The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) - Firewire News Case Study: U.S. Park Police (Presidio Reperpetration)

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP...

This is one Case Study of a series run by Firewire News about San Francisco cases.

(Firewire News) - A stalking victim barely escaped her stalker, ran home and called the police. The officer, responding to her complaint, said dismissively, "Oh we've only had one complaint of that in the past ten years."

"!?!?", was the instant reaction of the folks at the NCIDP.

According to the NCIDP staff, it is one of the most overt, openly misogynous and condescending abuses they've yet seen from any law enforcement officer in the field at the instant of original perpetration. It was a horrible dereliction of duty and reperpetration upon that poor young woman who was scared out of her wits and trying to get help. Although the NCIDP sees such things all of the time, they report that it is almost always much more subtle and subversive, and generally not within a few scant moments of the crime when the officer still has the opportunity to actually catch the original perpetrator at or fleeing the scene.

"The victim was deprived of the equal protections of the law by that perpy officer's preference for coffee and donuts over his duties and responsibilities, it looks like to us. We feel that the officer needs to be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. Section 242 at the very least.", says the NCIDP.

"We very strongly recommend AGAINST using physical acts to defend oneself from the violent assault (The Heart of Violence & the Law) of a police officer if at all possible, but tapes like this just make us all want to kick a jackass like that right in the nuts! [For his violent assault (The Heart of Violence & the Law) upon the victim and use of 'Fighting Words' (Chaplinski v. New Hampshire (S Ct. 1942))]", adds one staffer with purposefully misandrous sardonicism. "We certainly understand the sentiment. As our founder liked to say of such things, 'the bad cop that tarnishes his own badge tarnishes every badge.'"

"NO sane woman, no woman in her right mind, ever wants to seek help from the police ever again after an abusive encounter like this. This was the kind of bad cop that deprives every woman of any hope for justice through law enforcement; who leaves every woman with a loathing fear and disdain for every cop and the system of so-called justice that is supposed to protect her, but then refuses to do so."

Indeed, in this case, it later came to light that this woman was the victim of a group of stalkers, a gang that stalked and terrorized her. Ultimately, this group of stalkers did carry out a later homicidal assault. It appears that this report may have been one early opportunity for law enforcement to prevent that escalation to homicidal assault.

In the instant case, that reported within the Presidio of San Francisco to the U.S. Park Police, the woman had been walking home through the woods when a stalker attempted to close in for the kill. The woman, a highly experienced woodswoman, acknowledged to the NCIDP that, despite her immense experience in woodland environments, she still likely only evaded the stalker with the help of sheer dumb luck and the coincidence of a lunar eclipse.

The woman had been dropped off by coworkers at the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza in the Presidio, as usual. It was late in the fall, and late in the evening, long after dark. This was also the usual routine.

The moon was full, and moments before exiting the car, the victim's coworkers asked her if she was going to watch the full lunar eclipse expected that night. As the victim almost never watched television or listened to radio broadcasts, and rarely used the Internet, she hadn't been aware of the eclipse and had no plans, and mentioned that fact before exiting the car.

The victim followed her usual route, first along an active roadbed, and then into the old fortification access roads that had long before been blocked off and restricted to pedestrian traffic. The path alongside the old battery emplacements was well lit by the full moon high overhead, and the victim could see along its length better than usual. No one was walking or moving along the path ahead, and no one had been following her on the roadway that she had just left. The streets and walks appeared to be completely vacant, save for the victim herself.

At the far end of the well-lit battery path, the victim's path crossed a gravel driveway that served as an entrance to a gravel parking lot and scenic overlook. Most nights on this walk, there was a car or two or three in the lot. On this night, there were none. As she emerged onto the gravel drive, to her left some 100 or 150 feet lay the main road running nearly parallel to her current path. To the right and behind lay the parking lot. And directly ahead, cast in pitch black shadow by the towering trees blocking the moonlight, was the path that she normally took.

