The Stick or the Snake
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On June 22nd, a man in camouflage ambushed police officers outside a hotel in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood. He fired more than two dozen rounds in under a minute. Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34 years old, a father with a pregnant wife, was shot and killed — the first Montreal officer to die in the line of duty in 24 years. His partner was shot and critically wounded. A 68-year-old bystander named Michel Mizrahi was also killed. A video circulating online appears to show him being shot by an officer as he approached her position mid-gunfight. Quebec’s police watchdog is investigating, and the police chief has said plainly that he does not know who shot Mizrahi.
That hasn’t stopped the internet from reaching its verdict.
The officer panicked. The officer wasn’t up to the job. She should have been trained better. Some went further and made it about her sex. I’ve spent more than three decades across Army Special Forces, law enforcement and SWAT, and counter-terrorism work, and as a use-of-force expert witness. So let me tell you what the people typing those verdicts don’t understand — and more importantly, what this tragedy can teach you and your family.
Your brain was built for this decision — and that’s the problem
Picture one of your ancestors walking a dark path. Something long and squiggly lies across it. In the span of a single footstep, the brain has to decide: stick or snake? Step, freeze, or jump?
The bloodlines that decided “stick” and threw caution to the wind eventually got bitten out of existence. The bloodlines that flinched — that decided “snake” first and were relieved to be wrong — survived long enough to become us. Under mortal stress, with no time and no information, the human brain prioritizes the most threatening interpretation of what it sees, deals with that first, and sorts out the details later. That’s not cowardice or incompetence. That’s the operating system, and every one of us is running it. Now, it simply doesn’t really care what the result might be later. It only cares about this fraction of a second.
Now put yourself behind that planter in Montreal. Your partner is dead a few feet away. Rounds are still coming. Your entire world has compressed to one threat axis. And suddenly, a shape closes the distance on your position in nearly exactly the same way the gunman who is trying to kill you does a few moments later.
Stick or snake?
Her brain answered the way human brains have answered for three hundred thousand years. Keep in mind that it is not verified at this time that the officer shot the bystander, but the discussion points still hold.
Split-second syndrome, and what the Supreme Court understood that the internet doesn’t
In my tactical courses, I teach officers about what’s often called split-second syndrome — the trap identified by a police lieutenant years ago in an article in the now-defunct Police Marksman magazine. The U.S. Supreme Court described it in Graham v. Connor, recognizing that use-of-force decisions occur in circumstances that are “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.”
I break that into what I call the SIT factors. Safety — the situation is dangerous, so you are short on safety. Information — it’s uncertain, so you must act without the full picture, which means you can be wrong. Time — it’s rapidly evolving, so the decision must be made in a fraction of a second.
Here’s the part I hammer in training: good tactics are largely the art of manipulating those three factors in your favor — using distance, cover, angles, and patience so you never have to make the stick-or-snake decision in the first place. Poor tactics force that decision on you, and the results are suboptimal at best and tragic at worst. I hold officers to a high standard on this, and I’ve written before about avoiding friendly fire and blue-on-bystander/victim disasters ( [https://threatproof.substack.com/p/4-successful-disarms-4-tragic-results?r=5ya4h1&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true]4 Successful Disarms, 4 Tragic Results) [https://threatproof.substack.com/p/4-successful-disarms-4-tragic-results?r=5ya4h1&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true], because I want officers and others to prevail and go home.
But there are times when no tactic on earth gets a vote — when the stick-or-snake is simply thrown at you. An ambush by a rifleman who has already killed your partner is exactly that.
I don’t say this from the cheap seats. I teach active threat courses for law enforcement at the instructor level — the people who go back and train their departments. Threat identification and avoiding friendly fire get covered in my courses at a depth I have not seen matched anywhere else, because I believe the deadliest seconds in these events are the ones where good people misread each other. In fact, when this incident hit my newsfeed, I had just finished teaching a church safety group how to distinguish an active threat from everyone else — using the visual frisk and the ABCDEs of awareness that run through all of my material. So when I tell you what training can and cannot do, it’s not a guess. It’s my job.
By the way, Paid members of The Threat Proof Newsletter can download my Active Threat Awareness Module, which I present in many of my courses to police, military personnel, civilians, church groups, and others. (Find it below the pay line)
And I’ll say this as clearly as I can: there is no training program at any department level, anywhere, that reliably makes an average officer — or even a fairly good one — perform like a superhero in an outgunned, partner-down, worst-case ambush. Anyone who claims otherwise has never had to make that decision and never will. High-stress performance training helps at the margins, and the margins matter. But the people demanding perfection from that officer are demanding something that does not exist.
I have tried to clip a few videos together of the incident below. You can see that after the encounter with the bystander, the officer is directly assaulted by the shooter coming around the barrier nearly the same way. She has a blink-of-an-eye time period to decide what to do. It is hard to tell, but she appears to be able to duck out of the full-force attack and may or may not have fired at the shooter. Luckily, it appears that the shooter needs to reload or clear a malfunction, and he is engaged by officers and stopped, dead right where the officer previously was positioned. I believe the female officer was severely wounded, but Canada holds its information tight. I am not sure if she hesitated or fired in that split-second, but it shows both sides of the stick or snake, maybe shoot a bystander (coming around in a near attack pattern in the middle of a gunfight), maybe get shot by the gunman and die with no second chances. Hesitation or survival.
