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I've seen only a smattering of conversation about the subway incident, as I've lately been working hard to cut down on my social media consumption for my own mental health. But still, it's painful to watch everyone on both sides speak in cliches all the way down.

Depending on who you follow, Neely is either a career criminal and nothing else matters, or he's an innocent MJ impersonator and nothing else matters. I'm glad I follow you because I'm not going to get real nuance in most other places.

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The Neely story became more interesting when the Times reported that he actually did receive quite a lot of mental health care, all paid for by the city of New York, and had been committed to inpatient treatment (voluntarily and involuntarily) a number of times. Apparently, the city of New York keeps a Top 50 list of the most serious cases of mentally ill homeless people it keeps running into, and Neely was on that list. So even the question of "the system failed Jordan Neely" is muddied.

I also wholly agree with the observation that the tendency to waive off complaints about erratic and violent homeless people in publicly shared urban spaces is socially as well as politically self-destructive, and the Twitter zoomer white guy response of "whydoncha move back to Iowa if you're so scared, you pussies" is stupid and annoying beyond measure.

I remember even in New York City's Bad Old Days, for all the muggings and street crimes, the subways were not doubling as a rolling tent city for the homeless. I've never seen anything like the current state of both the trains themselves and some of the stations in New York, and pretending it's No Big Deal is so totally disingenuous, you wonder who actually takes the people claiming it's fine seriously.

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I think the proponents of involuntary care include long term, or even permanent involuntary care for cases like Jordan Neely. Basically - you don't get to leave unless and until you're ready to safely live on your own.

I think Jordan Neely, and the citizens of NYC, were failed by 1) releasing him from short-term involuntary commitment. When someone like that is punching strangers for no reason, they need to be taken off the streets. And 2) By imprisoning him at Rikers. That's not an appropriate place for someone with very serious mental illness.

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Also, I find this author to be wrong and annoying, but it's worth reading this piece to get a sense of how horrifying the experience of involuntary commitment can be. Skip through his credential bragging and read "My Open Letter to Eric Adams." I fully support its use, but in the spirit of FDB's writing here, I don't think we want to forget that even though it's good, it's still very bad. Some excerpts:

"Sit down. It’s not actually a request. This is coercion. When the force of the law says sit down, you have to do so. It’s not a suggestion, Mr. Mayor.

And it’s for your own good, because I say so.

When I say, sit down, you sit down. If you don’t sit down, I’m going to be concerned for your safety and the safety of my staff. In a psychiatric emergency room, I have the right to force you to do many things, by virtue of my medical license together with mental hygiene law.

I can have you grabbed by men and women and held down while you scream and shout and flail about uselessly. If you struggle too much, in addition to being held down physically, there is more I can do. You would be strapped to a gurney. Being strapped to a gurney against your will might be horrifying—and I mean this in the most literal sense of the word: it induces a sense of horror.

This is for your safety. But since you’re screaming, and it’s disturbing the other patients, one of the things I’m able to do is inject you with medicine. No, you don’t get to say no. It’s an emergency. And because it’s an emergency, I have the right to “treat you” over your objection."

https://thefrontierpsychiatrists.substack.com/p/involuntary-psychiatric-hospitalization?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

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I'm actually quite glad you shared that, and the disclaimer.

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Yes it can certainly be scary. But the part you aren't including is how many patients are thankful for the care they get. I can't count the number of people who, once their psychosis or other psychiatric crisis has been treated, have thanked everyone in the hospital for saving them. Inpatient psychiatric treatment should of course be made as calm and non-frightening as possible, but there are limits to what can be accomplished when working with severely ill and agitated people. A jab of medicine may be scary but it is far less scary than dying.

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Totally. I'm 100% in agreement with you, RW and FBD here, and I argued against the author of the piece I quoted when he posted it. I still find it helpful to keep in the back of my mind for these discussion.

And you're right, a similar piece could be written about the horrors of one non-commited day in the life of a person like Mr. Neely.

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I am 6 1/2 years sober, and a really common experience among people who are having successful recoveries is that it took either having their lives ruined, being coerced, or both to help them turn their lives around. It’s unfortunate and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it’s absolutely necessary sometimes, maybe necessary more often than it isn’t.

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The term I hear is "rock bottom".

I am also told that the meaning of "rock bottom" is different for each person.

