A case study in not grasping the power of intelligence and surveillance:
A former government prosecutor says the gang murders of Doug and Debbie London showed an unprecedented level of “contempt” in Charlotte for the rule of law.
This week, the law strikes back…
But the crime – the Londons were killed to stop Doug London from testifying against the United Blood Nation members who tried to rob him – shattered the notion that gang violence in Charlotte was confined to urban neighborhoods. To many, the city and its bedroom communities suddenly felt a lot less safe…
This new chapter in the city’s criminal history opened in May 2014 when Cureton and two other UBN members tried to rob the Londons’ Mattress Warehouse store in Pineville. Doug London shot Cureton. All three gang members were arrested. According to Daniel London, his parents made a point of attending all the gang members’ preliminary court hearings out of a sense of civic duty and a fear that the charges would be dropped or pleaded down.
Their presence did not go unnoticed by the gang. Meanwhile, the Londons’ concerns for their safety grew, particularly after a confrontation with a Cureton relative at the courthouse.
According to Charlotte gun shop owner Larry Hyatt, Doug London bought additional weapons for himself and his home, and talked about how he and Debbie were being watched and followed during their trips to court.
Court documents described the growing anger by Cureton and other gang members at the Londons’ appearances, and how the gang believed the robbery charges would disappear if there were no witnesses to testify.
“I need you guys to g– d— carry that s—, bro,” Cureton told Hartley during a phone call, some two weeks before the murders, according to court records. “I didn’t want it to come to that, but that s— done got out of hand.”
Hartley, who was carrying a jailhouse letter from Cureton with the Londons’ address at the time, rang the couple’s doorbell on the night of Oct. 23, 2015. Debbie London was shot and killed as she opened the door.
Doug London fired off one shot before his gun jammed. Hartley shot him, then fled to a waiting car. He stopped when he heard Doug London sobbing. Prosecutors say Hartley returned to the home, saw London crying over his wife’s body and shot him again. Court documents say the gang celebrated the killings that night.
Personally I am most fascinated by the fact the FBI apparently had no ears inside the gang, and never picked up on the attack through technical monitoring. Something is very strange in this country.
Once you notice you are being followed by a criminal street gang, you have a problem. Surveillance is the first step in attack planning. The attack may be a long ways off, but somebody is gathering information on you for a purpose, and that purpose is not to your benefit. That he noticed surveillance, and did not develop a comprehensive plan was a major failing. The moment he saw gang members surveilling him he should have gone into hyper-paranoid mode, assumed they had already mapped out his residence and patterns of activity, changed up all his patterns, and begun assembling his defenses.
In this case the first step in his counter-attack planning would be his own surveillance, designed to catalog the surveillance on him, potentially deduce his enemies’ intentions based on what they are examining most closely, and most importantly, alert him to any attacks as early as possible in their initiation.
Notice how his primary solution is to buy more guns. Guns are great, but you also need information to alert you to the attacker’s approach, and a plan to disrupt the surveillance on you. If you don’t see their attack coming, and if they are able to easily surveil you and plan an easy approach to attack you, your guns will be of no use. Guns are great, but with intel-gathering, if you do things right you will never need them and if you do things wrong, they may very likely be of little use.
In this case, he should have been switching up his patterns and routes as much as he could. He should have been randomizing his exits of buildings, houses, and stores to make starting follows discreetly difficult, and he should have been beginning to drive in such a way as to make following difficult. He should also have identified the approaches to his house, and where along those approaches he could have alerted himself to his attacker’s approach as early as possible. Perhaps the woods behind his house lead to an out-of-the way parking lot. If so, you need to get eyes and ears back there. You need to think like an attacker, and figure where they are approaching from.
If the houses on the other side of his block are back there, it will reduce the likelihood of being approached from that direction since attackers will tend to avoid other people for fear of exposure. Obstacles can have the same effect, be they bodies of water, or patches of thorny plants, or very exposed, well-lit areas. In this case he was approached straight from the street, so I would assume either the gang members were lazy or there were houses, maybe with fences behind him. If it was blocked by obstacles, you would still put eyes and ears back there to be thorough, but the coverage would not need to be as complete and it could be closer to the house to minimize resource expenditure.
