right speech and urban evasion.

We do some things right, we do some things wrong.

I was walking down 1st Avenue this afternoon, and a woman was waiting to cross at the corner. A man passing behind her looked her up and down, and just past her looked over and said "Heyyyy, how you doin'?". The woman, as almost all women do, looked anxious and exasperated and tired of this prime example of the bullshit women deal with, and grimaced at him and looked away.

I've never spoken up when this happens. But there's a choice to make. How does the world get better if I just stand there and let it slide? How many times can I stand to watch this shit and not do anything?

"Dude, leave her alone. What the fuck is your problem?"

"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU SAY, YOU PUNK-ASS BITCH?"

Oops. I once called a fellow aikido student "punk-ass bitch," which was something every group of friends had tossed around casually since high school. However, he had served a couple years in prison for dealing meth, and had quite a violent streak, and it turns out that in some hypermasculine and crime-associated American subcultures that aren't mine, that is an extraordinarily serious insult, and I had to talk him down from reflexively beating the shit out of me. Better late than never, I softened my language.

"Leave her alone. What the hell is your problem?"

Okay. There are better ways to say that. The traffic light turned and the woman and I crossed the street, with the gentleman shouting obscenities, which I decided to laugh loudly at as I walked away.

As I walked past, I told the woman, "Like you don't have enough problems."

"MAN, FUCK YOU! YOU GONNA GET YOUR ASS BEAT. MOTHERFUCKING FAGGOT!"

"Thank you for that."

She went into a shop for lunch, Harasser Guy turned his corner and walked, and I kept walking. The day went on.

Except.

After I'd gone about half a block, I heard angry yelling again, and looked back and the guy was walking after me, about a block behind.

I was obvious I needed to ditch the guy, but here's the full risk assessment that went through my head:

Harasser Guy is walking, not running. I can't run very far right now, but I can probably get myself to a safe place. He's about 6'3", about 300 pounds, quite a bit bigger than me, and people willing to get into fights usually have experience doing so. I have a black belt in a primarily defensive martial art, and a very sharp pocket knife. My body has very little energy due to my health issues, and I am carrying a fully loaded commuter backpack.

As you may or may not know, my preferred movie genres involve lots of shooting and/or swords and/or explosions--I usually get car chases as a bonus--and so I've seen a lot of non-James Bond spy movies, as well as every episode of Burn Notice and The Americans.

(Don't get me wrong, I've seen every James Bond movie as well, but here we're only interested in spies who try not to get noticed.)

I've seen a lot of these movies multiple times, so I remember the urban chases in some detail, and there are some pretty simple and logical ways to handle this. Also fun, since I have the really excellent Plan B (running flat out to safety, which would be fine but then I would be all sweaty), and the extremely unappealing Plan C (fighting, which would be a shitshow). Here's the map.



He harassed the woman on the southwest corner of 1st and Main. I was about 2/3 down the block to the north when I heard him coming.

1. Take a right onto Washington eastbound.
2. Jog to take the next right along the east side of Occidental Park: if the pursuer has started running, I don't want to be caught in the open, and that side of the park has bars to duck into and parked vehicles for better-than-nothing cover.
3. Start walking diagonally northeast across the park, which has many small groups of people (with open space between them, and they're almost all black, so it's not like it'd be hard to see me, but you work with what you have).
4. My very large, bright blue hooded jacket is the visual cue he'll be using to track me, so take it off and bundle it up inside-out so the blue is hidden and the gray liner is showing. Now instead of a large royal blue target, I am a normal-size black-shirted one.
5. Shift my backpack from two shoulders to one, which may not help, but can't hurt.
6. Walk at a normal pace, don't look around nervously, and especially don't look back. Judging by the yelling, he's not interested in sneaking up on me.

Instead of going diagonally northeast across the park, I had wanted to go straight south to Main, west across 1st Ave. and closer to my destination; but the guy had been turning east up Main when this started, so if he had given up looking for me, I could just run into him again, and I can only fit so much stupid into a day.

I reached the far corner of the square, and the cover of the building that must be at Waterfall Garden Park (intersection of Main and the alleyway). I peeked around the building just in time to see him stopped on the sidewalk on the Washington side, looking around, and not finding me. I continued on and made a bit of a loop out of my way, and back to the office. If I get myself into a mess, it's at least pretty gratifying to get myself out.

