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Is this not the most ridiculous thing you’ve read today?
UCONN Police Reporting a Suspicious Occurrence and Safety Alert:
On 2/7/09 at approximately 6:35 PM a suspicious incident occurred at Hilltop Apartments, in the parking lot between the Beard and French buildings. A male approached a female from the opposite direction and came up within several feet of her personal space. The female turned around and left the area. The male walked away in the opposite direction. The male did not say anything or make physical contact with the female. The intention of the male is unknown. Description as follows: a white male 6’ 0” with shoulder length brown hair wearing a red or brown cloth jacket and jeans. Male described as older than college age. The male had a round face and large build.
If you have any information or witnessed the incident please call UConn Police at 486-4800. As always, you are encouraged to travel in groups at night and in well lit areas. Please notify police of any suspicious activity to police immediately.
A man came within a few feet of a woman’s personal space?!? OH NO!!
What kind of world are we living in if a man is considered suspicious simply for walking near a woman? This is crazy.
Hat Tip: Right Wing News
Bob says: Even traditionally ‘liberal’ blogs and websites have been saying “Ok, this is fookin’ ridiculous, folks…”
Cousin Dave says: Well, y’know, you can’t trust us older-than-college-age men..
J David says: I wish I could laugh at this… But people just blow this stuff off like it’s unusual, when I could sit here for an hour listing personal accounts of such femi-looniness, and not run out of stories. I think better than 50% of American women are just nuts.
Stephen J. says: You gotta remember, paranoiacs never think they’re paranoid. The entire point of paranoia is that it appears perfectly rational from the inside. And the proportion of women who have good reason to be wary of strangers getting too close to them in a parking lot after night, when they’re alone, is still regrettably too high.
As any cop can tell you, you can get pretty far down the weird and scary spectrum, and present a tangible threat, without ever actually doing anything that can be recognizeably denounced; and by the time you can know for certain it’s often too late. There’s a reason most women’s self-protection courses urge their students to listen to their instincts.
Karen says: Ok, if I was alone in a parking lot and was being approached by a man, I might get nervous. I would probably even leave the area, like this woman did. But I would not go to the police, for crying out loud, because the guy did not actually DO anything! There are a thousand innocent reasons why he might have been walking up to her, and if he had any bad intentions, he would most likely have followed her. But I’m not surprised that this woman was so paranoid; what is shocking is that the police took this seriously instead of laughing at her.
Cylar says: Tell me again..exactly what was this fellow accused of doing? I don’t see where any laws were broken.
Mark says: The school has a policy that all students have the right-of-way in crosswalks, especially during change of class. They just approach the crosswalk, oblivious to any cars, never look both ways, and cross. Like precious lumps of clay to be mollycoddled by the administration.
Don’t worry, Cylar, in the new order you don’t have to break any laws to be under scrutiny by the authorities.
Yesterday, I walked near some teenaged girls. I must have committed some crime. Oh wait, I work at a high school.
mojoe says: I am a big, scary looking guy. Unfortunately, we big, scary looking guys do need to go out in public occasionally.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve walked out of a Walmart or supermarket behind a woman that will then glance nervously over her shoulder as we walk to our (inevitably) parked side-by-side cars.
A couple of years back I was standing in a laundramat folding my clothes. There was an adorable, little girl just at the walking stage, pushing around one of the wheeled carts. As she weaved around the place her Mom was on a cell phone, paying no attention to the child. The kid came tottering around a corner and banged into my leg, which caused her to sit down hard and start crying. Mom was there in a second, glaring at me. The few other people in there looked like they were ready to produce torches and pitchforks and string me up.
I’d jump in front of a train before I’d allow any of these people to be harmed in my presence, but how do you let them know that?
Karen, if they laughed her off, there’d be no end to the howling of sexism and discrimination. Cheapest and safest bet for college rent-a-cops is take it seriously and demonize the man. Don’t forget this is a University system and not local police; common sense and individual rights are tacky bourgeois crockery
RogerCfromSD says: If a woman nervously glances my way at night, I like to think it’s because she’s sneaking a peek at my well-toned glutes… But, that’s just me.
Blake says: I’m a Uconn student and when I was informed of this incident by text-message and by e-mail, I just sat there and laughed. My roommate thought I was insane. I couldn’t believe that someone was so paranoid as to report this.
The real kicker is that the university cops made a huge deal of this, but didn’t even bother to report it when a campus drug deal went south and a couple of armed robbers made off with 9,000 dollars worth of property- on campus! I only read about the incident today in the Daily Campus, nearly a week later. I think that two gun-wielding, drug-running hoodlums are more of a threat to my safety than the poor guy who happened to come within ten feet of a girl, don’t you think?
What a crazy world.
Dave says: The Incident occurred in a parking Lot.
So Males ar no longer allowed to drive cars or walk in parking lots?
Quantas Airlines has a Policy that Single Adult Males will NOT be seated next to any Female or Child, Because All Males are Perps!
I was on a grand jury a few years ago where we considered whether to charge a man with stalking and harassment. The story, as presented by the county prosecutor: The man went to a restaurant and asked the waitress who served him out on a date. She said no. He left. He went back to the restaurant later the same day and asked her out again. She again said no. He left. He went back the following day and asked for her. He was told she wasn’t there. He left. He made no further attempt to contact her. She called the police. The police tracked him down to another state — it seems he was just passing through — and arrested him. They did discover along the way that he had recently been released from a mental hospital, though at the time they were still trying to find out what he was in the hospital for. (So they didn’t know whether it was for violent acts, threatening people, or for, say, depression.)
I asked the prosecutor what law he had broken. He may have been annoying, but he only asked her out twice and apparently tried to ask a third time. The prosecutor replied that the legal definition of “harasment” is not what the accused person did, but what the victim felt. I am not making this up: the exact words used were “what the victim felt”.
I was the only member of the grand jury to vote against indicting him. (I don’t know if he was convicted of anything. I didn’t follow the story.) But could I just pick anyone, say, “When he walked past me on the street without looking at me or speaking to me, the way he walked just really scared me,” and have him charged with a crime? That is really scary.
Stephen J. says: The prosecutor replied that the legal definition of “harasment” is not what the accused person did, but what the victim felt. I am not making this up: the exact words used were “what the victim felt”.
It’s one of those damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don’t legal paradoxes. If you make the legal definition of “harassment” an objectively defined frequency of specific behaviour, some clever assclown with a good lawyer will figure out exactly how close to that line they can get without crossing it and use that to intimidate and coerce people at their whim. If you make the legal definition a subjective state defined by each harassment victim, the paranoid and the vindictive can charge any poor schmuck who’s made one date request too many with a crime.
No law with the necessary flexibility to encompass the clever or covert harassers will have the rigidity necessary to keep it from being abused by malicious or paranoid victims. It’s simply a question of which social evil you deem the worse.
spike says: that’s it! i’m doing all my shopping on-line; as a big guy, i don’t dare walk into a shopping mall for fear of arrest
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