Since that time, I look for perps everywhere. Like wild Bill Hickok, I like to sit where I am facing the door. I liken it to that sci-fi movie "They Live", in which the earth had been taken over by aliens who looked normal; but with special glasses, one could see the true alien's face. Being robbed at gunpoint strips a filter off your eyesight and makes things clearer.
I’m sorry but also glad that happened to you in a way that you survived.
Nothing like bad things happening to you to make you ‘think street.’
The article mentions people who try too hard to “act natural” ie Taliban pretending to be farmers in Afghanistan.
My own situational awareness has been honed by living for years in an inner city cesspool. Those guys “playing basketball” on the corner, as well as the fellows “working on their car” in a driveway were actually dealing crack and heroin.
The drugs were stashed under the hood of the car. The b-ball players would stop playing and chat with passersby, and the money would quickly change hands.
The buyer would then drive or stroll down the block and have another brief chat with the “mechanic” who would pass the drug packet with a quick “handshake” and a “hey, man, how you been?”
The white woman sitting on her porch who was always on the phone (she really wasn’t on the phone) was a signaler, telling the dealers that buyers were coming round the corner. She was a crack ho who got paid in product.
The kids on bikes were signalers too, who watched the outer periphery of the neighborhood. They’d ride by real fast and flash a hand sign at the woman on the phone, to indicate cops were incoming.
She’d jump up and run inside. The “mechanic” would slam the hood of the car. Both he and the b-ballers would stroll off down the street.
Just mindin’ their bidness. Calm as can be.