For the purpose of this chapter, the following definitions shall apply unless the context clearly indicates or requires a different meaning.
WORKPLACE VIOLENCE. Includes but is not limited to physical attacks, harassment, or property damage.
HARASSMENT. Often involving verbal abuse, including unwanted telephone calls, involves acts or language by a party designed to damage or harm a second party. Often this practice is initiated with the purpose of testing a person’s “boundaries” but can evolve into more serious abuses. This behavior causes emotional harm or distress to another.
PHYSICAL ATTACKS. Unwanted or hostile physical contact with another person such as shoving, pushing, hitting, fighting, throwing objects or worse, or any other aggressive or unsolicited and unwanted contact occurring between two more parties. By their nature, PHYSICAL ATTACKS often involve breaking criminal laws.
PROPERTY DAMAGE. Intentional damage to property, which includes property owned by the city, employees, or others. Violent people sometimes express their aggression in acts of property damage, crime, sabotage, theft, or destruction.
THREATS. The expression of an intent to cause physical or mental harm regardless of whether the person communicating the threat has the present ability to carry out the threat and regardless of whether the threat is contingent, conditional, or future. THREATS are significant because they may precede actual acts of violence. By their nature threats, which include incidents of stalking, often involve breaking criminal laws.
(Res. 2524, passed 12-10-97)