If the road was the primary approach, he should have deployed both hidden security cameras, to cover that approach as far out as he could (while keeping his awareness secret), and just as important – he should have deployed microphones. Inside his house, a car could pull up out front and go unnoticed on the surveillance camera TV inside if everyone is making dinner in the kitchen. But if you deploy microphones, the sound of a car pulling up and stopping on your TV will alert you to any car’s approach whenever you are in earshot of the TV. This will cue you in on vehicular traffic that may be surveillance as well as any attack being initiated. In this case, with angry Bloods members, a confrontation with their family, and surveillance, this was a vital, completely necessary security measure.
Microphones are not expensive. A good weatherproof, 12V amplified mic can be had for under twenty dollars in most quality surveillance shops. All you have to do is run 12 volts to it, and run the signal back to your TV or digital video recorder in such a way you can hear it. Then when you are in your house, it is as if you are sitting on your curb 24/7, and nobody out there has any idea.
Obviously he should also have had a camera at his door, with an intercom. Once he noticed he was being followed, he needed to go on the defensive and limit unplanned contacts with others. Had there been an intercom, just that would have put his attacker off-balance.
I would also have had at least one aggressive dog inside the house, to wake me at night if necessary, deny entry while I was out, and alert me to any entry made while I was out.
If he had done that, he would have been alerted when the car pulled up, seen a black gang-banger get out and head for his porch, and the gang-banger would have heard a dog bark, which would have given him a gut-check and instilled confusion regarding the soundness of his plan. If the victim used that early warning to arm himself and his wife with reliable high capacity semi-auto shotguns or pistol-caliber rifles, and take cover in his house, he would very likely have survived the encounter.
Much of survival is mindset. The advantage of an early warning is not just tactical, but it is mental as well. Being caught off-guard, and hustling to find a plan in the heat of the moment as his amygdala was overwhelmed with the violation of expectation, the violence, and the sudden and immediate need to figure out what to do, was as much of an impediment as the relative superiority his opponent easily seized when the door was opened to him by an unsuspecting woman and he let his shots fly. An early warning can put your mind in the right frame and leave your opponent reeling mentally once you begin an effective counter-attack.
His next failing is less clear. His gun’s jam could have been by chance, but it may also have been lack of familiarity. It could have been a simple incompatibility between his ammunition and his magazine or gun. Some firearms are finicky about what they will feed reliably, so you need to test your setup before it counts. It could have been a budget weapon or an expensive weapon with a cheap magazine. He could also have limp-wristed a semi-auto. In the movies you snap the gun out as you let rounds loose, and pull the gun away as it fires. Semi-autos need to be held firmly so the slide will recoil backward by itself as the frame of the gun is held static by you. If you limp-wrist the gun, the slide and the frame move backward together, the recoil spring holds the slide closed as that happens, the slide never cycles relative to the frame, or cycles partially, and you get a failure to eject and/or feed. Regardless of the origin of the jam, under this level of threat he should have had backup weapons stashed in the house, and been ready to transition to them.
His final failure was not realizing that the fight is not over until all of your enemies are dead. It sounds cold, but instead of crying over his wife’s dead body, he should have been getting a second gun up or clearing the jam on his first gun and preparing to engage again, even if he didn’t chase after his attackers. If you aren’t ready to exhibit that kind of cold-hearted focus on the battle, you are going into the fight with a serious disadvantage, since your enemies will almost certainly be psychopaths who will easily exhibit that type of mindset against you. In this case it cost this man his life, and that should have been predictable.
Fighting evil is not for those with anything less than a single-minded focus bent on killing it by any means necessary. Once this guy realized he was being surveilled by Bloods members, his immediate response should have been a burning desire to make sure that if somebody came to kill him, he was going to kill them first. Once that fire was lit, he should have been constantly on guard, running what-ifs in his head, trying to figure where he could be attacked, and he should have been ready to go. If you don’t have that mindset, it isn’t a bad thing. But you would be well served to not initiate a beef with a violent street gang.
Spread r/K Theory, because K-selection is no joke
