I don’t know much about American Football (coming from the UK I grew up with “Soccer”) however I do know one thing about the sport and that is the Quarterback – the person who throws the ball forward to his teammates in the hope of scoring a touchdown – has to make some very quick decisions whilst under immense stress and pressure; he has the opposing team attempting to take him out of the game before he makes the throw.

He needs in one glance to be able to assess the state of the field in front of him and assess which players are in the best position, all whilst waiting for some 250 LB giant to bear down on him and prevent him from throwing the ball. He certainly doesn’t have time to weigh up the pros and cons of each potential decision rather he must look, decide and then act. His visual assessment immediately determines his decision, in the same way that many emergency personnel immediately seem to know what to do when they turn up at a fire, a train wreck etc. One look at the situation will tell them what “type” of fire it is and what they must do to combat it – as the fire develops they may take in the new information available to them and adjust their plan but in the initial instant they know, just like the Quarterback, what they must do.

A computer has beaten a human at chess: IBM’s “Deep Blue” beat Gary Kasparov, a Chess Grandmaster. However no computer program has ever been written that can beat a person at either Backgammon or the Japanese game of “Go” (a game where players attempt to change two sided disks to their color by trapping a line of their opponent’s disks between theirs). Chess differs from these two games, in that it is possible to make predictions and comparisons based on different plays. “Deep Blue” beat Kasparov by comparing all the potential outcomes of a particular play and evaluating it against all the other ones available to it. Kasparov said he was only able to do this for one or two moves ahead and that he normally had a gut feel for a play based on the way that the board looked i.e. he’d seen the pieces laid out in an identical or similar way before. In Backgammon and Go, there are no “set outcomes” as such; every decision has to be based on the way the board “looks”, where the pieces lie etc. In Backgammon/Go the layout of the pieces do not result in any predictable outcomes; any computer attempting to run comparisons of plays would end up getting caught in an infinite loop – each year a large cash prize is offered to any programmer who can write a program that will defeat a top Go player.

When doing crowd surveillance, a security professional is presented with the task of identifying any potential assailant that may be in a crowd of possibly tens of thousands. It would be impossible to assess and compare every individual’s behavior and actions to ascertain if they represent a potential threat or danger, whether to others around them, such as at a sports event, or to a particular individual, such as a politician at a rally or similar. Any identification of such individuals must be done by looking at the crowd as a whole, in a similar way to a Quarterback who looks at the field in front of him and let’s his eyes be drawn to a particular player who is in the “best” position. The Quarterback knows what a “Best Position” looks like because it’s stored in his memory from previous experiences. He probably couldn’t even explain why one player is better positioned than another rather he just knows what looks right.

A Security Professional may never have seen an assassination attempt first-hand before – he will probably have been shown footage of previous assassinations as part of his training however these will have been caught on film from a cameraman’s perspective. Despite lacking a firsthand visual memory of such a thing, he’ll know from experience what a peaceful crowd attending a political rally etc will look like, and what behaviors people in such crowds engage in e.g. flag waving, clapping, smiling etc, he’ll also be aware of how people in such crowds move; whether the majority stand and wait, how those wanting to get a better look move through the crowd etc, etc. Whilst he scans his eyes over the whole scene, he will wait for his eyes to be drawn to the person whose movement, actions or behaviors are out of place and don’t adhere to the “normal” picture of a healthy crowd.

Just as a Backgammon, Go player or Quarterback can take in the importance of what they see in an instant and make a decision based upon it, so can the security professional. He though works from what seems out of place as opposed to what looks good and in place. Most of us have had that experience of walking in to a bar or pub and feeling that something was wrong; something that we couldn’t actually identify or put our finger upon. This is our fear system alerting us to the presence of danger by identifying that what we see before us doesn’t marry up to all our previous positive experiences of bars or pubs. This comparison of images is a bit like trying to do a “spot the difference” puzzle, where we can see that the two pictures/photos we’re meant to compare are not the same but we’re not immediately able to identify the five actual differences etc.

Our fear system works like a “behind the scenes” security professional, comparing situations with previous ones. If everything looks the same as a positive experience, then no alert is given. If it matches a negative experience an alert is given - likewise if it doesn’t match a positive one. Once this alert is given we must make a dynamic risk assessment.