Hey Civilian,

This week my team ran active shooter response protocol through one of the real buildings we protect.

Not a training facility. The actual church. The actual school. The actual hallways where four thousand people will be this weekend.

We filmed it. All three parts drop this week — entry protocol, hallway transitions, and a full debrief on what we got right and what we'd fix.

Below is everything the footage doesn't show you.

De-escalation gets dismissed as the soft option. The thing people say when they don't want to train.

After 9 years of MMA and doing executive protection work, I'll tell you: it is the hardest skill in self-defense. And most people who train for years still can't do it.

I spend a tremendous amount of time training and practicing both empty hand and firearm skills. But my most used and most important skills are awareness and de-escalation.

Here's why it matters: without it, your only tool is physical force. And physical force, even when justified, carries legal, financial, and psychological consequences most people haven't thought through.

In EP, de-escalation isn't passive. It's an active, high-performance cognitive task. You have to stay calm when your adrenaline is spiking. Read another person's emotional state. Choose exactly the right words and tone while they're angry and unpredictable.

Your body knows how to fight. It does not know how to stay measured and strategic when someone is in your face. That has to be trained.

The people best at it aren't pushovers. They're confident enough they don't need the situation to escalate to prove anything.

Start here: Next time you're in any tense moment, consciously slow your breath before you respond. Three seconds. That's the first rep.

Part 2 of a three-part series drops tonight. It was filmed in one of the real buildings my security team protects. A church. A K-12 school. More than four thousand people on site for large events.

Not a training facility. The actual building.

Part 1 (live) covers active shooter response entry protocol. Why every movement is deliberate, how a team controls the fatal funnel, and what that means for you as someone sheltering in place. The short version: get low, get behind hard cover, and stay out of doorways and hallways. You do not want to be in the path of a moving response team.

Part 2 (live tonight) covers what nobody shows you: the space between rooms. The hallway transition is where exposure is highest. If you're sheltering in place, position yourself to the side of the door, not in front of it. Flat against the wall. Away from the door entirely.

Part 3 (later this week) is the debrief. What we got right, what we'd fix, and the one thing about how active shooters move that changes how you respond. They move toward noise and concentration. Your job is not to be where they're going.

Subscribe to the channel so you don't miss Parts 2 and 3.

Almost all self-defense advice focuses on what to do when someone attacks you. In EP and criminology, we study something more useful: how attackers select targets. And the selection process has nothing to do with how tough you are.

Predatory targeting is a real area of study in protective work. Attackers are running a simple calculation: maximum reward, minimum complication. They're looking for distraction, hesitation, and isolation.

The toughest person in the room is still a soft target if their head is in their phone and a predator knows it.

Studies on predatory selection show that people chosen as targets share identifiable behavioral patterns. The people who get passed over aren't necessarily bigger or stronger. They're more present. They make eye contact. They walk with purpose. They look like a complication.

Start today: Walk to your car with your phone in your pocket, eyes up, moving with a destination. No performance required. Just presence. That single shift changes how you read to someone running the calculation.

Awareness keeps you from being selected. De-escalation keeps a bad situation from getting worse. And understanding how a response team moves through a building keeps you from being in the wrong place if one ever has to.

None of it is complicated. Almost none of it gets practiced.

That's what this is for. Reply to this email and tell me your number one safety concern right now. I build each issue around the most common answers.

Share the Brief: If this was useful, forward it to one person who should be reading it. That's how we grow this — one capable civilian at a time.

Stay capable.

Colin Lepiscopo
Founder, Model Civilian
10% of all Model Civilian proceeds go to We Get Water 💧