Then again, I understand (I'm not playing coy, I really don't have any personal experience here) that you cannot coerce someone into recovery. The person in recovery has to want to recover. You cannot do it for them, you cannot force them to do it or live them into doing it.

Correct me if I am wrong, here.

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I think the idea is that you can get them to hit rock bottom faster if you confront them and, e.g., lock them up.

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Sometimes forced institutionalization (or even the REALISTIC threat of it) *is* the rock bottom wake up.

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Multiple psychiatric admissions means little in this case. What Neely and many others need is long term psychiatric care. Not “come to the hospital for a few days of medications that you’ll stop taking after discharge and then come back next month when things get bad again.”

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Do they typically do oral medication or the more expensive longer lasting injections?

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I don’t practice in NY so I’ll defer to a psychiatrist from that area. But typically long acting injectable antipsychotics are preferred whenever possible. Some are expensive but others are either generic or often subsidized and are available to those without money (sometimes).

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The problem is even when committed to inpatient treatment it was only for a week or two at a time. There isn't a system for long term, even indefinite, care outside of a few very specific cases

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May 8, 2023·edited May 8, 2023

Yes, from what I remember it was extremely difficult to end up permanently at the long term New York state psychiatric facility which I believe was called Rockland.

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NYS had several such facilities. A few were built in the early 1960s to a common design.

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Correct. While we absolutely should not romanticize the “good old days” when we had large asylums to house the mentally ill, we have radically overcorrected, and provide almost no such long-term care, which is an equally great mistake in the other direction.

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May 9, 2023·edited May 9, 2023

From the outside looking in (I'm South African), the greatest nation on earth (yes, the USA is still that, for all its flaws) seems entirely ruled by fear nowadays. The operative fear in this case is the fear of disagreeing with the much-too-online radicals and poseurs. With the various Prog Twitter hive-minds constantly scanning for their next target, you don't dare express a practical or moderate position or you'll be literally hounded out of your career ("consequences" am I right?) This is why I read FdB - despite some deep ideological differences - because he has made a space where he can say the uncomfortable things to his own tribe. Of course a significant chunk of that tribe dismisses him outright as a crypto-fascist. But, eh, we'll take that from whence it comes.

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May 8, 2023·edited May 8, 2023

Nobody can predict when an obviously paranoid schizophrenic will transition from just shouting and threatening to actual harm. Every New Yorker (and regular user of other urban transit systems) has seen these kinds of behaviors. Neely required three individuals to restrain him and still fought back. Is it now a requirement that some innocent passenger be injured first before action is taken to mitigate?

Not known by the subway passengers at the time was that he'd had countless encounters with the law already. What was known is the the other passengers on the train were entitled to a reasonably peaceful train ride to their destination. My bet is that Bragg knows any jury of New Yorkers will decline to convict, influenced by their own experience in the subway,

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as a regular DC metro rider, I do see people acting erratically quite often and yet I would never even consider preemptively assaulting them like Penny did and I don't know a single person who would.

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It seems like you are filling in some gaps in the public record of what happened beforehand with your own assumptions.

Maybe penny’s actions were unreasonable based on what Neely was saying and doing. Maybe they were reasonable. We will probably know eventually, but we don’t know right now.

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I'm not filling in anything, I'm using the facts as currently known based on eye witness accounts that he didn't attack anyone prior to being put in the choke hold. And if he had attacked someone we'd obviously know it by now based on how this has been reported.

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From what I can tell, Neely was well-known (as one can be in a big city) on the subway system for being aggressive and had just spent a year in Rikers for assaulting someone. Now whether Penny knew that or not, we don't know, but we do know that Penny did not act alone. Two other men, at least, helped him restrain Neely. So something had set off greater than usual alarms.

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the guy who took the video has given an extensive account said he didn't appear to be looking to attack anyone and all he said was that he was fed up and hungry and didn't mind going to jail. nothing about attacking people that I've seen

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Neely said he didn't care if he was sentenced to life in prison. What crime carries a life term again?

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founding

NBC news reported that he said, "I'll hurt anyone on this train."

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Not very much has been reported. Part of the incident made it onto video. I have yet to see definitive statements from the eyewitnesses of what led up to all of it in the first place.

As with the Michael Brown case, there's a whole lot of assumptions still flying around in the air - not that it's stopped anyone from trying to craft their own narratives, of course.

