An excellent piece in the American Thinker today, giving the warning signs civilians should be watchful for. (H/T Larwyn)

Terrorists regularly rely on public complacency. The public has to realize that they have a responsibility for their own safety; they can’t just be led to believe they can leave it to the various law enforcement authorities and security agencies, whose principal capabilities appear to be to react after an attack. Terrorist plots don’t just occur in a vacuum, there is a lot of preliminary activity and often many people are involved.

We’ve called before for tools to help the public become more vigilant, and better educated about what they are being vigilant for.

During the planning stages reconnaissance of the target is of prime importance to the terrorist.  It is also a vulnerable phase when a vigilant, curious local residence can catch them out. Local people going about their “business as usual” should keep a trained eye out for anything out of the ordinary in their daily rounds. It could be a person taking photographs or making notes of an un-picturesque site, a public building of no consequence to a tourist, or someone taking an exceptional interest in a monument, strategic structure, or monitoring a site, such as an airport, military base or government building, even a nightclub. If the scene appears suspicious to a passerby, a mental note should be made of the time, date and depiction of the person involved. The more courageous could confront the person and innocently and strike up a conversation to assess them. The really audacious could try taking a photo of the subject with a cell phone or a camera and watching their reaction can be a surefire way of evaluating the situation. If he or she appears uneasy and tense, the incident should be reported to the police. This is known as behavior profiling.

Opponents of profiling refuse to admit that the profiling is not about a race or creed but rather the observance of behaviors, specific behaviors, which can be codified, as the Thinker piece does, and which are out of the norm. Of course for the multiculturalist there are NO normative behaviors, all actions are equally acceptable. Which is of course nonsense.

In everyone’s community there is a natural order going on around us on a daily basis, a sequence of events that seems routine, that we hardly notice, experienced almost in our unconscious state. We are only aware of it when something out of the ordinary happens. It is those moments that jar the unconscious that must be registered and remembered. It could be someone making notes on a map, a group on strangers speaking a foreign language, huddled in a local café, or someone driving slowly down a street several times. An observant local citizen should remark upon people who just don’t seem to belong somewhere, whose demeanor doesn’t quite fit the situation. This is known as situation profiling.

The linchpin of the anti-profiling argument is that all of us are the worst sort of racist hypocrites, whether we recognize it or not. That ultimately regular people are too stupid and bigoted to be able to tell any kind of difference between a man waiting for a bus, and a man waiting to blow up a bus, and that if encouraged to do so, we shall simply call in law enforcement to take away minorities because they are minorities. This flies directly in the face of reality, where we see time and time again that people are stone-cold terrified of being made to sound like a bigot, even in the face of obviously bizarre or down right criminal behavior. If Jihadist terror groups are moving towards campaigns of linked car bomb attacks, and away from spectacular single event attacks than vigilance must be the norm, and not the exception. No matter how pervasive their surveillance, there is no law enforcement or security agency which knows your neighborhood better than you do. Be responsible for your own security.