As for Michel Mizrahi — those who knew him say he was directing people away from the gunfire when he was killed. I don’t know exactly what happened in his final seconds; nobody does yet.
But take the reports at face value and you have something the internet’s version can’t hold: two good people, both acting on brave and fundamentally human instincts, colliding in the worst possible way. Nobody in that frame is the villain except the man with the rifle.
Now the part that’s for you
Because here’s the truth: someday you might be the one running from gunfire toward the uniforms — or toward a capable civilian defender. Do it wrong, and two right instincts collide again. So learn this now, calmly, while there’s time — the same way I teach it in my seminars.
Hands up. Open. Empty. The three words I drill in every seminar. Nothing in your hands — not a phone, not keys, not anything that reads as a weapon in a quarter-second glance. If you’re armed and police may be arriving, your weapon goes down and out of sight before they see you.
Use your voice, loudly and repeatedly. “Officer! My hands are up! My hands are up!” or “Officer — help me!” — or if it’s an armed neighbor instead of a uniform, “Don’t shoot! It’s me..!” Under extreme stress, auditory exclusion is one of the most commonly reported effects — they may barely hear you. Say it anyway, keep saying it or whatever fits the situation. I have some code words I teach that may be useful here for avoiding friendly fire. You’re trying to buy one beat of recognition in a brain that’s locked on a threat.
Understand that they may literally not see you. Tunnel vision is real. The formal term is inattentional blindness: under threat, the brain drives all attention to the danger and deletes everything else. There’s a famous experiment where people counting basketball passes fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the frame (watch it yourself [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo] — count the passes first, no cheating). You can be directly in front of an officer or defender mid-gunfight and functionally not exist. Act accordingly.
Never surprise anyone with a gun in their hand. Don’t burst around corners. Don’t sprint up behind or beside a position. The single most dangerous moment for this is exploding out of a building’s exit into a parking lot where officers are set up — you appear suddenly, at speed, at close range. That is the stick-or-snake, weaponized against yourself.
Stay out of the line of fire — offset, then move. In the military we call the principle bounding overwatch: if you expect someone to protect you while you move, you must keep their lane of fire open. Don’t run a straight line between the defender and the threat. And don’t take the other wrong path either — a long sprint across open ground toward safety that never was. A few quick steps at an angle — putting cover between you and the threat, and clearing their view of the gunman — beats forty feet in a straight line every time. Break line of sight with the shooter first. Then move directly away.
If “bounding overwatch” sounds like some crazy commando tactic that has no place in an active shooter conversation, consider this: you’re fighting with an intruder at your own front door. Your secondary defender — your wife, your husband, whoever in the house can get armed and come to your aid — does exactly that. Do you break away and run straight at them? The tendency when people get scared is to run to their savior. But now your body is exactly between their muzzle and the threat. Instead: break away from the attacker, move loudly a few steps to the side, and hand your defender a clean line of fire and a clean angle to use whatever tool is in their hands. Same principle at your front door as in that Montreal street. Offset, then move.
And if the fight is still on around you: get behind real cover and proactively look for your next move. Hide means being hard to see and hard to reach, not frozen without awareness or readiness. Then be ready to provide aid — to yourself or the person next to you — because every officer on that scene is fighting for their life, and it may be a while before anyone can get to you.
If you’ve followed my work, you’ll recognize the shape of that sequence: Alert, Evade, Hide, Fight, Aid. The same responses I teach families apply here, reverse-engineered from a tragedy. None of it is complicated. All of it has to be decided before the moment — because as Montreal just proved, the moment doesn’t leave room to think.
Sit down with your family this week and talk through one question: if we ever hear gunfire in public, what do we do — and what do we do when the police arrive? Thirty minutes at a kitchen table. That’s where these decisions belong. If you want the complete system — the full family emergency action plan I’ve built from a life spent on the other side of these calls — it’s here: tacticaltwos.threatprooflife.com
Two men died in Montreal doing their duty as they understood it. Honor them by being ready.
Be responsible, capable, and confident.
Trevor ThrasherThreatprooflife.com
For paid subscribers: how to spot the threat first
Everything above is about surviving the moment once it’s unfolding. But the earlier you see a threat coming, the more of these decisions you make on your terms instead of in a half-second of panic.
That’s the rest of this: the Awareness Module from my instructor-level Active Threat Interdiction course — the same system I teach the people who train their departments, and walked a church security team through days before Montreal.
Inside: the ABCDEF framework for reading a person in six lanes, the Rule of Threes (one cue means watch, three means act), and the Visual Frisk — the two-second read that tells you if the person in front of you is a threat, adapted from Paul Howe (former CAG/Delta) and built for flash-picture speed. Plus the body-map every student keeps.
Real course material, not repackaged internet content — useful whether you’re an everyday defender, running church security, or wearing a badge. If that’s worth a few dollars a month, come on in. Either way, thank you for reading — and be responsible, capable, and confident.
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