It’s good that New York’s progressive elected officials and transit advocates are outraged by Jordan Neely’s killing on a Manhattan subway train Monday.
Neely’s life mattered — and so did the lives of the 27 other people violently killed on the subway since March 2020.
Where was the progressive outrage then?
It might have prevented the latest death.
Monday afternoon, Neely, 30, was menacing people on an F train in Lower Manhattan, according to witnesses, when another passenger put him in a chokehold.
The medical examiner has ruled the death a homicide.
It’s up to police and prosecutors — and, if it comes to that, a jury — to determine whether this killing was justified self-defense or just another subway murder.
Our progressive pols aren’t willing to wait.
“Jordan Neely was murdered,” concluded AOC, because he was “crying for food.” “People experiencing homelessness, mental illness, hunger, and frustration need and deserve compassion,” not “force,” tweeted city councilwoman Tiffany Caban.
“Does the Mayor, Governor, or any high-ranking MTA official plan to say anything about Jordan Neely’s killing today?” asked the author of a popular subway blog.
It’s good that the progressives are finally interested in a subway killing.
But before Neely’s death, from March 2020 until early April, 27 people lost their lives to murder in the subway, many of them, like Neely, were homeless young people.
Before 2019, it took 15 years for New York to rack up 28 murders on the subway, not three.
Where were AOC and Caban when homeless soccer player Akeem Loney, 32, was murdered by a stranger as he slept on the subway, in November 2021?
Where were they when Claudine Roberts, 44, also sleeping on the subway, was fatally knifed by a stranger earlier that year?
Oh, yes — Caban, even as four people were killed within a month last fall on the subway, including a union steamfitter and a Citi Field worker separately on their way home from work, was dismissing concerns about subway violence, calling it “a one-in-a-million event.”
In some recent cases, perpetrators have claimed self-defense, perhaps spuriously.
Just in April, an attacker killed 18-year-old Isaiah Collazo aboard a Brooklyn train after Collazo’s friend pulled the emergency brake, sparking a dispute; the attacker’s Legal Aid lawyer claims the dispute escalated to the point where he had to defend himself.
Similarly, last fall, the man who allegedly pushed Heriberto Quintana to his death under a Jackson Heights train claimed the move, during a fight, was “defensive.”
Because, in the latest case, Neely was black and the alleged perpetrator appears to be white, the progressives are all now screaming “Bernie Goetz,” after the illegally armed man who shot and wounded four people menacing him on the subway in 1984.
“We cannot end up back to a place where vigilantism is tolerable,” Al Sharpton says.
Actually, the Goetz incident wasn’t that unusual. Self-defense, or the claim of it, was common in the 1970s, 1980s, and early-1990s high-crime subways.
In 1979, a 63-year-old man stabbed and killed a 23-year-old who, he said, had tried to rob him.
In 1990, two people died in alleged subway self-defense incidents.
Just like in the latest case, the press and pols only found Goetz interesting because he was white, and his assailants were not.
What kept killings, including purported self-defense killings, on the subways low after the early 1990s? Low crime.
In 1990, with 26 murders on the subway, riders were on edge.
That was the year Bill Bratton launched broken-windows policing underground, stopping low crimes before they became big ones, and crime fell.
By 2019, with one or two killings a year on the subways, riders felt safe.
But now, with killings back up to double-digit numbers annually last year for the first time since the early 1990s, people are scared again.
Neely, with a long history of disorderly and violent behavior, is just the latest example of a trend we’ve seen for three years: disorder escalates.
Whether Neely’s death was justified or not is less important than whether we could have prevented it.
Yes, we could have, by keeping subways as safe as they were in 2019.
Ensuring order on the subway means that Neely wouldn’t have been able to act in a way that made people scared; it also makes it less likely that a fellow passenger would react in the same way to feeling scared.
Violent subway crime, though lower than it was during last year’s horrific fall, is still 28% higher than it was in 2019.
Progressives needed to care about all subway victims to save the one who, sadly, fit their desired narrative of “vigilantism.”
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan’s Institute’s City Journal.
