392 - Mailbox (video): Three males walk into your home...
Tik Tok home invasions, personal security, communication, use of force issues
Copyright © 2023 by Jeth Randolph
All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
Video
Three males walk into your home… sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s anything but.
I got sent this video (see below) that shows teens videoing themselves walking into, what is described, as random houses (home invasion) - and using a cover script to film the residents and mock them.
This corresponds quite directly with recent physical training that I delivered in a workshop (countering it of course rather than perpetrating it!) and thought that this would be useful add on material to look at.
Additionally, I guess “Tik Tok” is an apt platform name for this as it’s only a question of time before this new fashion past time generates it’s first tragedy.
The script
The males state that they are looking for a home study group and upon entry to the house they call out to residents and enter other rooms, sit on furniture and play to the camera.
Situational reality: Being outside the home
This house is situated in an urban area and is therefore open to all that comes with that, both good and bad, but the owners do not seem to operate on that understanding.
The female owner seems to be completely unaware of the fact that the front door being open behind her turned back can be breached by someone in a matter of a couple of seconds.
Simply working where she is with the door closed and the keys in her pocket would be little inconvenience to her and would have stopped this situation (in the form that it is shown here) before it even started.
This isn’t rural country living but she seems to be operating under that level of awareness and has therefore fallen victim to three males with zero offered resistance to their invasion of her home.
Implications
The male of the house is not aware of the open front door and is in another part of the home out of sight and hearing range.
How could this be playing out if he was not there and she was alone with three unknown males?
Even though he is there, what if she didn’t have time to call to him?
What could play out upstairs while he is oblivious in another area of the house?
Male homeowner’s first contact
Rather than yelling “Help!”, the female resident shouts and summons the male resident by name.
The intruders then immediately capitalise on this handed advantage and call out for him using his name, which means that he enters into the situation in complete confusion with his guard lowered (perhaps believing it is someone he knows looking for him) seemingly from being with small children downstairs.
This also places him in direct threat of being kicked back down the stairs if this was an invasion with a different first contact agenda as they are now waiting for him at the top.
Comments from viewers
In the links that I saw, many comments mention killing, stabbing, guns and general extreme force as a solution to this situation - most of it just hotheads hiding behind a keyboard.
These reactions may well have been possible outcomes if a different type of house was targeted in an area representing a different way of life - see “Target selection” below.
If these people had resisted with force?
The three males came with video recording as an implicit threat.
They don’t care that the owners are there - they have video and numbers and that is a tip off that this isn’t just a light hearted prank. Like all good boy scouts, they are prepared.
Video recording is not just for a Tik Tok audience, this is also to sue you for assault and also any communication from the owner that could be then presented as excessive, threatening or possibly taboo.
This will then give the opportunity to reframe the situation as three young students making an honest mistake and then becoming the victims of unwarranted aggression or, because of the owner’s visible demographic, as result of some kind of prejudice.
The male home owner would have faced a three on one fight while the female watched or tried to ring for help, with intruders that he could likely expect to be armed.
There are no hints of weapon carry but as these fine examples of modern youth are videoing gang home invasions, I hold little expectation of them not planning for or being willing to stab someone that dares to resist them.
The ensuing beating of the male homeowner would then be passed around social media garnering comments praising the three youths and raising there social status.
Communication
The male of the house uses the presence of children as a justification for asking them to leave as though he has no right to eject them otherwise!
This is a huge signal of weakness to the three but in this example they are leaving, so at least this situation luckily didn’t go south from there.
The flipside is that despite it’s weakness, this may well have been a good justification for force if it had happened as if they were in any way more aggressive, he would have looked as though he tried to reason despite experiencing threat to his children, that’s if of course, the footage was ever recovered.
There isn’t much concern from the three males about this fact either.
“Oh, you’ve got kids” is just a blank repeating of what is being said to them and is mocking rather than a change of heart and this is good to note as well as if they didn’t leave at that point, it’s unlikely that kids would have mattered much to them or may have represented further entertainment if their intentions were different.
Target selection
The house is stated as being “random” but I doubt this highly.
This is a wealthy house and would be specifically targeted I suspect for the following reasons:
Owners are resented for material wealth.
Owners are disliked for what they represent to the gang.
The target demographic are correctly viewed as naïve, unaware and unlikely to offer any meaningful physical resistance and by this I mean that there is unlikely to be any experience of using violence and therefore little chance of being at ease with immediate overt aggression.
The victimising of this demographic will elicit great entertainment value on social media, which again, is important for raising social status.
Movements upon contact
It’s always amusing to hear some experts on Ewetube that chide trainees for not corralling/ “flanking” / positioning threatening groups of people when facing them alone as though this is some kind of newbie error.
The reality is that this is simply not always an option - in this video you can see the complexity of arriving behind the threat in your home, trying to fathom what is happening, respond to it, individuals already being in two areas and also the limitation of footwork in a hallway!
“Flanking” or to use less cool sounding jargon, simply being off to the side of a potential attack, is a sound concept and works nicely in an open training hall or space in a pre arranged bouncer type scenario, but consider this situation in the video because no one is some kind of fantasy master that can control the positions of others beyond basic concepts by using chi / coolness or NLP…
Sometimes you start in a bad situation and have to simply work with what you have from there!
Motive
Although there will be some apologists out there who will try and frame this as nothing but a prank, this predatory behaviour is a variation on goading and is designed to push someone under real duress to say or do something that will allow the use of righteous violent punishment to be meted out to the resident by the gang while providing video for social media prestige.
Thanks to the reader that sent this. Jeth
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Thanks, Jeth