How to deal with strangers
What do you do when someone walks up to you on the street?
What should you do when a stranger approaches you in some public place?
It depends.
Jumping straight to the “YOU’RE NOT MY DAD! I DON’T KNOW YOU! STAY AWAY FROM ME!” response is perhaps a bit…much in everyday life.
For one, the reality is that most human interactions are a friendly affair. Someone genuinely needs help and is asking for a hand from whoever they see. There is no need in those circumstances to be and act fearful. The problem is that it’s not always possible to tell when that’s all it is, and when something more sinister is afoot.
You don’t have to be rude to find out, but you do have to be aware of potential risks and you do have to be firm in maintaining control of the interaction to reduce those risks. Firm sometimes includes being loud and using profanity, but it doesn’t need to be insulting. There’s a difference between saying “Fucking stay back there” and “Stay back, motherfucker.”
If the stranger coming up to you doesn’t set off your spidey senses because of how they look, move, are dressed, or any other reason, you can simply work to avoid any verbal interaction at all. Crossing the street, moving aside, even just putting on that resting bitch face and stare into the distance can all work. If they talk to you, you can simply put them off with a “Can’t help you” or similar statement that doesn’t invite further interaction. However, if you do decide that it’s okay to talk with that stranger, pay attention to the directions they lead that conversation, including whether they respect your personal space (and you’ll want that bubble to be pretty large around you). If they try to press you to respond in ways you have indicate you don’t want to, you know that they’re likely bad news in some form or another. The only question is how bad news they are.
They might simply be desperate or oblivious, and no real danger to you. In those cases, you probably just need to be increasingly blunt in words, tone, and volume until they go away. Again here, starting out polite can help make this strategy actually work. Jumping straight to aggressive language and tone can make an otherwise-annoying stranger into one who feels insulted enough to try to hurt you.
They might simply want to scam you for a couple bucks. I’ll leave it up to you on your comfort level with giving money to someone who might or might not actually need it for what they’re claiming they need it for. Simply be aware that the ask for cash can be a ruse to get closer to you and take more than you’re willing to give, whether in dollars or safety.
They might be looking for a way or an excuse to physically attack you. Conversation often naturally leads to letting people get closer and closer to you, within grabbing or striking distance. Even if that’s not necessarily the stranger’s plan at first, it could morph into that if they don’t like your responses. Whether or not they like what you’re saying is up to them and their logic - you can’t count on it being anything that makes sense to you. That’s why you must always remain on guard to ask approaching strangers to stay distant, and to be ready to immediately ramp up your aggression if they start making a move that indicates more danger for you.
Regardless, if you do have to get loud with a stranger to try to get them to go away, be ready for multiple potential outcomes. They may decide to walk away from the conversation, with or without insults. Let them go. They may frantically apologize. Accept it, while continuing to tell them to move on. They may attack you. Respond with appropriate skills, tools, and violence.
It’s not difficult to manage most everyday interactions with people you don’t know, and most of them will end up just fine even if you make some sort of tactical mistake. Avoiding those outlier circumstances when they turn into more is primarily a matter of simply knowing that they could go sideways, and thinking through what you can do in any possible way that interaction could go, whether it’s a non-interaction where you just walk by and appear to ignore a panhandler and he does nothing but let you go, to being punched in the face because someone wasn’t happy with your attitude when you answered his question, and all of the different possibilities in between. Just remember, the most likely scenario? Nothing physically risky.