The Yorkshire Ripper caused terror in the 1970s across the Yorkshire region sadly attacking numerous women and killing several. Many of his attacks in Bradford occurred in the Lumb Lane area of the city and this was quickly associated with the killings in West Yorkshire.

The TV programme Band of Gold which was shown between 1995-7 highlighted this part of Bradford again, and showed it as a seedy red light district. The local residents from the area decided they had simply had enough of this bad reputation and they decided to make a stand. They teamed up by getting together and protested by joining hands and forcing the prostitutes and the pimps out of their neighbourhood. This pushed the red light district to the Thorton Road part of the city which is next to the University of Bradford and it has been there every since.

More recently the self-proclaimed “Crossbow Cannibal” Stephen Griffiths was a student at the University of Bradford and he had a house just off Thornton Road which means he has been walking these streets every single day for many years. One prostitute was reported as saying she saw him every single day. Why is this important I hear you ask? Because all of the victims of the latest murders in Bradford were likely to have known Mr Griffiths personally because they saw him every day. They knew him, or at the very least, they will of known of him.

A scary fact is more than half (60%) of women are attacked by men they already know – not a complete stranger.

In my opinion the guy that attacked these ladies probably lived amongst them.

Good personal safety is being aware of people you know as well as the complete strangers.

Attack Rituals

If we look at attack rituals, an attacker is almost always likely to have his blood full of adrenaline. The murderer, or attacker, attacks people for a reason and usually it’s because they get a buzz out of it.

So if you see someone you know and they are behaving just slightly differently this can often be a key clue because it’s not congruent. Now I am not saying that everyone who acts a little differently is going to attack you but it should ring some alarm bells in your head.

If someone is going to attack they are either going to use the ambush technique, or they are going to use the talking distance attack, because it has to take place at talking distance. The attacker needs to get close, so they can either run and ambush or they come and talk to you nicely but they won’t be acting like they normally do.

If I was to guess I would say that these terrible series of Bradford murders were probably talking distance attacks and the girls probably recognised their attacker and felt pretty comfortable in his company. In fact, one newspaper article I read said the accused, Stephen Griffiths, was acting in a very different way on the day of the final murder – in other words he looked a bit shifty!

There are three elements to look out for:

• Body language
• Tonality
• Words

If the other person seems excited or nervous, or both, there will be a incongruency between their body language, tone and words. In other words they may be saying one thing but their body language and tonality would be saying another because of this extra excitement.

Psychopaths like to kill people because there is a feeling of being important and more in control – they enjoy this kind of domination. They don’t understand empathy and often they simply do it to get a chemical reaction in their blood.

So if your proposed attacker wants to get close, he will try and talk to you and he will have increased levels of adrenaline. This is why some people appear “shifty” as there body language is saying something completely different to their words.

I know this advice may sound simple and it is but it could save your life. I would recommend you trust your instincts even with people you know.

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If you watch the video clip which I have included in this post, you can see the background to the event. In other words what was going on before this particular event actually took place. In the video you can see members of the public being aggressive and surging towards the police. They are moving towards the police aggressively and the police are clearly vastly outnumbered, which could cause them to fear for their lives.

Then Miss Fisher approaches Sgt Smellie in an aggressive manor and he uses what we call clearance strike to push her back and out of his way. You can see he uses the back of his hand – he didn’t use his fist or his baton.

After the strike, she then moves towards him again, in possible retaliation and she seems to have items in both hands. From the video you can’t tell what she has in her hands. They could be anything.

So Sgt Smellie honestly believed he was under attack and consequently under Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act was fully entitled to use reasonable force to protect himself. You can see on the video he drops his body level so he can strike Miss Fisher’s legs, rather than a strike at head height, which could have caused severe head injuries. Because he takes this approach he is demonstrating a measured response which shows he is trying to use reasonable force.

He only uses two strikes, he bends his knees and strikes twice. They are not life threatening blows but you have to remember he also didn’t know if she had a weapon or not. She had already been warned both verbally and with the clearance strike. It is my understanding that the CPS weren’t even interested in the clearance strike, they were only interested in the use of the baton, but the judge decided it was reasonable force and threw it out.

The IPCC still might sanction the police officer in some way. However, the police officer could theoretically sue the police for removing his human rights, Article Two is the human’s right to life. He could say you have taken away my right to defend myself.

The circumstances of the case were extremely public and I believe the Government had to be seen to be doing something but the judge just threw it out. It shouldn’t have gone to court in the first place. The problem is many people simply don’t know how these laws work and they cause confusion.

