Yesterday late morning, while walking to the train station on a street busy with motor traffic, a guy tried to get my attention from behind by beeping the horn of his car. As with others before him, who, I can only guess from their action, somehow think my very personal act of getting dressed and walking outside constitutes invitation for their come ons and solicitations (no, the streets I walk on are not frequented by prostitutes, this I double-checked with the police yesterday), I ignored him and kept on walking.
Instead of taking the very obvious “hint,” he decided to pull his 4×4 partially onto the curb not 20-feet in front of me, put on his hazard lights and waited. At this point, the possibility that this person might be someone I know (ex, a neighbor), as well as some more unpleasant scenarios, flashed through my head. Since we were in broad daylight, and other cars passed frequently on the same thoroughfare, although I began to feel more annoyed and nervous, I walked steadily ahead, eventually passing his car while keeping a safe distance.
As I did not recognize the corpulent guy wearing a white baseball-style hat and short-sleeved striped polo shirt through the back windows of his silver 4×4 as I got closer, I decided to walk pass the rolled down front windows without turning my head to get a more direct look, lest he takes my curiosity for the identity of this creep to be interest in his come on.
He said “hello” a couple of times as I walked pass. A few seconds after I passed, he apparently finally got the hint and drove away. As you might be able to imagine, I was very relieved to see that he did not try to pull his car onto another curb in front me to wait another time.
Still, I debated with myself whether I should report the guy to the police while I scanned all the silver 4x4s I passed to see if I can find the creep again. After all, although men have pulled their car close to me to “offer rides” on my walks before, which are already annoying and nerve-wrecking enough, I have never encountered one as moronically audacious as this guy, whose act of pulling his 4×4 onto the curb to wait for me to walk by, whether he realized it or not, made me feel stalked and cornered.
Since I wanted to make sure this sort of incident and its possible escalations didn’t happen to me again, nor to anyone else for that matters, I did, in fact, report the guy to the police when I got to the station. While the female dispatcher was sympathetic to me, my encounter with the patrol cops was another story.
As I described the incident to the male officer, he expressed his inability to investigate the matter, since I was not physically harmed, and turned to his female partner to ask: “This happens to you right?” At this point, the female officer chimed in, “He was trying to tell you he thinks you’re cute,” as if I had somehow missed my one-in-a-million opportunity to get into a stranger’s car. While the female cop turned away and started making calls on her cell phone, the male cop said that unless someone was trying to physically assault me, i.e., trying to coerce me into his car, there was nothing he could do. And if he did take my statement, the police would be filing reports all day because apparently this sort of incident is common in the neighborhood. When I repeatedly asked the cop if I’m supposed to ask someone who’s physically coercing me into his car to stop and wait for me to call the police, the male cop said they can’t investigate a crime before it occurs.
Whatever happened to crime prevention? If such harassment incidents take place in this neighborhood so often that the police has developed the pat answer “weird people live here,” shouldn’t we at least attempt a public awareness campaign on respect for personal space, taking a hint when people are ignoring you when you’re trying to accost them on the street, or even more generally, that motorists should refrain from targeting pedestrians on neighborhood streets for practicing one’s pick-up honks/lines?
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