A homeless woman spit on me in SOMA a few months ago for no apparent reason. Just walked up to me squawking like a bird and spit on me. Probably was on something.

My immediate reaction was to jump out of my chair and aggressively move towards her - I'm actually not sure what I would've done next because it all happened so quickly. Probably shoved her? That seems like a legitimate response to someone walking up and spitting on you. Thankfully I was with a few friends and they restrained me before I could do anything and the woman ran away unscathed.

The entire experience left me so confused. I am legitimately concerned that if I had shoved her I would've been considered the 'bad guy' here be the absurd SF hyper liberals and could've ended up in jail been fired if my employer found out.

What are you supposed to do in this situation? There needs to be some sort of disincentive to this behavior but it seems like the way things are in SF it's actually socially acceptable behavior.

I guess NYC and SF have more in common than we realized.

We have our own spitting lady: http://nypost.com/2017/04/24/notorious-spitting-lady-loses-i...

In many southern tech cities corning someone and yelling at/assaulting them with unknown fluids is a great way to get shot. We recently hired a CA transplant to the dev team and he was shocked how many of us carried.

Do you feel like your life is threatened when someone throws a cup of liquid at you?

If I'm cornered by a crazy man who's shouting and dousing me - if it hits me in the face, quite literally inoculating me - with God knows what? Even here in duty-to-retreat Baltimore, you'd have a hard time calling that other than self-defense.

Not relevant to the parent comment but in places like the UK where acid attacks aren't uncommon, that can be a concern.

Acid attacks are incredibly uncommon in the UK

For anyone curious about the rate, these articles https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/04/27/acid-at... https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/z4dy43/why-acid-attacks-h... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4462016/Two-acid-att... suggest that (on average) there is more than one attack per day in London alone.

In other cities I think the government has your back. The SF police will not respond not a non violent encounter because the court system heavily sympathizes with non violent offenders in SF, to the point where they don't even prosecute. I am at a loss as to what I, as an individual, can do to curb the aggressive behavior.

Use pepper gel?