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So here goes, my ten year old son is new to his local football team, he normal plays as a winger but he played in defence last Sunday and I decided to take a nice journey down to watch him and his team mates in action.

When we got to the pitch where the game was being played it was bitterly cold, so I decided to move around a bit to try and stay warm. As I was trying to stay warm, I had a look around the ground and on either side of the pitch, I noticed there were two sets parents from either team which is what normally happens at these sporting occasions.

I decided to take a stroll around the pitch and whilst I was walking I noticed a young man of around 25-years of age with a small Jack Russell type dog. What struck me at the time was he was wearing just a T-shirt in freezing temperatures. The dog he had with him was on a really long lead and it looked like it was trying to bite peoples’ ankles and the guy seemed to find this funny.

As I continued to watch with interest, I saw the guy walk further on and his little dog charged towards a Labrador and the Labrador quickly ran off with its female owner getting a bit upset. I remembering thinking trouble could be just around the corner and I wasn’t wrong.

Suddenly, whilst watching the game I heard a lot of commotion and a lot of dog yelping noises. I turned around and saw that the little dog had gone for another dog, this time it was a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and it had bitten it hard on its snout.

The bull terrier took offence to this and bit the other dog hard on its mouth and then locked its jaw so hard on it almost bit the dog’s tongue clean off. This was a horrible scene to watch and it all happened it seconds. The Jack Russell was now squealing really loudly in pain. All of this noise and commotion caused most of the parents from the opposing side of the pitch to run across including several large blokes. The guys quickly got very angry and started being really aggressive with the owner of the Staffordshire Bull Terrier. One guy even lunged for it and pulled it clean off the ground by its lead. A friend of the Staffy’s owner tried to help the little dog. He was quickly elbowed in the head by a guy from the other side. Another parent jumped in he got strangled by his neck and then got head butted. All of this happened really quickly in split seconds. Seeing things were getting violent, I quickly jumped in and said:

“Come on let’s sort this out properly and get the dog to the vet”.

As soon as I said it one large guy threatened me and I deliberately stepped back a little bit to show I wasn’t being aggressive. If you step back during a conflict you demonstrate that you are being passive and I could tell he wasn’t going to back down now. If I had remained closed to him, I believe he would have attacked – so I made a calculated decision for three reasons.

1. It creates more space to operate in if the situation gets nasty.
2. Legally he will be seen as the aggressor if he steps forward.
3. It seemed to be the right thing at the time as he was going to attack.

I need to point out that I did have my hands up (I covered this in a recent post) – so it would have been hard for him to hit me. So I took one or two steps but most importantly, I didn’t turn my back. I could see in his face that he thought he had a psychological advantage but he still wasn’t sure about me, as I was stood like I knew what I was doing. Because I stepped back he felt he had the moral victory and so the net result was he didn’t attack me. If I had backed off a lot it would have demonstrated fear and then he may have attacked me then too.

The police arrived to sort matters out properly and he came across to apologise. He said:

“My behaviour back there was out of order, I can see you were trying to calm things down. Let’s shake on it.”

I told him:

“I am not going to shake my hands with you”.

I did this because personally I felt that by backing down the second time this could have made me even more vulnerable when my son plays this team again. The point of this story is my observation and positioning both prevented me from being attacked.

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There are three main types of attack ritual to be on the look out for and if you understand what these rituals look like, it can be easier to spot an attacker first and then take the necessary evasive action. This is based on the work of Geoff Thompson and is highlighted in his book Dead or Alive which is a brilliant book.

The three rituals are as follows:

