point where we both went out our sperate ways.

As an aside, one thing this situation has brought forth is a far greater awareness of personal space among the masses. Recognising when people are getting too close will become a universal thing.

All the best

Iain

Zach Zinn
Zach Zinn's picture

Thanks Iain. yes, in retrospect I think I did exactly what I should've done.

Especially working in the mental health/substance abuse arena though, I know I would've felt terrible after the fact had things gotten physical, which could be both an asset and a liability in this kind of situation, depending on how you look at it.

Funnily enough, one of the factors that made me hesitate (just one) prior to pre emptive striking was that I did not want to go to jail. My sole experience with being arrested is a night or two in the holding tank in my 20's, but I have worked adjacent to the legal system long enough to know that if things got physical we would both spending a little jail time, even if only a little...jail sucks, I get to see what it is like for others in jail on a regular basis. I also get to see the long term legal aftermath of things like fights with some of the people I've counseled...it's years worth of stuff, even if you get "cleared" somehow.

I do recall that among all the things racing through my adrenalized brain when the guy was close to me was something "decide carefully, you might end up in jail" and this perhaps contributed to the delay that gave him the opporunity to back off into the street before I hit him. Again, in this case it worked out well, but in another it could have been a liability. It's intesting the complexities of these situations.

Iain Abernethy wrote:
This is the vital stuff that most entirely ignore or fail to see the importance of.  This is especially true when we see combat sports masquerading as self-protection; and when self-protection is falsely seen as being synonymous with “street fighting”. Any worthwhile approach to self-protection needs to include these skills.

I almost posted something the other day on this, but thought my post was too wordy. I've been exploring martial arts videos on youtube for the first time in a number of years. There's some really great stuff out there in terms of technique, tactics, etc. It amazes me though how often this sort of thing is glossed over, I've even seen youtube personalities I follow  who spend an entire hour talking about how self defense vs. fighting is  a false dichotomy, it's not!

I had hoped by this point in time that focus on this kind of material would central to most places self defense training. it's dissapointing that you can go to you average dojo -or- gym and these things get not much beyond lip service, when they are precisely what we are most likely to be the skills and situations we need to drill.

It's also food for thought that -I- need to make this kind of context more central to my class.

Inujin
Inujin's picture

That is a scary but educational experience to share.   Thank you.  Violent encounters are fortunately rare for most of us so your experience is helpful to study.  I wish my martial art instructors over the years had done a little more training like this.  I will second what Iain said about it being a moot point if the person has mental illness or not.  I work in a busy emergency department and by far the greatest threat to our safety is the patient with unstable mental illness.  Even if they are not entirely responsible for their actions they can cause real harm.

Zach Zinn
Zach Zinn's picture

Inujin wrote:

That is a scary but educational experience to share.   Thank you.  Violent encounters are fortunately rare for most of us so your experience is helpful to study.  I wish my martial art instructors over the years had done a little more training like this.  I will second what Iain said about it being a moot point if the person has mental illness or not.  I work in a busy emergency department and by far the greatest threat to our safety is the patient with unstable mental illness.  Even if they are not entirely responsible for their actions they can cause real harm.

The vast majority of mentally ill people I've been around are not violent, as far as I know this is reflected by statistics on the subject. However- there is a small subset that certainly are, or can be. Now, not being violent does not mean they are pleasant, or non-threatening, etc. Simply that most are not physically violent. Many mental illnesses are associated with a lack of impulse control though, and that certainly can lead to violence with the right conditions. I'd derfintely be interested in hearing about some of your direct experiences with this though, as I know someone who had a job for years working in an instituion with mentally ill people who were prone to violence, it sounded trying. I imagine that Emergency rooms is where you get the worse cases, people with severe mental illness fully decompensating, which I imagine can be a recipe for chaos and possibly violent behavior.

In my job (drug and alcohol counselor/assessor) the scariest people I interviewed in jail were ironically usually the most clean cut and "normal" seeming at first glance, now most of these people are not severely mentally ill anyway (depends on how you define it I guess though), but it was interesting how little their demeanor corresponded to some of the things I'd read in their history. Another examples where surface indicators are not always indicative of reality.

Now, what makes this situation particularly interesting is that I felt like we were seconds from something going down, but according to the caretaker and the police, he was never any threat. Now, I do not neccessarily trust them to make that call (and indeed, I wouldn't, I would do what was needed); but I am glad nothing happened in this case.

It's interesting how quickly the situation changed once I knew he was mentally ill, he literally dropped his hands and became entirely docile once I was told. There are a lot of different conclusions one could draw from that, and I try to draw a balanced one that both keeps me safe and acknowledges his humanity. While I'm not going to assume he was no threat, it did remind me that sometimes there is stuff going on under the surface of these encounters that we can't know about.

Here's Ellis Amdur's book on the subject, which I plan on checking out:

https://www.amazon.com/Grace-Under-Fire-escalate-Individuals/dp/0982376227

This is intended for people in the helping professions, but would probably be useful to anyone. I have his Safety At Work book: https://edgeworkbooks.com/safety-at-work/, it's very good and covers some of the same ground. I'm going to be revisiting it in light of this experience. My wife also works around this population, and she did a conference with him on the subject on a work event.

Inujin
Inujin's picture

Thanks for the book recommendation I'll take a look.