Obviously I fucked up, and nothing reminds us why we try to practice Right Speech like failing to do so and weathering the consequences. There are a few ways this could have gone poorly, and then the absolute worst case would probably be if the guy were a fast runner with a gun. But it didn't go worse, and that's enough to be grateful for.

Most people would read this story and think it's pretty odd that I thought and did all this, and they would be absolutely correct. I haven't had any training, not even a course (though those look like fun). I don't have a terribly clear explanation for you, except to say that I watch spy movies in part because I find this stuff interesting and potentially useful, so I've paid attention, and that I've spent decades refining my tendency not to panic, and probably those things came together today in exactly the way I would hope.

And some luck.

the bright, burning light of politeness.

The other day there was an intermittent loud honking out in the street. I finally identified it as a silver BMW sedan which would drive up part of the street, honk, do a U-turn in the intersection, honk, drive back down the street. Over and over.

At last I noticed the driver had stopped cruising and parked over by the corner. I decided to go ask them to stop honking their horn. As I walked up to the car it occurred to me that there are a few folks living in the area who might not respond well to some random guy asking them to quiet down. I decided to deal with that if it happened.

As soon as I saw the young man in the driver's seat, I felt a little awkward, because he had a fascinating array of tattoos, most of which I would (admittedly in ignorance of the details) associate with gangs and/or prison time. You know how some criminals have teardrops tattooed under their eyes, typically assuming to correspond to people they killed? This guy had musical notes. A quarter note and then an eighth note, if I remember right. Well, okay, maybe I'm about to go ask a gang member to keep the noise down. No point in turning back now.

"Excuse me, sir? Are you the one honking his horn?"

The driver looked furtively around, in pretty much any direction except my face. He is looking at his phone.

"Yeah, I just gotta meet my friend at this intersection."
This is new. "You don't know where he lives?"
"Nah, he just said this intersection."

Still looking everywhere but at me.

"Is there anything I can do to help you find him? The honking is pretty disruptive."
"Nah, I just gotta wait for him."

 Luckily for our driver, I spot another young man coming down the street toward us, clearly the awaited passenger.

 "Oh, this is him..."
"All right. If you can stop the honking, I'd appreciate it."

And then back to the house.

I hate to draw conclusions about people, but I'm going to assume that our tattooed driver, furtively honking and looking around for a guy he doesn't know to come meet him at a specific intersection--rather than, say, an address--was involved  in some criminal activity. Some theory, some observation:

1. There's no criminal genius here. Nothing about this episode screams "Professor Moriarty."
2. It's interesting to just walk up and ask. It could go bad, but...
3. ...I think the young man didn't like the attention. I've written before about how you alter the situation by just being there and letting someone know they are seen. I'm hoping that by signaling that sketchy activity is noticed, they'll take it elsewhere.

Ah, city living.

showing up

I was coming back from the Mütter Museum, along Market Street, maybe around 20th. It's all office buildings, empty on weekends, so there was very little pedestrian traffic. I watched a car pull into a parking spot, and next to the parking spot was a bike chained to a post, and a guy crouched next to the bike. With bolt cutters. Cutting at something. He decided he was done, and put the cutters in his backpack.

It's kind of an awkward situation. I don't see people committing crimes much, especially not in broad daylight. I couldn't just let the guy walk away with someone's bike. I thought of a story my aikido friend Brandon tells, about someone being aggressive on the commuter rail, and Brandon just moved himself over to where he could watch. The guy stopped harassing another passenger long enough to demand, "What are you lookin' at?!" And Brandon calmly said he was just going to sit there and watch, and the guy's enthusiasm petered out.

There was a white couple in their 50s in the recently-parked car, and the guy had already walked over to pay the parking kiosk. The woman had the door open, but was staying in the car. I decided to walk over and say hello.

"Hey."

He stands up, a little wobbly, pretty shabby-looking: black, dark skin, scruffy white whiskers, baseball hat, probably in his fifties, about my size. Quite friendly.

"Oh! Hi."

"What's up?"
"I lost m'key!"

"Really!"

"Yeah, y'know, I lost my key, so I hadda cut the lock off."

Awkward pause as I can't think of anything to say that wouldn't escalate the situation. Do I call him a liar? Do I try to run him off? Then what: shouting match? fistfight?