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the guy who took the video, Vazquez, said he wasn't armed and didn't appear to be looking to attack anyone

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Despite Neely's own statements. And clearly multiple people on that subway did not agree with Vasquez's assessment and intervened directly.

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This is technically true but leaves out relevant context. Also per Vazquez via CNN: Neely was "acting erratically” and started yelling about being “fed up and hungry” and “tired of having nothing,” and said, “I don’t care if I die. I don’t care if I go to jail. I don’t have any food … I’m done,” according to Vazquez. At some point, Neely took off his coat and threw it on the train’s floor, repeating he was ready to go to jail and get a life sentence, Vazquez said.

I think the 5th Column guys addressed this well. Regular metro/subway riders (as I was in NYC for more than a decade) have become used to behavior that would unacceptable in any other scenario. We avert our eyes or try to move to another car. The fact that you (or me) or your friends wouldn't try to subdue someone acting this unpredictable in a closed space says more about what we have allowed/accepted in our daily lives than what is proper or not in this given situation.

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Yeah. I haven't followed this closely, but yeah. In my experience, whenever these outrageous things occur, facts later come to light that qualify what's outrage-worthy about it. They're almost always more complicated than what gets reported or than what the public hears (or, I might add, than what most people who weren't there can really know).

With the Michael Brown case, the first thing I heard of it was that Mr. Brown was handcuffed and in the back of a police car and the officer shot him there. I have no idea where I heard that. Maybe it's something I "heard" but the report was actually different. At any rate, whatever the other complications or blame in that case, nobody says that he was already handcuffed and in the backseat of the police car.

In my better moments, I try to remember that before I jump to conclusions or accept whatever narrative is out there. In practice, I probably still make those mistakes.

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I don’t think there’s much point in arguing over the meaning of the words “gaps” and “assumptions.”

You have your mind made up, sounds like. Seems like the majority of people following this story do. Maybe you’ll be proven right at the end of the day. I don’t know.

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I've read everything I can find about what the witnesses have said. I can certainly change my mind if new facts come out from credible sources but based on the facts we know now the idea that anyone who takes the subway can understand this happening does not ring true to me in the slightest.

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I was referring to gaps in the public record itself, not to gaps in your examination of what information is currently out there.

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"Never even consider..." seems pretty tolerant of disorder and chaos. If we re-labeled his behavior as "bullying" would you consider stepping up?

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no, attacking someone is almost assuredly going to make the situation worse.

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We certainly should withhold firm judgment until we have a more complete picture of what went on on that train. But H is right: we have a lot of info, including the video and the statement of the guy who made the video. He said Neely wasn’t armed and didn’t make a move to attack anyone.

Yes, his raving was scary. I would’ve been on edge, a little worried. But did anyone have the right to use force to stop that raving? At what point is initiating force really justified?

(I say really as opposed to legally. Legally has gotten way too loose in many places.)

What’s missing in this argument is all the other steps someone could and should have taken if they thought they needed to intervene. Call it deescalation, call it whatever, first you need to do like they tell you in grade school -- use your words.

And use them to try to lower the temperature, not raise it. Get his attention. Ask him to keep it down, tell him he’s scaring people. Be compassionate, tell him you get it, life can be hard and the world can be unkind. Ask him if $5 would help.

Talking to him will probably bring all his attention onto you, which is scary and risky. But if you’re feeling brave enough to tackle the guy, you need to be brave enough to try some diplomacy first.

And talking to him may ratchet the situation up, no matter how calmly and gently you do it. Maybe his fury now has a focus. Maybe being asked to stop enrages him further. You can’t know. Intervening always carries that danger. The instinct to keep one’s head down and stay out of it is totally reasonable that way.

So it may end up in a physical altercation anyway. That’s possible. There’s no guarantee. But I think you have the responsibility to try nonviolent intervention first if the other person hasn’t done any actual violence themselves yet.

In general I think the principle has to be that you as the intervener do not escalate things yourself. You don’t up the ante, don’t raise the volume, don’t hit first.

There are of course exceptional scenarios we can imagine. One commenter asked What if he were saying he’s gonna push someone in front of a train?

