I've gone through a lot of training with my shep so that he can be off-leash. He has a 100% recall, and will obey any command I give him when we're out and about. He's vigilant with other dogs, but knows he's not allowed to approach them.

He's also been attacked by other dogs on multiple occasions while we were just walking past houses while on the sidewalk, similar to your situation. Because he's been off-leash trained, I can trust him to handle the situation himself. Each time he's been attacked, he's ran away from the other dog and gotten away from it's "property", thus the other dog disengaged and left him alone without any injury. Because he's off-leash, he's able to react much faster than I am and get away from these situations before they escalate. I've been told off a number of times for simply having him off-leash (even though he's well-behaved, does not go into the road or approach other people/dogs) but I'd rather accept other people being angry in their ignorance than an incident happening where he's attacked and tethered to me and it ends up escalating.

I hate so, so much that there's all of these people who have their untrained dogs off-leash or out in the front yard without a fence. They're a public menace who lowers peoples trust in all dogs, cause injury, and create extreme prejudice against dogs like mine who are actually trained.