Photo by mymetrostop via flickr

We posted this last year but in the spirit of Public Transit Awareness Month, we though we should re-post information about the different ways you can report an incident to WMATA.

Now, we know that WMATA hasn’t had the best track record of taking sexual harassment and assault incidents seriously (and we’ll be exploring the problem on the blog next week) but we still encourage to community to file reports. After all, the more we report, the hard it is for WMATA to ignore that this is a problem they need to address.

Here are three ways you can report to WMATA:

1) If you are sexually harassed or assaulted by a Metro employee:

Take the name of the employee, record the date, time and location of the incident and report it the customer service department, at 800-637-7000 or online at www.metroopensdoors.com

According to WMATA: “When an incident is reported, a case file is created and the information is sent to the head of the Division for the employee in question.  We will conduct a thorough investigation and take appropriate action.  Harassment is not acceptable, please do not tolerate it, take action and report it, so that we can take action as well.”

Even if you don’t get the name of the employee (seems like a lot of trouble to us) and you still want to report, we fully encourage you to.  That way WMATA will know their employees are sexually harassing riders.

2) If you are groped, witness public masturbation/indecent exposure or are assaulted, threatened or stalked while riding the Metro:

Go to the metro kiosk and ask for help or call the Metro Transit Police at  (202) 962-2121 from your cell phone or the call box that’s located in each metro car.  Metro Transit Police deal with incidents that occur on the platform,  Metro cars, and Metro parking lots and garages.

3) If you experience verbal sexual harassment on WMATA trains or buses (or if you don’t feel like reporting a physical assault to the police), write WMATA a complaint.  Let them know that this is a problem and it is time they did something about it.

Submit your complaint to WMATA online.

If you have filed a report with WMATA, we’d love to hear what the outcome was.  Help us hold WMATA accountable by sharing your experience.