Well, if he’s still in the train, he can’t do that. But it’s a serious enough threat to call the police about. And if he gets off the train you follow and jump to:

If he’s off the train, in a station or on the street, you stay close while calling 911. You hope the cops arrive soon. If, before they do, the guy heads toward the platform, you intervene. You have to judge things in the moment -- maybe you can try non-violence first -- but if there’s an imminent sense that he’ll push someone you may have to escalate things yourself and try to restrain him.

It is possible, in other words, that a situation will demand immediate preventative action. But from everything we know about the Neely incident right now, it didn’t rise to that level. No one could’ve been killed with a sudden push. He didn’t have a knife or a gun. If someone wanted to intervene they needed to try talking first.

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Well, first I’ll repeat that we’d really need a lot more information about exactly what happened in order to judge for sure. That’s what a jury might get. All sorts of details could switch my opinion one way or another in this case.

In general, though, I stand by my framework. That is, you only get to use the element of surprise or other advantages if the situation has definitely already reached the critical point. You don’t get to say, This guy MIGHT go from yelling to actual violence, and since it’s safer for me to catch him unawares rather than draw his attention, I won’t wait for him to make a move AND I won’t try to talk him down. I’ll just do what I would do if he were already attacking someone and take him down.

It’s a hard line to draw, but I think it’s a really bad plan to give everyone permission to preemptively use violence on others based only on a subjective sense of an emerging threat. That’s what gets us things like the Arbery case. It can’t be enough to say, I thought he was an imminent threat and I didn’t want to give up my tactical advantages in order to find out.

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"And talking to him may ratchet the situation up, no matter how calmly and gently you do it. Maybe his fury now has a focus. Maybe being asked to stop enrages him further. You can’t know. Intervening always carries that danger. The instinct to keep one’s head down and stay out of it is totally reasonable that way."

How the fuck did we get to this point? Whose job is it to make sure that the subways are safe and usable? Is it the guy who's just trying to get to his shitty job at McDonald's or Starbucks?

Or is it the responsibility of the millionaires who pull in literally billions in public money to do something about the problem but somehow seem incapable of doing anything?

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I lived in NYC in the late 1980s and early 1990s when things were at another low point, and I saw a lot of stuff on the subway, so I’m not just talking out my ass.

I’m totally with you in thinking there needs to be more effort to make the subway and all public places safe. Like Freddie, I’m absolutely not part of the all-hands-off fantasy crowd.

I am still very concerned that the majority’s desire for order not trample on the rights of peaceful but weird others, nor can I abide a kind of hard rain washing the streets clean attitude. It’s a hard problem to solve, and we need to look at things like mandatory long-term treatment (as others have discussed here).

All that said, it’ll never be possible to prevent every scary situation. People have breakdowns and crises. It’s not always predictable. Even in the best case we’ll never guarantee that people might not encounter another person behaving in a bizarre and threatening fashion. So we’ll still need to have some kind of protocol for handling those situations. We’ll still need legal and moral standards for when force can be used against others in self-defense.

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"We’ll still need legal and moral standards for when force can be used against others in self-defense."

For cops, not for ordinary citizens. You can expect a uniform standard for somebody who's got the training and whose job description is enforcing law and order.

If, for some insane reason, you try to push this off on ordinary civilians the responses will run the gamut from pretty good to completely crazy. I sympathize with Eric Adams when he talked about getting aid from subway passengers and ordinary citizens when he was a transit cop but that can only hold for isolated incidents.

Nobody is suggesting that crime is completely preventable, but Lori Lightfoot of all people just asked what people think the end result is going to be when Pookie shoots up his neighborhood and then is right back out on the street again? What message does that send?

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>Nobody can predict when an obviously paranoid schizophrenic will transition from just shouting and threatening to actual harm.

This is the thing right here.

It's absurd that people are placing a higher expectation on a bunch of random subway riders to be master psychologists capable of expertly reading the actual intentions of an erratic individual, than they're placing on Jordan Neely to not behave threateningly in public.

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May 26, 2023·edited May 26, 2023

The fork in the road of opinion seems to be whether one waits for an innocent to be injured first before bystanders can put hands on a crazy person or not. None of those who advocate for punishment in the subway case seem to acknowledge this. It's a denial of reality. Then, again, there will always be a follow on of gauging proportionality. "He didn't deserve to be killed for just pulling a gun from his waistband" and similar. I think identifying with and excusing criminality and threat might be some sort of mental illness itself.

