Part 1: How to Identify Criminal Alert Signals; Two Types of Morality

I admit, it’s hard to find a place to start at first, trying figuring out what to share from the security industry. Security itself is a vast ocean filled with seas, inlets, deltas and even brackish water covering a global scale of industry specifics. Physical security all the way down to cyber-security has its place within the security community itself. So where do we start? After a long session of consideration I think the best place to start is with the mental state of people’s own morality. Sure I can touch on the physical aspects that every Tom, Dick and Harry have but that would just be a redundancy of regurgitated garble that I think most people, at least people with commonsense, already know. That’s not me.

What about understanding why people do bad things while others seemly breeze through life doing the right thing? Better yet, how do we immediately identify these people to keep ourselves and our loved ones out of their reach? Ahhh! Have I hit a nerve? Not yet, I will. I’m about to delve you into a world few people touch on which is industry dubbed “Alert Signals and Identification.” Sound boring? Maybe, but I promise you this, it doesn’t matter how many drills you run in practicum on the range if you cannot properly identify a predator before he attacks. It’s essential to identify a predator while the predator is stalking and then use counter-measures to disrupt the predators cognitive thought process while you get to safety.

Before we can get into the physical alert signals and identification first we have to look at what makes a person’s clock tick. Really, what makes one person do the right thing while others just seem to be “opportunists”? This is actually quite simple and broken into two categories. People are either morally honest or conditionally honest. Every single person on the face of the planet falls into one of these categories. Furthermore, there are people under certain circumstances that can cross over into the other one. So let’s look a little closer at these “honesty” areas.

Someone is considered morally honest who are honest just because it’s the right thing to do and need no further justification to be honest. They are just plainly put, a person you can trust your wallet with and know what ever was in it would still be there ten or twenty years down the road. Setting aside moral-relativism, the idea that every person chooses what right and wrong is, as everyone knows murder, stealing, lying and cheating is wrong, it’s hard to argue there are morally honest people out there.

People who are conditionally honest are those who are only honest under conditional circumstances. The example I use to illustrate this is an armed guard outside of a bank. It’s a deterrent, or in this case the conditional circumstance, that keeps people from robbing the bank outright. While it may not stop everyone it’s a deterrent non-the-less. I’m sure many of you have heard the expression, “Keeping an honest person honest”. This statement would not need to be used if everyone was morally honest but that’s an ideal and not reality. Conditionally honest people have to have conditions, or measures of conditions, to keep them honest. Otherwise, they would take advantage of the opportunity of dishonesty in front of them without risk of getting caught. This is who we look out for.

Contrarily, though, morally honest people can cross over into conditional morality under any number of conditions. Lack of money to pay bills creates desperation and the moral justification to fulfill their financial obligations outweighs their morals. The end result is committing a crime of opportunity.

So how can you use this to your benefit you may ask? That’s a mighty fine question and I have an answer. People who are about to commit any dishonest act put off alert signals, whether they want to or not. There are 4 distinct stages of the mindset of a criminal: Pre-Crime Stage, Commission of the Crime, Cover-Up and Post-Crime. I’ll save this for part 2 though.

Next: Part 2: How to Identify Criminal Alert Signals; Criminal Mindset