Leap Over The Abyss

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Leap over the abyss

Knowledge of psychology allows special services to calculate terrorists in a crowd, and bodyguards - possible criminals

Read a person's thoughts by gestures and facial expressions and predict his possible actions, tenaciously remember the face of the criminal and recognize him even in makeup, hold attention for many hours in a row at a high level of concentration and at the right time be able to make the right decision - all these skills must be possessed by an employee police special forces, professional bodyguard, security officer

For several years now, a special training center for training bodyguards has been operating at the Kiev Institute for Industrial Personnel Development. Among the students undergoing training in this unique center are those who would like to master this profession, those who already work as a bodyguard, but need advanced training, as well as leaders of organizations and companies engaged in security activities. Bodyguards and professional security guards are taught here not only to run, jump, shoot and fight, but also read emotions, effortlessly memorize any information and even understand the psychology of criminals, criminal gangs and group psychology.

Valentin Kim, a teacher of the psychological training course for bodyguards, spoke about why a bodyguard needs knowledge of the secrets of the human psyche and what special knowledge and skills a special forces soldier should have.

- In fact, the requirements for bodyguards are quite high - Valentin Kim begins the conversation. - The bodyguard must be physically stronger than an ordinary person, have different reactions, react differently to some standard and non-standard situations. The work of these people can be compared to jumping over an abyss - the abyss cannot be jumped 99%. Either you jump 100%, or you fall down. People of such professions risk their lives, and not only their own, almost every second, because they do not know at what moment all their skills and abilities will be required. And the moment it is needed, they should work 100%. Psychological training in the section of general training of bodyguards, of course, takes the main place, but when it comes to life, it is the psychological preparedness for an extreme situation that can be a decisive factor.

- What special skills and knowledge, inaccessible to a mere mortal, should a professional guard have?

- the bodyguard must be ready not only to act in an extreme situation, but also to anticipate the occurrence of such a situation and avoid them. As in the philosophy of a warrior - the main battle, this is not the one in which you won, but the one that you managed to win without violence. Moreover, in modern society, the requirements for a security specialist are constantly growing. You need to master new knowledge and skills, constantly keep yourself in shape, deepen the already mastered professional skills. It should be borne in mind that the protected person can become not only a victim of a contract killer, but also an ordinary bully or even just an accident. For example, everyone probably remembers the situation when Yulia Tymoshenko, during a large rally in Luhansk, stumbled and fell on the red carpet. It happened in a huge stadium, in front of thousands of people. The people around were probably funny, but in fact this case was a serious blow to her image. Especially in such an important eastern region for her. And the task of the bodyguards at that moment was to pick up the client, not to let him fall. You can also recall the case with the egg that was thrown at Yanukovych in Ivano-Frankivsk in 2004, or the recent case with the President of Poland, when a young man passed the bodyguards and smeared an egg on the head of state. The protected people did not receive physical damage, however, the damage to their image was colossal, and the bodyguards were obliged to prevent what happened. The fact is that the protection of an individual should be perceived by the bodyguard himself as complex security, when life, health and image are protected.

- Can the subject you teach help you avoid such situations?

- A separate topic of my course is verification - reading emotions and the ability to predict human behavior by his gestures and facial expressions. Gestures are of primary importance compared to our speech. We can try to lie, suppress our own aggression, try to hide interest in a person of the opposite sex, but our gestures will always give us away. By the appearance of a person, by his gestures, facial expressions, one can determine how capable he is of showing aggression, whether he can decide on some unexpected act or does not pose any danger. For example, a person who has planned a demonstration trick, as in the case of throwing a cake in the face of Bill Gates or trying to pull the Pope from his car, can be identified in a crowd by a number of signs. Such a person can be dressed provocatively demonstratively, in violation of the dress code. For example, to a meeting where everyone is dressed in business suits, he can come in jeans or a tracksuit. Naturally, we are talking about a person whose main motive is to defiantly humiliate someone, not kill. Also, such a person will move in a rhythm different from the crowd. Usually large groups of people awaiting the arrival of a person communicate with each other, turn in one direction when any events take place on the stage, they can stand on tiptoe together, as one, in order to better see or smile in response to a joke sounded from the stage. The person who has conceived any dangerous action is not in sync with the crowd. He may not communicate when everyone is talking to each other, he may not react to what is happening on stage. At the same time, such a person is tense, focused, he is waiting for the right moment in order to pull off his plan.

- Several years ago, the Israeli special services faced the fact that the technical means of screening at airports became less effective, air terrorists learned how to make explosives that were difficult to detect with scanners. And then special employees were involved in the work, whose task was to identify in the crowd those passengers who should be subjected to a more thorough inspection. Immediately after that, the effectiveness of control at airports increased significantly - intelligence officers could easily figure out in the flow of passengers not only terrorists, but also smugglers, drug carriers, and fugitive criminals. Do the Israelis use exactly the same method that you teach Ukrainian bodyguards?

- The techniques are similar. A person who has conceived an unlawful action, in this case - to bring a prohibited object into the plane, is afraid of being caught. And if he does not have the proper training, he will give himself away with his behavior. Such a person is nervous, he may stumble in place, rush to pass control, make many small movements, for example, fiddling with details of clothing, straightening clothes for no reason, for example, pulling his tie all the time or checking whether the buttons on his jacket are buttoned. Such a person may try to hide his face, lower his head, look down. Also, such people often look around, they try to control where the police are, where are the airport workers. Nervousness is the first sign of latent emotion. Excessive calmness, poverty of facial expressions, lack of interest in the surrounding changes also attract the attention of Israeli verifier employees.

- Many fraudsters are good psychologists, it is not difficult for them to identify in the crowd a person whom they could deceive. This is why some people become victims of crime more often than others. Do criminals use the same art of gesture reading and facial expressions in their work?

- I would not say that scammers are good psychologists. After all, psychology is a science. And representatives of the underworld can only be good, experienced practitioners who hone their skills for years, or even decades. At the same time, they only use the information that can help in the commission of crimes. As a rule, scammers first of all pay attention to people who are not collected, scattered, and confused. Potential victims can attract the attention of the offender with an uncertain, unhurried gait, confused, wandering eyes, thoughtfulness. In this state, people are more susceptible to other people's influence.

- In addition to learning sign language, what do you teach Ukrainian guards?

- One of the first topics of my course is attention training. I teach listeners the ability to concentrate attention, distribute it, not lose focus for a long time. And also the ability not to pay attention to various confusing factors that can deliberately divert attention from the main activity. This skill is very important for a bodyguard. I also familiarize students with various memorization techniques that allow them to memorize any information without much effort, I introduce them to ways of training memory, thanks to which it is possible to increase its volume. Finally, I teach security psychology, criminal psychology, criminal group psychology, and group psychology. A separate topic is teaching methods of self-regulation, ways to deal with stress. And finally, the basics of business etiquette. It is simply impossible to do without this academic discipline now. The psychology of security activity is a separate area of legal psychology that studies human behavior in the legal field. It should be borne in mind that in our society there is some kind of Asian attitude towards laws, when they are perceived as an obstacle to the implementation of something that we would like to do. And the bodyguard enters into a certain mental conflict - he should not so much protect a person from criminal encroachments as he is obliged to protect the law from a society that is not interested in the law. And this imposes certain requirements on the personality of the bodyguard; therefore, the psychology of security activity is quite complex, multifaceted and, unfortunately, poorly studied. Especially in our country.

Based on materials from the newspaper "Argumenty Nedeli" No. 43.

Journalist Svetlana Radich.