But just to play devil's advocate here for a second (or maybe not. I'm not 100% sure where I stand on this particular incident), does that not reveal the woman's subjectivity in how she feels about what she's wearing rather than a faux pas on the officer's part?
There's always going to be a subjective component to how people hear officers' inquiries, warnings and advice (and as far as it goes, any perception that the scenario in question is 'just like' wearing a U2 jacket would itself be subjective). Good community-oriented policing takes known social and cultural factors that might predictably influence such interactions into account--we most often hear this concept associated with race relations, but it also has applications for gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and other factors. And those differential perceptions are directly informed by firsthand negative experiences common to members of that community--they can't just be chalked up to ideological conditioning, or a collective inability to think rationally. If an officer were working in a neighborhood with a large gay community which has recently seen several beatings of men perceived as gay, I certainly hope s/he'd see the problem in walking up to men s/he perceives as 'dressed really gay' and 'advising' them that their appearance could get them beaten up. That's not meant as a precise analogy--it's vaguer of course, and also gay men, unlike women, have the option of 'passing' in threatening situations, for better and for worse--but there are some similarities there.
I do understand and appreciate that you're coming from a standpoint of sincere concern for women's safety. But from a woman's point of view, arguments that for example 'this is just about one specific case,' 'it's just one particular clothing item,' etc. can sound both unrealistically abstract and frustratingly afforded. There are multiple reasons for that. Most women have experienced firsthand that merely being female
will unpredictably turn you into a sitting duck at times, no matter how you dress or act. Most women have experienced firsthand that many men will resort to 'slut'-scorning (or its flipside, 'frigid' swipes) to maintain the upper hand in certain social situations, recognizing that this is an effective way to put women in their place. Many women, myself included, have experienced
both being sexually assaulted by a stranger and being beaten up (or some similar violent crime) on separate occasions, and as a result are keenly aware that sexual assaults are a kind of hate crime, one that humiliates you as a human being in a way 'random' muggings don't,
and are intended to do so by the textbook serial sexual assailant (hence the sensitivity to any apparent insinuation that sexual assailants are merely super-horny guys with poor impulse control, and their victims looked so hot they just couldn't help themselves). Even something as seemingly remote as the way your parents and especially your father reacted when you first started wearing 'sexy' clothing as an adolescent for dates, school dances and so on--parents often unintentionally come across as perceiving a woman's body to be 'more obscene' (dirtier) than a man's--even that can play a role. All those factors and more can inform how a woman hears someone (and especially a man, and especially a male authority figure) who suggests to her that her 'revealing' clothing might increase her likelihood of getting sexually assaulted. It should be incumbent on police officers to be aware of this social backdrop, with women potentially at risk as well as with women who've just been assaulted, and to not just stand there going, "Well why can't she be
reasonable [i.e. think just like me] about this."
Finally, though it's a bit of a digression from the above, the Brooklyn assailant(s) hasn't been caught yet, so the fact is none of these officers actually know how and why he's selected the victims he has so far. Maybe it's just coincidence that most/all(?) the victims so far were wearing skirts--after all, the reported assaults (11 to date) mostly/all(?) happened late on weekend nights during the warmer months, when high numbers of women out and about do tend to be dressed 'up'. Or maybe, given that he reportedly also targets petite women who are preoccupied with unlocking their doors, he's simply looking for whoever's the easiest target available that time of night--after all, it's also easier to overpower a woman in a tight skirt and heels than one in sweats and sneakers. Or, maybe their assumptions
really are precisely on-target and for this particular serial assailant, delicate-looking women wearing very feminine clothing happen to match his obsessive composite stereotype of all the women whom he believes taunt and demean him with their perceived indifference, so b--ch, now I'll show
you who's really in charge. It could be any or all of those things, they really don't know. Again, it's really beside the point of the above, but one more reason not to lapse into hackneyed stereotypes of why men sexually assault women.
Why don't all men have foot fetishes? You said yourself that some men need to strangle someone to get it up. What do you think that compulsion is? What do you think they're doing with it after they get it up? Somewhere along the line in their life, physical violence became associated with sexual gratification. They need one to achieve the other.
I'm not personally qualified to judge, but from the modest amount of reading I've done on psychological profiles of serial rapists, I suspect most mental health professionals would object pretty strenuously to analogizing the compulsive aspect of serial rapists' behavior to 'fetishes.' It's not just that these men experience sexual gratification from rape, though they certainly do (not at all necessarily exclusively, however--it's not unusual for them to have girlfriends, visit prostitutes etc.); it's also that they typically have profound, longstanding feelings of resentment, rage, and aggrievement towards women in general, and experience rape as a satisfying act of 'revenge.' (Often, in particular, there's a belief that women are continuously taunting and deriding them, mockingly flaunting their unobtainability to make them feel emasculated.) Obviously that's pathologically antisocial, and not just because sex-as-'revenge' rules out consensuality. Whereas all that is
not true of someone with a foot fetish. I suppose you could say it's somewhat true of pedophiles (since you also mentioned that), insofar as their sexual interest in children, when acted upon, is also profoundly incompatible with basic due regard for the rights of others. But pedophiles, at least in my limited understanding, don't typically consciously desire to harm/avenge themselves on children per se.