1. Ambush strategy – this is when an attacker follows you and lays in wait, and strikes using speed coming from behind you. A good example would be from behind the back of a pub. The key to this is the element of surprise. With this attack ritual there will be no dialogue, so don’t expect talking.
   • On a personal note, this actually happened to me, and it was the trigger to me taking up personal safety training in the first place. I was attacked on the way home from a night out in a local pub. Some guys were sat on a wall and attacked me from behind. One punched me on the chin and then I got kicked in the head several times. When I dusted myself off and returned home my father asked me what they had said to me and I replied “nothing”. He then asked me what I said to them and I also said “nothing”. The only way to defend against this type of attack is by having better awareness. Something which I have covered in the POLITE model – observation. So the real antidote to the ambush strategy is good observation.
2. The talking distance attack – the reason it is called this, is nobody can attack you from shouting range unless they have a gun. The distance is usually less than an arm’s length and dialogue is always involved.
   • Passive version – this is when an attacker has an excuse to get close to talk to you. He may ask you the time, directions or simply for some change. Basically they think of an excuse to come up close to you. If they think you are unaware they will attack with some kind of pre-emptive strike i.e punch
     • The 3D’s Dialogue, Deception and Distraction – a good attacker will use these to make you think and whilst you are thinking you are off guard.
   • Aggressive talking distance attack – this usually begins up to 50 yards away. It is the art of sucker punch which will get around any martial arts training. It starts with eye contact. The second stage is they will put their hand up and say something like “Can I have a word?” That is designed to get you to stop otherwise you would have had a head start. Then they make the approach which will be in a straight line and the speed will depend on how sophisticated the attacker is. An amateur attacker will move quickly which could startle you and put you on guard. If someone comes across in a more controlled manner, they go under the radar and when they are in striking range they will say the same statement again but change the tonality. This time it will be with an aggressive tone “Hey I said I wanted a word with you?” The attacker will then begin hen packing, ballooning and stalking to send an unconscious message that you do you want to mess them. If they see any sign of weakness or their opponent starting to crumble, the attack will continue. However, if they are met with an aggressive response they will probably abort and go and pick on somebody else.
3. The gentleman’s duel – this doesn’t really happen these days. Most people who are trained for self defence are only really ever prepared for the duel. When one man challenges another to a fist fight.The bad guys these days will tend to use the talking distance attack.

As a final point, Geoff Thompson claims he has won 90% of his fights in the first three secs by using the 3Ds.

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I thought this was a great quote and what she was basically saying is that if someone is looking for a fight you are going to lose either way. Whether it is through injury or police arrest. While I was there I found myself comparing her examples to our POLITE system which I have covered extensively here on the blog. The essence of what she was saying was, if you remain POLITE you won’t get dirty because you won’t be taking part in any battles.

Another thing she said was “Discard the emotions involved in the conflict and use the Judge Judy approach”.

I really liked this comment as it was a nice reference and made me think of my last post on emotional state control in which I said you should do your best to control your state when in involved in a conflict as it will make you a better negotiator.

When Judge Judy sums up, she only deals with the facts of the case as legally courts don’t deal with emotions. Yeah sure they might consider people’s emotions at the time but they don’t use them to make a final decision. Personally, I always recommend that you try to stay in control of your emotional state because if you don’t you will lose your all important skills of negotiation.

In her seminar Judi took us through her 3-step approach which had the following three steps at its core:

1. What’s the current reality?
2. Where do you want go to?
3. What’s the cost of the gap?

It is true to say that when it comes to conflict there is always a cost on one party’s side.

If we look at Judi’s approach and contrast it with our POLITE model there are certainly similarities.

In our model, the first element is position and we normally talk about this from a physical point of view. However, we could a talk about it from a psychological point of view as well. What is the cost of that?

Judi also recommends that you should take the position of an adult not a parent or a child when you are dealing with difficult people. I think she was linking this to A school of Psychology Analysis from the book “I’m OK your OK” written by Thomas Harris.

The most effective way of getting a win/win situation is by taking a communication style of an adult – the reason for that is if you act as a parent it would be a win lose because you would win but they would lose.

If you take the position of a child, you become passive and much more likely to be walked over which is a lose/win. In other words you would be saying this is my view and I am much more interested in your view. The chances are extremely high that you will come out of the situation acting like a rebellious child thinking “I am not doing that” and we are not likely to get to the end result.

Thomas explains a lot of this in much more detail in his book.

As Judi went on in her seminar she also talked extensively about building rapport and mirroring people’s body language and if we link how we position our body, we would be matching and mirroring anyway.

However, I have to admit I didn’t agree with everything she said, as she seemed slightly confused over the open palm used when dealing with violent and aggressive people(she has probably been shown this wrong, which is quite common ). She is looking at this technique from one school of psychology but I am talking about it from experience in the field and so I have seen what actually works in practice.

Here are five other things Judi referenced during her seminar:

1. Don’t interrupt – this is also in my model under listening.
2. Don’t assume anything – that’s why you use your questionings skills. “The problem with assuming is it will make an ass of you and me,”.
3. Agree to seek an outcome which focuses on common ground.
4. If you are not getting the response you want, you need to change your strategy– I totally agree with that.
5. To use the word I rather than we. I will sort that out for you. I will deal with that. It gives more of a sense of action and makes it more personal.

In essence, 90% of what Judi discussed in her seminar fits perfectly in the Polite Model of conflict resolution. We created our model because it makes everything nice and simple to remember – always be POLITE when dealing with difficult people and you won’t go far wrong.

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