NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE P ace drama queen AOC, Jordan Neely was not murdered. Yet, he did die at the hands of another man. The circumstances under which that happened are complicated. Of those circumstances, the dangerous setting that Neely further imperiled before his fateful confrontation is probably the most consequential: an under-policed New York City subway system that is regressing to late 20th century mayhem — except with the add-on of a mental-health crisis decades in the making.
The least consequential of the circumstances, at least in the decisive moments, was race.
The manic 30-year-old Neely was black. The young man who placed him in a headlock, a 24-year-old former Marine identified Friday as Daniel Penny, was white. In a sensible world, the happenstance of the racial difference would go unmentioned because, objectively, it was irrelevant. Psychotic and suffering, Neely was not discriminating about the racial and ethnic composition of the passengers he harassed and frightened on the F train as it crawled through Manhattan on a Monday afternoon. Penny obviously did not hop on the subway thinking, “Good day to hunt down young black men.” Nor did the other passengers who helped subdue Neely, at least one of whom appears (from video of the incident) to have been a young black man.
The happenstance of racial disparity made no difference, except to the demagogues who carp their way to control of our public debate — to whom it is now the only thing that matters.
We need to learn to ignore them. Of course Jordan Neely’s life mattered. But so did the life of the 67-year-old woman he punched in the head on November 12, 2021, fracturing her orbital bone and breaking her nose — as a result of which he spent over a year in Rikers Island. Neely’s life also mattered when he was repeatedly arrested and left untreated, despite the patent danger he had become to himself and those around him. Notwithstanding the indifference then of the agitators to whom he suddenly matters, his life mattered as much then as it did on the subway Monday afternoon. And as for the subway, as Nicole Gelinas observes, the lives of the 27 other people violently killed on trains and in stations since March 2020 matter too — though you haven’t heard about them because their circumstances don’t advance the Left’s race-mongering.
Year in and year out, about 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black assailants, overwhelmingly young and male. Comparatively speaking, incidents of interracial homicide are rare enough to dispel the absurd depiction of America as a racist dystopia — indeed, in the majority of such killings, the perpetrator is black, and the victim is white.
I offer these cold hard facts not to make a racial point. Quite the opposite. The point is that when we obsess over race, as the Left would have us do, we miss violent crime’s critical causative factor — recidivism.
The fact that young black males, as a class, offend at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the overall population should not obscure the more salient fact that a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by repeat offenders — and too many of those recidivists have mental-health problems.
This is not a black issue. Yes, if we’re going to think in group terms, then a disproportionate amount of crime committed by one demographic means that demographic will have more than its share of recidivists. But contrary to the Left’s insistence on pitting group versus group to divide us, crime is an individual phenomenon. As judges instruct juries, guilt is personal — you may not be convicted of a crime based on the racial or ethnic group you happen to be a part of; there has to be evidence that you personally committed the charged offense. The toxic notion of group proclivities has no place in the law.
The percentage of black people who are recidivist felons is small. It is the recidivism that should concern us, not the race of the recidivist. If we’re going to worry about race in the context of crime, we should worry about how black communities are disproportionately harmed by our conscious failure to tackle recidivism and mental illness.
That is to say, recidivists belong in prison: We don’t have an over-incarceration problem; our problem is under-incarceration of committed offenders. And, as New York mayor Eric Adams has been trying — however ineffectually — to explain to his city’s and state’s progressive overlords, the mentally ill who are a danger to themselves and others belong in custodial treatment. The priority should be to get them there before they do something violent.
By taking that commonsense position, Adams is not undermining civil rights. The Latin word civilis relates to society and public life. The civil rights we enjoy are a balancing act between our individual interest in liberty and the society’s interest in protection from the harm any one of us may pose. If one demonstrates that one is sociopathic — whether out of willfulness or mental disturbance — one’s liberty may be restricted. There’s no ordered liberty without order.
What happened on the F train Monday did not happen because of race. It happened because race has become an excuse not to deal with what actually ails us.
So . . . what should happen? What should always happen when someone’s life is taken by another person: a thorough investigation.
Neely’s death was a homicide. It is an unfortunate turn of phrase that we say the medical examiner “ruled” a death a homicide. The ME doesn’t really rule anything. What’s provided is an expert assessment that death was caused by the agency of another person — that Neely didn’t have an accident or kill himself. It means police will presume that Penny’s headlock caused, or at least substantially contributed to, Neely’s demise. But that is not a finding of murder or some lesser form of actionable homicide, such as manslaughter. Conclusions about whether a crime has been committed can be made authoritatively only by the justice system.
This is a hard case. New York law allows the use of force for the purpose of defending oneself or others from a use of force or the imminent threat of force. Even when the defensive use of force has quelled the offensive conduct that provoked it, allowance is also made to detain the offender until the police arrive. Nevertheless, the use of defensive force must be reasonable under the circumstances, not excessive. A use of force that is excessive can be deemed reckless, and if it is, and it causes death, manslaughter is the appropriate charge.
The question, then, is whether Penny used excessive force. The fact that Neely died does not necessarily mean Penny’s use of force was excessive. On the other hand, if Neely was subdued to the point that he was no longer a threat, yet Penny knowingly continued to apply force beyond what was needed to detain him, force that plainly could have killed him, that could support a manslaughter charge.
The inquiry on this is fact-intensive. Presumably, that is why Penny was released without being charged after being questioned. Police and the district attorney must investigate what Neely did to provoke a defense reaction, what Neely’s underlying condition was, exactly what Penny did and when in the timeline of the altercation, what actions were taken to help Neely or get him medical attention, and so on. A prosecutor would have to weigh heavily that a criminal charge could lead to a jury trial. If you don’t think the hellscape the subways have become in the last three years is a factor, as are the decrease in proactive policing and the surfeit of psychosis underground, you are kidding yourself.
Until more of the facts are disclosed, I can’t pretend to know what should happen here. I do know that distorting a tragedy that had nothing to do with race into another episode of the Left’s tragically divisive race-baiting will only make a bad situation much worse.