In separate incidents last week, some holiday shoppers trying to subdue a thief got pepper-sprayed in their faces; and some other shoppers in Union Square found themselves being pursued by a crazed, aggressive panhandler who was, ahem, quacking like a duck.
42-year-old Bryan Black, an Oakland parolee, attempted on Saturday night along with a female accomplice to steal several thousand dollars worth of purses from Nordstrom in Walnut Creek. The accomplice managed to get away, but a couple of helpful shoppers (presumably male) tackled Black and held him until police arrived. In the meantime, Black who was also armed with a knife showered his tacklers with pepper-spray, the UC Davis police force's perfume of choice.
Meanwhile, over on this side of the Bay, a crazed panhandler in Union Square was harassing shoppers by madly quacking at them like a duck. (This of course is not much of a come-on, as pandler come-ons go, so perhaps he was just your average mentally ill homeless fellow enacting his own sort of nativity play for the assembled masses.) In any event, as Hotel Nikko general manager Anna Marie Presutti tells the Chron, "He must have approached them at the corner and he was just quacking like a duck behind them. They had sheer terror on their face[s]."
So much for the Union Square Business Improvement District! To be fair, the USBID and the San Francisco Travel Association have been complaining to police and the Mayor's office for months about what they say is a worse-than-ever aggressive panhandling problem, which was likely to blame for S.F. slipping into second place on Conde Nast traveler's tourist favorites list earlier this year.
