If someone is not a relative or intimate partner, there's no easy way to get a civil restraining order against someone in New York the way you can in domestic cases. There either has to be a criminal prosecution to get a criminal restraining order, or you have to retain a lawyer and file a full-blown lawsuit in a court of general jurisdiction.

It should definitely be enough for police to act if you establish that you demanded that contact cease and and that it continued unabated. In this case it seems that the author may not have clearly established it, perhaps did not understand the best way to frame this, and police were unhelpful and didn't want to be involved unless there were threats or a domestic incident involved (where mandatory arrests come into play).