Rule #1 - Never Help Your Opponent
For those of you who know me well know that outside of the Security Industry I am a USTA Certified Tennis Instructor and Coach. As a Coach, there is one foundational rule that I drill into tennis players from day one: Never help your opponent!
If I am on the tennis court and I slam an easy forehand into the net, my opponent didn’t have to do anything other than watch me give them the point. They didn’t have to run or outsmart me, they simply got to save their energy and prepare for the next point.
In Tennis, we call that an "unforced error."
For thirty years, I have worked in the high-stakes world of school security, business security, community safety and targeted violence prevention. I’ve assessed school districts, city centers, and corporate campuses and I almost always come to an uncomfortable conclusion about why tragedies happen:
We are obsessed with the opponent's game, while completely ignoring how many unforced errors we are creating at our own organization or community.
The Myth of the "Mastermind"
When a Mayor or a Superintendent worries about safety, their mind tends to go to the movies. They imagine sophisticated adversaries—highly trained, meticulously planned “Mission Impossible-style breaches.” We spend millions of dollars trying to defend against "The Winner"—the shot that is too good to return. But when you analyze the After-Action Reports of real-world tragedies, you rarely find a mastermind.
You find a side door at a high school that was propped open with a rock because a teacher forgot their key. You find a corporate termination that went wrong because a manager was too busy to call Security. You find a community tip about a troubled individual that got lost in an email inbox because nobody owned the "follow-up."
These are not examples of the adversary outsmarting us. These are unforced errors.
The Economics of an Attack
Every physical attack has a "price” and each side spends something in some way shape of form.
The adversary—whether they are an aggrieved employee or an outsider—has to spend resources to hurt you. They have to spend time surveilling, energy bypassing your controls and most importantly, they have to spend risk—the longer they are exposed, the higher the chance they get caught.
Our entire job in protecting a community is to keep that price astronomically high for the adversary. We want to make the logistics of attacking us so expensive that the adversary decides it isn't worth it.
But every time we commit an unforced error, we lower the price. When you leave the loading dock door unlocked because it’s "easier," you have put your facility on clearance sale. You have removed the cost of "breaching." When you ignore the warning signs of a student in crisis because the paperwork is tedious, you have removed the cost of "evasion."
In that moment, you are no longer just a passive victim. You have become the adversary's logistics partner.
The Cure for the Human Condition
So why do we make these errors? It isn't because we don't care. It's because we are human.
Humans get tired, humans get distracted and humans have bad days. A Principal at 4:00 PM on a Friday is less vigilant than they were at 8:00 AM on a Monday. That fatigue is where the cracks form.
This is exactly why I stopped relying solely on human memory and built a platform around Assistive Intelligence.
We developed Threatalytics AI not to replace the human judgment in our schools and businesses, but to stabilize it. We built it to minimize the unforced errors.
It remembers the policy when the human forgets it.
It assists in spotting the patterns in the behavioral report when the human is too tired to see it.
It assists to ensure that bias does not creep into the decision making process.
Threatalytics AI “acts as the relentless doubles partner for your safety team—the one who covers the gap when you are out of position, and communicates the threat before you even see the ball coming."
Make Them Earn It
This is a hard truth to swallow because it removes the comfort of victim-hood. It forces us to look in the mirror and ask: How much of our own risk are we manufacturing with sloppy discipline?
My philosophy for protecting a community is simple, and it comes straight from the tennis court: We never help the opponent.
The world is a dangerous place, bad actors exist and they may decide to target us no matter what we do.
But if they want to breach our perimeter, they are going to have to use their resources, not ours. They are going to have to defeat our culture, evade our technologies, and outsmart our protocols.
Rule #1 - Never Help Your Opponent!