Opinion: Trust your instincts to help bolster public safety

Jan 23, 2024

The role I serve within public safety focuses entirely on prevention. Our section offers surveys for private residents and businesses, focused through the lens of crime prevention through environmental design. The aim of this service is to offer advice on how to target-harden yourself or your business.

There is a great deal we can do to improve our own security within our homes and when we are out in public, but if there were to be one overarching guideline to crime prevention, it would be to trust your instincts. For a deeper understanding and explanation from a far better writer, I encourage you to review Gavin De Becker's work, "Gift of Fear."

This notion of trusting your instinct and confronting potential security and safety concerns brings me to my anecdote from my last trip back home to Virginia Beach.

My family, which includes a newborn, a toddler and my partner, decided to come home to visit family this Memorial Day; based on the delay at the Hampton Roads BridgeTunnel, half of the East Coast had a similar idea.

Neighborhood walks were a staple in my family growing up, which is why my father was eager to take my eldest out to grab doughnuts early on Saturday morning. After returning across Virginia Beach Boulevard, my dad took my daughter to a public dock to look for fish. After making it down to the water, a woman approached from behind. She apologized and proceeded to ask my daughter if she knew the man she was with and if he was her father or grandfather.

After some confirmations and awkward laughter, all three walked out using the sidewalk. As it turns out, her response to a red flag — being an older man walking with a child — was to mount the curb, park on the grass and run to address the situation.

It is one thing to identify a problematic situation, but another thing entirely to stop everything you are doing and put yourself in potential danger to come to the aid of a child. For a host of reasons, law enforcement must work retroactively; this puts the burden and responsibility of preventing crime on the shoulders of ourselves and fellow community members.

I wish I could give you a clear-cut warning sign to look out for; unfortunately, specific crime indicators can be misleading and limit the scope of your expectations. We have been trained to spot the strange van by the playground offering puppies or candy, but that is not always the case. When it comes down to looking out for warning signs, trust your instincts. We are hardwired for preservation. Our unconscious mind sees more than our conscious mind and communicates through physiological responses like fear and anxiety.

Listen to yourself and be prepared. It is important to know your options. In this example, a woman thought my child was in imminent danger, and there was reasonable justification to act herself. For your safety, it is not advisable to physically confront someone in a dangerous situation, but she felt a child's safety was more important than her own.

There are varying degrees of appropriate responses to suspicious activity; know which numbers to call. Depending on the situation, that might be 911, the non-emergency line or maybe your neighborhood watch.

When my father and daughter returned, we celebrated this unknown hero. As a father and advocate for public safety habits, I can confirm this amount of individual responsibility for a stranger to look out for a child unknown to her was the gold standard. I can only hope that this level of bystander intervention becomes the norm and expectation in communities around the country.

And if someone questions your ties to a child, please meet this confrontation with grace and praise rather than resistance or indignation. My only advice to this individual is that there was no need to apologize for checking on a child's safety.

Mason Riggs is a civilian crime prevention specialist for the Manassas City Police Department.

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