The chain is wound multiple times around the front wheel and back wheel and through the frame, and he stares at it blankly, paralyzed by puzzlement.

"Say, is there a lot of bicycle theft in Philadelphia?"

"What's that?"
A bit slower--our accents are a little different and I slurred. "Is there a lot of bicycle theft in Philadelphia?"

"Oh! No, not much. Why?"

"Oh, I just noticed you've got the chain all wound through the wheels and the frame."

"Yeah, you know, the wheels, they'll take the wheels."

"Ah, yeah. That's a good idea. I'm from San Francisco, lotta bike theft there."

All this time he's been expecting me to leave and mind my own business, so he can attend to his. I have nowhere to go. I can stand there and watch him in awkward conversation for the next five hours, if I feel like it.

New tactic.

"Say, can you register bikes in Philadelphia? Like, if I went and found a cop, you could prove it was yours?"

He doesn't blink. "Nope, nah, bikes aren't registered."

"Ah, bummer."

The truth comes out.

"Oh--you think I'm stealin' it!"
"Well, yeah, actually. I do."

"Well, I ain't. I ain't stealin' it." Well, your logic is impeccable. That should make me go away!

"Huh. Okay."

"I'm just gonna keep gettin' this chain off, tryin' ta figure it out..."

"Mind if I stand here and watch?"

"Sure! Go ahead!"

It's hard to describe the awkwardness. Yes, I see you committing a crime there. No, I'm not going to stop you. I'm just going to stand here and pay close attention, and make sure you know I'm here.

The chain continues to foil him.

"I just gotta figure out...get this chain off."

"Yannow, I'm gonna look around for a cop. He can help you with the chain."

"Oh, sure, thanks...gotta figure out..."

A few seconds later, he stands up, says "Bah" and walks away. Leaving his bike behind! Amazing.

The woman got out of the car and said, "You handled that beautifully. Thank you."

I looked at the thick, galvanized steel chain and saw the guy's trouble: he hadn't cut all the way through the link, and even if he had, he would have had to cut the other side, because you can't bend a steel link open. So I guess he's not an expert. I left a note in the half-cut link explaining that someone tried to cut it and I stopped them.

This is part of the value of community: if we're alone, we can tell ourselves whatever story we want. Maybe the guy convinced himself the bike was abandoned, or the owner was rich and could afford a new one, or he needed the money more than the owner needed the bike, or whatever. With other people around, we have to see ourselves reflected in their responses. It's concrete, external feedback that's much more convincing than the stream of thoughts in our heads. The bike thief may have been afraid of being caught, but he wasn't bothered whenever I mentioned the police, and in reality there couldn't have been a cop within 4 blocks of us, let alone one that would care about a bike theft. I think he was just unnerved that I was watching him and knew what he was doing. (I would have physically stopped him from actually taking the bike, but why escalate things without need?)

Being present matters. If a person is in pain, sometimes they just need another person to be there and acknowledge their pain. Yes, I see you in pain there. I can't fix it, but I'm going to sit here and hold your hand.

When I was a kid, my mother told me 90% of life was just showing up. I'm not sure if she knows how right she was.

Is Oakland Burning?

There's a website to tell you! http://isoaklandburning.com/, in the tradition of things like istwitterdown.com and isobamapresidentyet.com.

Riots in Oakland come along every year or two for various things. Usually it's the Raiders, but there's also no shortage of police brutality, and this time it's the shooting of Oscar Grant, an apparently mellow guy who was restrained face-down on the ground, pinned by one or two other officers, when Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART, the light-rail system) cop Johannes Mehserle pulled his gun and shot him.

This probably would have gone the way of all police-violence cover-ups, except it was New Year's Eve, and a train full of people recorded the arrest and eventual shooting on their cell phones. YouTube has a bunch of videos; they're unsettling, obviously, what with the guy being shot and all, but mostly it's just baffling. It seems to come out of nowhere, and then Mehserle looks as surprised as anyone else at what he just did.

The BART transit police, while legally equivalent to real police, are a sort of under-supervised, over-armed version of real police. They've been known to go walking the trains in full paramilitary uniforms, with body armor and automatic weapons. That seems a little excessive considering they're usually dealing with violent drunks, rather than drug cartels or cult militias. But hey, the department spent all that money for the equipment, why not use it?

