by Patt Morrison

About the author: Patt Morrison is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

First you see the guy in the T-shirt following the teenage girl in the store. She glances back at him and keeps going. He hustles up and shoves her, really hard, into a rack of shoes. When she looks to see what the hell happened, he’s glaring and ranting and coming at her as she backs off, and then he goes past her and out the door; it’s all there on the video from the security camera.

If this had happened only once, the charge would be a misdemeanor. But five times now, at the beach, in downtown San Diego, in stores, to five women, all strangers to the man in the T-shirt—as...