She stopped. She looked in every direction several times, standing silently and stock still in the middle of that driveway, far enough away from any nearby shadow to give her some reaction time if someone were to lung out of those shadows. There was no motion, there was no sound, not even the sound of any slight breeze in the air. No traffic on the nearby road to be heard or seen either. Yet she had the powerful, instinctive feeling that she was being watched from the shadows, and she felt the eyes were along the drive toward the road. She contemplated changing her usual route and heading for that road, but felt that if her instincts were right, the person watching was acting predatory and would not be safe to pass by.

She plunged into the darkness of the path ahead of her, well aware that until her eyes adjusted to the depth of darkness on this part of the path, she would be blind and vulnerable. After a few paces, her eyes did adjust, she paused for one breath to listen for footfalls on the gravel behind her, looked back to scan behind her one more time, then she marched on.

The darkened path was fairly short, and the victim came to an opening in the trees and canopy within a few seconds. Entering that lighted opening, the victim looked up to admire the full moon, something that she liked to do as often as she could. Much to her surprise and delight, she looked up to find that the eclipse was beginning in earnest, and nearly one quarter of the moon was already disappearing. Feeling instantly soothed at the end of a long, exhausting and stressful day by the site of that eclipsing moon, the victim decided that she would pause there in the center of that clearing and stay to watch the eclipse unfold.

The instant that the victim's own footfalls stopped, the sound of rapid, stealthy footfalls closing fast on her from the dark path behind reached her ears. Had she not stopped to admire the moon, she feels certain that the stalker would have gone undetected long enough to close the last few feet necessary to reach the predator decision point, the point of pounce, where the predator feels close enough to strike with some high probability of success.

Experienced in the woods, and intimately familiar with every bit of the woods that she was in that moment, the victim instantly knew that she was in trouble. The victim's instincts had been exactly right - knowing the routes and paths available, the victim knew that not even someone out for a jog or run, likely not even a fast sprinter, could have closed the distance from the range of her vision at the driveway to where the stalker was now. To be that close, the victim knew that someone had indeed been watching from the shadows, and had followed after her into the dark path.

The stalker was walking, not running, but walking extraordinarily fast - fast enough to close on a victim with amazing legs whose own walking gate often required others to run just to keep up. The stalker was making an effort to keep the footfalls light, to minimize the chances that the victim would hear. The victim was also quite certain that the sounds of the footfalls that she was hearing were not coming from running shoes of any kind, and sounded to her more like boots. The breathing of the stalker was even subdued to minimize its sound and enhance the ability of the stalker to hear the victim's movements. [NCIDP: Every woman who doesn't know how to make all of these distinctions should learn. These are all key to recognizing predators on the hunt.]

The victim knew that the stalker was within paces of making the lunge to pounce, almost to the edge of the clearing already. She glanced at the brush in the clearing for cover, but knew that she had to already be within sight of the stalker and would remain visible in the moonlight that was still shining brightly on that brush. She knew that retreating to the brush would mean that her only real hope for defense from the stalker would be her little can of pepper spray that had never left her hand from the moment she left the car at the toll plaza.

Even as she completed that evaluation, she leapt forward along the path, toward the next group of towering trees and the lighted road beyond. Sprinting as fast as she could through giant tree trunks and their tangled roots, and steering a wide berth around those trees in case the stalker had an accomplice waiting behind one, the victim ran through the short section of trees to the lighted roadway, and then kept on going.

She ran down the road, down the hill, toward her home. She ran past an emergency roadside call box because it was too close to the dark woods that she had just run out from, and was nearly overgrown by bushes. She kept running down the hill, past even another call box because she was almost home and felt safer calling police from behind her own locked door.

If you've ever used one of those call boxes, then you might know that it can take an inordinate amount of time for someone to pick up that emergency line, and then the emergency operator still doesn't necessarily know where in the state you are calling from. [Are those call boxes really not enhanced 911 compliant still? They didn't seem to be then, and at last report (2008) from one user, the emergency operator still didn't know where the emergency call was coming from without the caller providing the call box number verbally.]

Upon returning home, breathless and panicked, the victim called police and experienced the reperpetration that started this article.

"Comments about donuts aside", says the NCIDP psychosocial department, "this victim had the grave misfortune of reaching out for help and finding only an officer whose behavioral preferences at that moment were narcissistic, misanthropic and sociopathic - anything but dutiful, responsible and worthy of the public trust."