Baseline and Anomaly Detection in Practice
with Brian Marren, Greg Williams
Summary
Brian and Greg take a practical approach to two of the four HBPR&A components: establishing a baseline and detecting anomalies. Using real examples from patrol environments, school campuses, and corporate settings, they walk through the exact process an operator uses to read a space, establish what's normal, and flag what's not. This episode is packed with exercises listeners can practice on their own.
Normal Is the Foundation
You can't spot what's wrong until you've defined what's right. Baselining is the first operational skill.
Anomalies Are Context-Dependent
A backpack on a subway isn't an anomaly. A backpack left unattended at 2 AM in a closed station is. Context drives everything.
Practice Without Gear
The best training happens in everyday environments. A coffee shop, a parking lot, a school hallway.
Transcript
All right, today we're getting tactical. We're going to walk through the first two components of HBPR&A in a way that you can actually practice after this episode.
And this is important because a lot of people hear "behavioral analysis" and think it's some abstract academic exercise. It's not. It's a practical skill. You can get better at it the same way you get better at shooting or driving or anything else. Repetition in context.
So let's start with baselines. A baseline is your understanding of what normal looks like in a given environment at a given time. And every environment is different. What's normal at a school at 8 AM is completely different from what's normal at the same school at 11 PM.
And people miss this all the time. They think anomaly detection means looking for "suspicious behavior." But suspicious compared to what? If you haven't established a baseline, you have nothing to compare against. You're just guessing.
Exactly. So the first thing you do when you enter any environment is observe. Not react. Not assess threats. Just observe. What are people doing? How are they moving? What's the flow of foot traffic? What are the ambient sounds? You build a picture of normal.