A few days ago, one subway passenger killed another subway passenger. You probably saw something about it on the news.
The man who was killed was Jordan Neely. We don’t know the name of the man who killed him.
We know that Jordan had been a skilled Michael Jackson impersonator, performing for tips on the subway. We know that he has faced many challenges in life, including the murder of his mother. We know that Jordan was one of the many New Yorkers who could not afford a place to live. We know that Jordan had been arrested many times, for crimes that largely stemmed from being poor, and unhoused, and angry, and suffering from untreated mental illness.
We know the man who killed Jordan was a Marine.
We know that Jordan was black. We believe the Marine is white.
If you ride the subway in NYC, you have inevitably encountered people who are belligerent and unpredictable. Most of the time they keep to themselves. Sometimes they engage other riders. Usually riders seek to deescalate, first by ignoring, then by moving away. Sometimes a third party will step in to try and calm things down.
Other times, riders will engage. Usually this involves yelling. Occasionally pushing and shoving. Real fights rarely happen. When they do, they usually don’t last long. A few times I’ve seen riders intervene in a fight to subdue the party that instigated the fight; maybe until the next stop, maybe until the police arrive.
What doesn’t happen is what happened this week.
The New York Post, which almost never gets anything right, had its broken clock moment today.
NYC is great because we give each other space. NYC is great because we take care of one another. Jordan needed one or the other, but instead he got the worst of us. He got our fear, and our anger, and our violence. A few of us saw him the way too many politicians and commentators and media companies tell us to see poor Black and Brown people: as a threat to be met with overwhelming force, rather than as a person desperate to overcome his oppressive circumstances.
I don’t think we should take lightly the fear many of our neighbors feel when confronted by unstable and belligerent people on the subway or the street. Yet some of us do take it lightly, because we have responded to the calls for “law and order” by embracing the other end of a binary.
According to this binary, either you think people should learn to live with the fear, and occasional reality, of random acts of violence, or you think we should excise the people they are afraid of from public spaces. Either you have empathy for the riders, or empathy for Jordan.
What the NY Post gets right in its headline points toward the actual solution. We should reduce street harassment and we should reduce poverty, homelessness, and untreated mental illness. Or, to put a finer point on it, the WAY to reduce street harassment is by reducing poverty, homelessness, and untreated mental illness.
Most of us know that this is right. Yet we respond to increases in street harassment NOT with massive, powerful, urgent calls to reduce poverty, homelessness, and untreated mental illness. We respond with call for more cops and more incarceration. We want to fill the pockets of our cops with billions in overtime and fill the cells of Rikers Island with poor people accused of crimes.
Or we respond by telling New Yorkers to get over it.
Roxane Gay provided some useful context in a NYTimes essay titled “Making People Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed.” She catalogues a number of recent incidents where people who mistakenly show up at the wrong home or car are met with gunfire. “All across the country, supposedly good, upstanding citizens are often fatally enforcing ever-changing, arbitrary and personal norms for how we conduct ourselves.” Then, turning to the killing of Jordan, she writes,
On Monday, Jordan Neely, a Michael Jackson impersonator experiencing homelessness, was yelling and, according to some subway riders, acting aggressively on an F train in New York City. “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” Mr. Neely cried out. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” Was he making people uncomfortable? I’m sure he was. But his were the words of a man in pain. He did not physically harm anyone. And the consequence for causing discomfort isn’t death unless, of course, it is…
A man actively brought about Mr. Neely’s death. No one appears to have intervened during those minutes to help Mr. Neely, though two men apparently tried to help the former Marine. Did anyone ask the former Marine to release Mr. Neely from his chokehold? The people in that subway car prioritized their own discomfort and anxiety over Mr. Neely’s distress.
We live in a shoot first, ask questions later moment. Violence, even deadly violence, is justified by our leaders and our laws. Of course, the difference between lost people being shot and Jordan being choked is that the former just needed directions. Jordan needed much more than that.
If this moment has a legacy, let it be that it galvanized us to demand better. Jordan deserved it. We all do.
