Managing Unknown Contacts

Considering some of the crap going around right now, good time to re-post this.  It starts with
Talking on a cell phone.

Now we all do this in public, but how often have we seen someone totally engrossed in the conversation they’re having and completely oblivious to the environment? I use an earpiece usually and this keeps my hands free and more importantly my head upright. We all use cell phones day in and out, but be cognizant of not allowing yourself to become so fixated with the task of speaking, that you forget where you’re at and what’s around you.

And continues with(among other things)
What if he still doesn’t stop or say he begins to verbalize somewhat but still keeps advancing?

Once again, we can kick up our verbage a bit by adding some profanity.

Now there are some trainers that will tell you to never, ever use profanity. What I’ve seen over my career in law enforcement is that profanity is part of criminal vernacular and bad guys understand it. If you do elect to use profanity, use it to accentuate the message and don’t directly insult someone with it. There’s a big difference between “Back the f*ck up” and “Back up motherf*cker”.

So if we have range and time we can escalate within our verbal options from:

A polite request to stop advancing.
A louder command to stop advancing, using different specific language.
Shout the same command at the top of your lungs and accentuate that with carefully selected common criminal vernacular, i.e. profanity.
There are times that "BACK THE FUCK OFF!" in that 'hear me on the other side of the parking lot' voice is just the thing.

Seriously, very good piece on protecting yourself.  Go read it if you haven't already.