(Don’t) Take the F Train

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Would you find this a threat to yourself and fellow passengers? I would.

In fact, two other passengers (one White, one Black, if that matters to you), who appear on videos of the incident assisted a former U.S. Marine, Daniel Penny, in subduing Neely, who later died after being placed in a headlock.

The usual bleeding hearts are blaming the subduers and contending that Neely was driven to this because he was homeless. In actuality, he was probably homeless because he was very mentally ill and though former mayor Bill DeBlasio’s wife spent $850 million dollars ostensibly to improve the city’s treatment of the mentally ill, no one has been able to trace how these monies were spent. In any event, the city and its subways appear chock full of aggressive mentally ill people attacking ordinary citizens. Here’s a video of Neely aggressively threatening passersby on the street. Neely’s conduct is far from unusual.

Here’s another video of aggressive assaults on a New York subway train.  In that case, no one stood up for the woman who was viciously attacked. 

A typical loony response to such behavior is this:

Emma Vigeland on the Majority Report today says that the desire to feel safe on public transit is bourgeois and explains how one time she suppressed those bourgeois feelings when she was assaulted on the subway by a mentally ill vagrant, as everyone should. 

There are worse things than “bourgeois feelings” — like being assaulted or killed.

Isn’t it odd that we have people screaming that words are violence but violent conduct is not? Isn’t it odd that the impulse to survive threatened attacks is attacked as an unworthy aim?

The upshot of the Neely death is protestors massing in support of Neely and a grand jury being impaneled to consider whether the man who held him down (though apparently not the two others who aided him) should be criminally charged for homicide. (Let’s hope the jurors have to get to the courthouse by subway.) 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has naturally jumped aboard the get-the-rescuer demagoguery. To his credit, the mayor of New York was critical of her prejudging the case.

Once again, we see people trying to fan a race war, just as they did when George Floyd died after being restrained by law enforcement. Floyd had a lengthy criminal history, having served eight jail terms between 1997 and 2005. In 2007 he was charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. In 2009 he was sentenced to a five-year prison term for that. He had a record of drug use. At the time of his arrest and death he was suspected of using a counterfeit bill and refused to enter the police car after his arrest. An autopsy showed he had fentanyl intoxication and had been using amphetamines which had increased the likelihood of death. And he has been elevated to some sort of street sainthood. He was, in fact, a menace to himself and the community.

Rather than sympathize with those violent passengers, my sympathy lies with those people forced to use the subways to work, shop, and go to school.

Gregory Umbach speaks for me in support of subway passengers:

“Riders on the subway deserve to have a ride where they don’t feel threatened. And the mentally ill deserve to have the treatment and the protection…”

“…that would allow them to work out their struggles in the protected space. We can’t have a subway system that’s both a system of transportation and housing for the homeless. Those are incompatible goals.”

Said Gregory Umbach, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, quoted in “After homeless man choked on subway, NYC grapples with treatment of mentally ill” 

If New York cannot manage its homeless and mentally ill, it will have to forego the nonsense about defunding the police and place cops in the subways and on the streets, or it will be up to more people than the three men who subdued Neely to keep ordinary citizens safe from attack. Maybe the people who are failing their duties to the homeless and mentally ill are the ones who deserve to be in the dock, not those acting to defend themselves and others.

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