blowing the whistle on assault

The platform at the Old Town train station in San Diego runs something like seventy-five yards. When I arrived that morning, the train wasn't even there -- a little voice told me to take a look around so I did. I walked the length of it, taking my time, registering the people who were there. I found a tree at the far end and stopped under it for a minute to enjoy the tiny smidge of nature that was available.

Then I saw the man with the stick.

He was on the platform across from me, walking faster than the people around him, holding a stick down at an angle and moving it back and forth, low to the ground. At first it looked like he was sweeping. He wasn't sweeping. I told myself I didn't want to jump to conclusions. People are different. People do strange things in public places. I even hoped he was self-soothing -- but the longer I watched, the clearer it got. He was off balance and his aggression was slowly escalating. He wasn't moving randomly. He was approaching people.

It was clear he was making more contact with the people around him.

I couldn't tell for sure that he was escalating his aggression but it was clear he was making more contact with the people around him.

Maybe this was so clear to me because as in most movement arts I've practiced techniques with multiple partners. Once you start that practice you learn to observe groups as a single unit. So when I stopped focusing on the stick movement, which was repetitive, and started observing his spacing I could see he was moving toward making contact with someone. It was also clear that if he did decide to hit someone that stick was going to multiply the psychological impact. It strikes me now in hindsight that he was so off balance that he was unable to strategize. I have no idea what was going on in his psyche but to me his behavior was a clear call for attention. I wish I could have intervened sooner -- and I'll say that once he saw those people in the wheelchair he made a beeline for them, crossing half of the transit station on a brisk walk when before he had been kind of walking around aimlessly.

The first time I noticed, he walked toward someone standing maybe thirty feet away -- but at a forty-five degree angle, not directly. He passed them. A minute or two minutes later he did it again with someone else, this time at twenty or thirty degrees. Then he tried it with the angle tighter -- ten degrees off -- he stopped and turned away just before he hit anyone, but they also moved away from him. I was concerned that the escalation would continue.

I looked for security and didn't see any on my side of the tracks. I saw the row of transit buses parked along the curb and figured a driver would know where to find them. I walked over, told the driver what I'd seen, and he pointed me to a bus across the way where four or five security personnel were standing near the door, talking.

I said, "Excuse me. I want to let you know what's going on. There's a man on the other platform with a long stick, swinging it around. He hasn't hit anybody yet. But I think he's somebody you want to keep an eye on."

They asked me to describe him.

before I named what color he was

Here is the part of the story I keep thinking about. In that moment, I could not come up with a single physical characteristic. I knew exactly what he was doing. I had no idea what he looked like.

The first thing that floated up was, "I think he's a Black man." I stopped before I said it. We live in a country where naming the wrong race can put the wrong person in handcuffs, and I wasn't sure. I hemmed and hawed and said "you'll recognize him -- he's the guy swinging the five-foot stick around." Then I closed my eyes. I let his image come back. And what came back was different: he was thin, bald, Caucasian, with the kind of complexion you get from living rough outside in the San Diego sun. I told them that. He wasn't bald as I'd imagined, but he did have a crew cut.

the whistles

They followed me to the platform, but by the time we got there I couldn't see him. He had moved. We scanned and saw nothing out of the ordinary. They told me they were going to walk over and look around, and headed for the tunnel that connects the two platforms.

While they were underground, I picked him up again. He had walked over under a tree and was now in conversation with a few people in wheelchairs. From where I was standing, I couldn't be sure what was happening. I was trying to watch the stick guy and look for security. When security came out of the tunnel, I whistled and I pointed.

I whistled and they looked toward me. The security guards looked up as they came out of the tunnel. I pointed.

Then I heard a sound that carried across the tracks -- the kind of sound a stick makes when it hits something. I looked. He was still standing with the people in the wheelchairs.

The guards started walking. There were a lot of people on the platform between them and him, so they were moving slowly. As I watched, I became convinced of two things. The first was that he was being aggressive with the two people in the chairs. The second was that if he knew he was being watched, he would change his behavior. I was really desperate to do something for those people under the tree, and the people nearby didn't seem to be taking any action.

So I whistled again. Longer this time. Six seconds, two whistles. He looked up. The guards looked up. And I held my arm out and pointed directly at him.

From my angle that didn't help him much -- I could still track him, but he did move away from the people under the tree. When they finally lost him in the crowd, I whistled one more time and pointed. They saw him. From there it was clean -- they crossed to him, cut him off from the people around him, and separated him from the crowd. He didn't run. He walked over. They asked him about the stick. He put it down. They walked him to a bench to talk.

After the whistles, a woman came up to me. She had her children with her. She told me she'd had to walk her family past that man earlier, on the way to the tunnel, and she'd known something was wrong before she could put it into words. She told her kids to stay close, stay on the far side of her, stay behind her. She said someone had told her the man had hit one of the people in the wheelchair -- not just the chair. The person.

I told her we should report it to the conductors when we boarded. We did. They took our names but said it was outside Amtrak's jurisdiction.

what I keep coming back to

I've been working with attention as a discipline for a long time. The thing I keep coming back to from that morning is the angles. Forty-five degrees, then thirty, then ten. He was rehearsing. He was working his way up to it. He needed to be unobserved to do what he was doing -- and the moment he understood he wasn't unobserved anymore, his entire body changed. The stick came down. His shoulders dropped. The plan ended.

You don't have to know martial arts to do this. You don't have to be brave. You have to be willing to watch closely, not jump to conclusions before you have seen what's actually there, and be willing to be visible when the moment calls for it.