Remember the worst thing that ever happened to you on Muni? That was naptime at a posh suburban pre-school compared to this:
Elena Aronson says she was riding a Muni bus to work back on April 6 on Van Ness Avenue when a man sitting next to her fixed his gaze on her teeth, and said, "I want them."
"He kept saying how my teeth were beautiful, like the moon and the stars," she recalled. Aronson, who grew up riding buses on the South Side of Chicago and later in New York, had never encountered anything quite like it. She decided to make a quick exit.
The next thing Aronson recalls is being on her knees outside the bus, bleeding profusely from her torn lip -- with her two upper front teeth missing.
Good god.
Muni crime has been a white-hot topic in SF lately, and it looks like mayor-in-waiting Bevan Dufty plans to make bus-phobia a primary issue when the campaign kicks off. In the meantime, SFPD is going to try something crazy and new:
Deputy Police Chief John Murphy, Muni's new security boss, detailed plans to improve security on the transit system. He said that instead of having officers randomly board buses, they will be deployed according to a "zone strategy." Basically, that means tracking Muni crime hot spots and deploying officers accordingly.
When more broadly applied, the "zone strategy" has been one of the most effective anti-crime measures that police departments around America have tried. Here's the wild, out-of-the-box, Nobel-quality brainstorm at its core: sending cops to patrol where the most crimes happen. In other news, doctors are now experimenting with treating appendicitis by removing the appendix, instead of any random organ.
In the meantime, if you must ride Muni, remember to keep your iPods, jewelry, and incisors hidden.
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