BART's response to the shootout was almost comically awful: first complete silence, then the inevitable support for the officer in question, denial of wrongdoing, claiming the victim had been a threat to the officers. More than anything, it looked like they were trying to buy time to come up with a credible story to get Mehserle and the department off the hook (and I'm pretty sure that's what it was). This is standard operating procedure for a police department, but while BART refused to comment on anything, all those cell phone videos spread like wildfire, and the rest of us drew our own conclusions--"He shot a restrained, motionless man in the back"--and moved on to speculating about motives. It was so smooth and fast that it looked almost like an execution, but then Mehserle was obviously upset afterward, and what kind of idiot would purposefully kill a guy under those circumstances? With several other officers and a station full of witnesses?

The other option was that he meant to go for his Taser and screwed up. This also seemed barely credible, because a Taser and a Glock are nothing alike, and the cops are theoretically well-trained to know the difference and which side of their belt they're kept on. And why was he going for his Taser when Grant was already restrained?

Well, never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, and it turns out Mehserle was just an idiot, went for his Taser and pulled and fired the gun instead. I didn't follow the details of the trial, so I don't know why he was even going for his Taser. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. A lot of people I know were upset (or at least annoyed) by the verdict, but I don't know why: he accidentally killed the guy without meaning to. That's what the involuntary manslaughter charge is for. So he's going to jail, and his life is ruined.

Today is Mehserle's sentencing, which is why everyone's on Oakland Riot Watch. Thankfully he won't be a cop again: whatever his previous record, I, uh, don't think he's a good choice for the job.

UPDATE: He got "two years," with credit for time served, so he'll probably only do another couple of months. Bleh.

making important decisions, quickly

I just went down the hill and had a very nice beer, at some random bar that was apparently one of the few things Pinochet didn't confiscate from one of his opposing political parties. Warmed up a bit, I walked for about 5 minutes, and then caught a colectivo--lucky me, it was empty and I got the front seat.

We got to the next major stop (Bella Vista), when the driver and I were both startled by someone opening the back door and hurtling themselves into the car. He was extremely distraught, shouting and upset, and seemed to be yelling at the driver to GO GO GO, like something out of a movie.

Then there's more shouting, the driver shouting at the guy to get out of the car, and then more guys coming up to the car and...dragging the first guy out of the car by his hair. And repeatedly punching him in the head in the process.

They got him out onto the street and kept beating on him. The driver got out of the car with a billy club; I got out of the car to try and assess what was happening, because my instinct was to stop them beating the crap out of the guy. There were three of them, they were angry, and no one in the crowd was stopping them. Those are bad signs for getting involved.

Then someone behind me shouted "Close the door!" and tried to close the colectivo door on me and get past the car. So, on top of being slightly tipsy, now we have:

• A group of angry strong guys really intent on beating up this one guy.
• A small crowd of onlookers letting it happen.
• An unknown number of people behind me, willing to close a car door on me, pretty hard.
• I cannot understand any of what people are shouting about the situation.

I got back in the car and closed the door.

I thought for a while about how that all went down. It was interesting to watch myself decide I'd done the right thing. That's always an awfully appealing conclusion for anything, and deserves a lot of scrutiny.

When we drove away, I looked back, and they'd stopped kicking the guy on the ground, and let him get up onto his knees--the beating part seemed to have stopped.

The driver described the situation to another driver at a stoplight, and they both laughed, which was a little puzzling.

So I asked the driver why they were beating the guy up, and he said the guy had been stealing.

that sucks. what can we learn?

A couple of volunteers up north got rolled by a group of teenagers.

There are maybe a few things that could have been done differently here.

• Don't go wandering around a strange city late at night.
• If you do, don't ask a crowd of teenagers for directions. (Anna's a big fan of this. I might or might not depending on the situation and how dodgy they looked. I sort of imagine I might have passed in this case.)
• If you ask a crowd of teenagers for directions, don't just turn your back to them and walk away. (I definitely wouldn't do that. When I'm walking around alone, I pay attention to everyone I can see, and make sure I know where they are.)

And if you're not caught too much by surprise, there are other options if you have some training in handling physical conflict.

It's always important not to blame the victim when something bad happens (and I'm glad John and Ryan weren't more badly hurt than scrapes and minor concussions), but it's also always important to look at the steps leading up to the bad thing, and learn where we could have done something different to avoid it, so we can avoid it in the future...