A nice weekend assault

I was assaulted this weekend in Venice, crossing the street. The perp was a crazy guy. And I mean this quite literally. We think he might have been schizophrenic (our armchair diagnosis, given that he was talking to himself and cussing very loudly and aggressively at cars). While we were standing at the crosswalk waiting for the light to turn green, we heard him walking from a block down, cussing up a storm for no apparent reason. Jenny, being the smart cookie she is, suggested we figure out some other way to cross the street to get out of his way. Me, being kind of stupid and not willing to stereotype crazy people as violent, shook that suggestion off.

Anyway, we were both at the crosswalk, and it looked like he was going to cross over to our side. Fine, shouldn't be a problem, right? The light turns green, and as we walked toward Crazy, I did the whole swerve to the left, then right, to try to avoid bumping into him, as normal humans do. But every time I adjusted my x-axis, he would follow me. Uh oh. As I got near him, he swung his foot at my ankle and caught me a good one. I lost some flesh and some blood. And as he walked away, he turned and yelled, "Motherfucking Chinks!" and some other colorful and inappropriate language. So we called 911 and filed a police report. The police were nice, but not too helpful. After all, they came 10-15 minutes after the incident, after Crazy was long gone. They offered to arrest him if they found him, but we told them that we mainly wanted someone to be keeping an eye out for him, since he's clearly aggressive and can be violent. I got off easy, but what if it were a kid.

The thing that struck me about this was, I wasn't even that mad. Just really spooked. And pissed that for all of my resistance to stereotyping mental illness and conflating it with violence, I had to be proven anecdotally wrong. Let me reiterate that the vast majority of people with mental illness are NOT violent. It was really unfortunate that the guy I encountered happened to be really aggressive. But he was not homeless. He looked well-groomed, with clean clothes.

But it does bring up questions about people who are mentally unstable or ill. What if they ARE violent and refuse to take meds? What if they continue to be a menace to society, even on a micro scale? What responsibilities do their families have? What choices do they have?