Successfully quick-peeking around a corner or door jamb to check for a hidden suspect is all about proper timing. Do it too slowly and you may get shot. But if you pop your head out and back too fast, your brain may trick you into thinking the coast is clear when actually someone is waiting to ambush you.
Trainer Derrick Bartlett, managing director of Snipercraft, Inc., warned of this little-known “too-fast” phenomenon at the ILEETA conference earlier this year and elaborated on it during a recent interview with Police1.
“When your eyes move very rapidly from one point to another and back again, a split-second of blind space is created where you can’t really pick up useful information to send to your brain,” Bartlett explains. Scientists refer to this as “the Blanking Effect” or “Saccadic Suppression.”
Unconsciously Drawing Conclusions
However, Bartlett says, without your realizing it “your brain tends to fill in this void, based on memory, past experience in similar situations, and expectation, creating a ‘reality’ that gives you the illusion of having actually seen what you’ve looked at.
“You may be more concerned about getting your head out and back safely than about your eye registering a valid image of what’s there. In effect, you end up unconsciously drawing conclusions about what you think you’ve perceived.
“If your guess is right, good. If not, then things could turn tragic when you or others enter the area you’ve quick-peeked into,” Bartlett cautions.
What’s needed, he says, is to “take the emphasis off of ‘quick’ in quick-peeking and retrain yourself not to look any faster than you really can see.” This involves a two-pronged approach:
1.) slowing your quick-peek a bit and
2.) learning to capture more information visually in the limited exposure time you have.
“If a hidden suspect does not know you’re about to quick-peek, he has to go through a recognition cycle before he can react and shoot at you,” Bartlett explains. “His lag time may be 1 to 1½ seconds or more — well beyond what you need to pop an eye out from behind a barricade. With practice, you can learn to truly see an extraordinary amount of detail in a safe amount of time.”
At ILEETA, Bartlett, a 25-year SWAT veteran, exposed officers to a sampling of the “flash recognition” skills that he teaches in his Snipercraft classes. Flicking longer and longer strings of numbers on a screen for shorter and shorter periods of time, he demonstrated how you can “train your eyes to pick up more and more data and your brain to absorb it at a faster and faster speed. You can get really fast rather quickly,” he says. “A lot of it depends on repetition.”
A Technique For Trainers
Bartlett suggests this exercise: Set up a PowerPoint program that alternates blank slides with photographs of rooms, each furnished with different objects and occupied by different subjects. Initially, allow trainees to view a room photograph for one second and then answer six or seven questions about it: How many people were in the room — were they male or female; were they armed; what objects in the room were visible, etc.
“No one will get all the questions right the first time, but gradually they’ll improve,” Bartlett says. “Keep the timing at one second until they’re scoring perfectly, then gradually decrease the time allowed for observation.
“Of course, you keep changing the pictures so they don’t just memorize the scenes. In time, their eyes and brain will learn to work together better as they repeat the exercise, and this will translate into improved quick-peeks.”
A trainer in Bartlett’s ILEETA class, Ofcr. Gary Petersen, explained a live quick-peek drill he learned at an FBI survival school that he plans to use with his own department, the Portage (Wisc.) PD.
An offender role-player armed with a Simunition or Airsoft weapon hides down a wall inside a doorway, “ready to shoot at first sight.” Positioned behind him is an instructor’s aide who holds up a varying number of fingers near the suspect. The trainee, wearing protective gear, must peek out from the door jamb and duck back before being shot but long enough that he can accurately report the number of fingers signaled by the aide.
“We did this repeatedly at the survival school, in regular light, low light, and by flashlight,” Petersen recalls. “Like Derrick says, if you go too fast you won’t see what you need to see, but too slow you take a round.
“This is a very useful tool for perfecting your timing. Everyone’s ideal is a little different. But with practice, you learn to quick-peek successfully in well under a second. You beat the suspect’s best effort to nail you and you really see what you think you see.”
A final important precaution: When quick-peeking more than once from the same location, “be sure to come out at different heights,” Petersen says, to “throw off the suspect’s aim and increase his reaction time.” With that understanding, Bartlett believes a second peek is not a bad idea to confirm whatever has registered the first time.
For more information on Tactical Vision training, contact Bartlett at: derrick@snipercraft.org or 863-385-7835. His website is: www.snipercraft.org.
