Telling them it’s over and you’ve involved the local law enforcement might be better to force them to understand it’s over.

Cops don’t do jack shit where I live.

I agree with parts of this, but don’t know how to put this delicately: this is a very reasonable opinion to hold if you aren’t in the position that most of your dating partners could relatively easily kill you.

I think ghosting should only be done in the case of safety concerns (in which case, I agree, you’re not thinking about work awkwardness), but waiting until someone’s hit you is suicidal. In the case of, let’s say, a 25 year old woman, she’s statistically likely to have been getting harassed in public for more than a decade, and likely has a good idea about when something feels off. It’s not reasonable to expect her to initiate a conversation that the other person might take as an attack if it feels like it’s not safe to do so. With unstable people, simply becoming less interesting to them, by responding less and less can be a safer way to end things than by provoking them.

Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting that only heterosexual men are violent in relationships and only heterosexual women are abused. I am saying that due to standard phenotypic differences, this type of violence is most likely to be catastrophic even in small doses. I’m a large woman (178 cm/5’10”), and taller than my fiancé, but when he cracks my back, for example, it’s very clear to me that he could squeeze me to death without too much trouble. My sister played rugby for a decade and did martial arts for several years, she’s strong as fuck. She used to wait a month or two to spar with her new male teammates, because an untrained but relatively fit man would generally be able to accidentally seriously injure her. This got way off topic, sorry.

TL;DR: waiting until a person has hit you is too long to wait when that one hit can be fatal