“If you are found with dedicated counter custody tools, your captors may start viewing you as a liability and not an asset.” This is a reoccurring theme on many blogs and websites that focus on counter custody skills. The solution to this reoccurring theme is to have a kit made up of various items that can be plausibly denied as being a counter custody kit. Items commonly cited, and shown in photos, include bobby pins, safety pins, small pieces of stiff plastic (to be used as shims), paper clips and so forth. The idea is that you can carry these items as “pocket litter”, and that they would arouse no suspicion on the part of your captors.
I have to call bullshit on this one.
I do not believe that any kidnapper is going to let you keep anything that you might have on when you are captured. If it is found, it will be taken. Law abiding citizens are not the only ones who study and practice counter custody tactics, techniques and procedures. Criminals study them as well.
The thing you have to remember is that if there is no obvious reason for you as an individual to have something on your person, it will probably arouse suspicious. Take bobby pins for example. Women can easily explain why they would have them (assuming they have the kind of hair style that requires them). But how many men use bobby pins as the manufacturer intended? Or carry two or more of them together with paperclips and safety pins of various sizes in their pockets? If they don’t use them to pick locks, then what do they use them for?
If you are going to make a kit around plausible deniability, then it has to make sense for you as an individual in your specific situation. It is not enough to explain things away. Ideally, it need to not raise any questions at all if it is found. Even innocent questions can unmask the truth.