The Safety Trap: A Security Expert's Secrets for Staying Safe in a Dangerous World

By Spencer Coursen

Threat management expert Spencer Coursen offers proactive strategies to protect yourself and your loved ones in the event of hostile encounters and emergency situations in The Safety Trap: A Security Expert’s Secrets for Staying Safe in a Dangerous World.

Despite what the news and social media would have you believe, we have never lived in a safer time than we are now. Unfortunately, we live under a false sense of security enforced by authorities that only alleviates fears without reducing risk. We have placed our personal safety, and our responsibilities of guarding it, into the hands of people trained only to respond to crises, not actively prevent them. Our blind faith in institutions to protect us has only dulled our natural survival instincts.

The truth is that when we feel safest is actually when we are in the most danger.
This is the paradox of The Safety Trap.

When you don’t expect danger, you simply fail to see the signs that something bad is about to happen. But the signs are always there, and staying safe is about training yourself to see them. In easy-to-implement methods of maintaining vigilance, assessing risk, and taking preventative measures, you’ll discover how to be alert without anxiety and know how to best protect and defend yourself on the job, in school, in public places, at home, and online.

With Coursen’s simple formula of Awareness + Preparation = Safety as your guide—as well as real world examples of managing threats—you will learn how to develop the skills and confidence to reclaim your own security and avoid The Safety Trap.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250258151

Spencer Coursen

SPENCER COURSEN is a nationally recognized threat management expert and author of The Safety Trap (St. Martin’s Press, 2021.) He has an exceptional record of success in the assessment, management, and resolution of threats, conflict resolution, employee terminations, physical security assessments, expert witness testimony, policy authorship, protective intelligence, and vulnerability reduction. Mr. Coursen is the founder of Coursen Security Group (CSG), a premier threat management firm based in Austin, Texas. CSG provides expert security assessment, consultation, and protective strategy to help organizations, public figures, and private families succeed in staying safe.

Book preview

PART II

THE SAFETY TRAPS

[1]

AVOIDANCE

What Happened

So many of us want to believe that if we just ignore the uncomfortable thing long enough, it will somehow solve itself. The TV star was hoping this same approach would work for her.

When the first email came into her in-box, the TV star thought it was from someone she knew. What she found when she opened the message was nothing like what she was expecting. The video began to play all on its own. She could hear the man pleasuring himself to an array of her videos and photographs that he had opened as individual windows across his oversize computer screen. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see the outline of his reflection in the monitor as his arm moved up and down in a violent gesture. She could hear his voice moaning in pleasure. She told me when she heard him first moan out her name, she slammed the laptop closed so hard she was afraid she’d shattered the screen. The next day, another email arrived. Another one the day after that. By the end of the week, she had at least a dozen. She left all of them unopened. She didn’t want to see what they were. She didn’t want to have to deal with yet another creep who had somehow managed to learn her personal email address. So she just left them unopened—a blue dot next to a bold font causing her more and more anxiety every time she checked her mail. By the middle of the next week, there were at least twenty.

When her assistant came into work the next morning, she asked her to delete them. She also asked her to create a rule so that they would be automatically deleted without her ever having to see them. Her hope was that by simply ignoring them, the issue would somehow resolve itself. So that was what she did. For her, out of sight was out of mind. And she was right. As she would later reveal to me, within a few weeks, she had completely forgotten about the incident in its entirety—for a while, anyway. Six weeks later, the TV star was filming a scene on a downtown city street in Lower Manhattan. There was a man lingering behind the yellow caution tape that separated the film set from the public street. She didn’t know what it was about him. Maybe it was the way he was standing there all alone. She felt he was looking at her, and she couldn’t be sure, but when their eyes met, she was almost certain he was motioning for her to come over.

Between one of the takes, a production assistant came up to her saying that a man said he knew her and had brought her that thing that she asked for. The TV star was confused. She’d met so many people in this line of business that she honestly couldn’t remember whom she had met and whom she had not. Still, she didn’t want to offend anyone. When she asked the production assistant which man she meant, her stomach turned to knots when the PA pointed to the man she had been weirded out by all morning. She made the mistake of looking over at him, because he was definitely looking at her now. He could see the production assistant had just pointed him out. And now he was waving, energetically waving, as if he had something of utmost importance to tell her.

The TV star began to slowly walk over to where the man was standing behind the tape. She could tell that he was pulling something from a messenger bag he had slung over his shoulder. It was an envelope. A large envelope.

When I asked her later why she had decided to walk over to him, she told me it was the envelope. She thought he was a process server, and she thought it better to be done with it here and now rather than having this guy try to track her down for the rest of the day. But as she got closer, she realized she had made a terrible mistake.

I was able to watch the rest of the encounter thanks to the TV star’s assistant. Her assistant was used to filming interactions with fans to use as content on the TV star’s social media accounts, so when the assistant noticed the TV star walking up toward the crowd, she quickly came up behind her and started filming.

Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! the man said as the TV star approached.

Hi, she said. So good to see you.

You could see in the video that the TV star’s entire demeanor changed as soon as she realized this man was definitely not a process server. She literally stopped in her tracks a few feet from the yellow caution tape. She wasn’t being sued after all. This was something else entirely—she just didn’t know what it was.

I made this for you. The man was jittery with excitement. Watching the video, you could see he was nervous. His left hand was clutching the envelope, a tight grip more than a light hold. His right hand was up by his chest. He kept wiping it on his sweatshirt. The man let out an exasperated sigh as if he were building up the courage to say what came next. I knew you would want me to find you here.

The TV star stood there confused. I’m sorry…? she said with a bit of exaggeration in her voice. She had clearly misread this entire situation, and her mind was racing to figure out a way to get herself out of this awkward engagement.

The man was now holding out the envelope over the tape for her to take it from him. But as her hand reached out to take it from him, he pulled it back.

But I don’t understand why you’ve been ignoring me. Why did you stop reading my emails?

I watched the tape as her face flushed white. She froze. It was at this moment she realized this was the man from the reflection on the computer screen. This was the man who had sent that disgusting video. And then just kept sending … and sending.

The man’s demeanor had also changed. It had escalated from one of excitement to one of agitation. He was aggressively shaking the envelope at the TV star. Is it so I would bring you this? Is that what you wanted me to do?

Her assistant stopped filming and tried to make eye contact with the security guard who was pouring himself a soda at the craft services table. When she was unsuccessful, she keyed her radio and asked for