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There is no such thing as a "normie." The unironic use of this term is a sure sign that someone spends too much time on the internet.

Otherwise, 100% spot-on! Excellent and compassionate piece.

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So, do you have assistants scouring the Internet for you just looking for things you might find interesting? Do they print them out and leave them on your desk? Do you dictate your comments?

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I don't use social media.

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Agree with you on the post, Sleazy.

"Normie" generally refers to people who haven't adopted the perspective of extremists on the left and/or right (I actually don't know if it's use by progressives in that way--it's common among right extremists). If you just mean everyone is different, that's true enough, but the term is meaningful. Irony is built in, because within extremist groups (on the Right, at least, where it's more common) it plays off of and reverses the value of "normal." In Freddie's post I read it as doubly ironic, since it turns an imagined irony among progressives back on itself.

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I first encountered the term among professional video game streamers. From there I think the term infiltrated other areas of the public discourse.

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It has been widespread in the Alt-Right for many years. Self-proclaimed neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin published "A Normie's Guide to the Alt-Right" during the 2016 election.

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https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/normie/

I am not surprised that the term is popular among the alt-right given the substantial overlap between that subculture and video gamers, anime fans, etc.

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Good source, Slaw! My orientation was reading through old 4chan /pol/ posts, but this tells me there was a history before.

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I don't think the term is meaningful. It almost always means "people less enlightened than I am."

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I have always understood it as a contrast to the Extremely Online and to a lesser degree those with serious interest in politics or partisan political commitments. Never thought of it as pejorative, and if anything, carries an implication that political junkies are the weirdos. Which is in fact the case.

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The fact you suggest only a select group of people think of others as 'normies' kind of torpedoes the point you're making, that these divides do not exist.

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These divides do not exist, except for in the minds of the pitiably online.

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Which is a divide you yourself are repeatedly determined to highlight, thus disproving your argument.

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This is the reason I read Freddie. He accepts nothing is as simple as it seems, and he challenges us with his perspective. I won't say I always agree with him, but I sure do learn from him.

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May 8, 2023·edited May 8, 2023

If it is “not defensible” for women to call the police when men harass and threaten them, then what are women to do? Would you support mace? Concealed carry? Or is this just a form of, “shut up bitch it’s not that bad”?

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I'm editing this response because it may be less charitable than Freddie deserves; some scenarios captured by what he conjures wouldn't be threatening. But others would. Moreover, the meme that it is "not defensible" to call the police when you fear violence is itself indefensible, and demeans an otherwise-strong post. Anyone who takes critiques of "systemic" bias seriously should also consider whether this dumb, execrable meme systemically disfavors a protected class who are on average less capable of self defense than men, plus far more likely to be targets than perpetrators of random violence.

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This is an uncharitable reading. There's a substantial difference between someone yelling random bullshit from afar, which was explicitly FdB's example, and someone actually threatening you. In the former case, it's perfectly reasonable to feel afraid (because the former *can* lead to the latter - but is not guaranteed to), but not really reasonable to assault the person yelling, whether with mace or with gun. Calling the police might be reasonable, depends on the situation.

But if you're being *actually, directly* threatened, and it looks like the person might make good on their threats - different situation. Calling the police seems perfectly defensible and reasonable there, to me, as does mace if the threat is imminent.

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I admit there’s some ambiguity in “shouting at himself or at you,” but he also says “aggro” and it’s a recurring experience, if you are a woman in NYC who walks at night, that once in awhile you’re forced to duck into an open store because the aggro shouting guy pursues you. It spikes adrenaline for a reason.

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"Aggro shouting guy pursues you" 100% falls into the latter category, agreed. You should never have to compromise your own safety because of someone else's instability. But the solution to anything short of that is definitely not assault.

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May 8, 2023·edited May 8, 2023

The solution certainly isn’t assault, but the idea that it’s “not defensible” to call the cops when you fear violence makes my skin crawl and is the exact attitude that paves the way for vigilantism.

The other thing is you just don’t know. Let’s say you walk home every night and 1/50 nights a guy shouts at you and 1/10 shouters follow you, and a single one of those times turns genuinely frightening. This black swan risk looms over every other dark walk and certainly every other aggro shouting encounter. You’re not faster than him and there’s nobody around. Even if he does nothing other than shout “you fucking bitch” your body will undergo the same response the antelope exhibits when the tall grasses stir. So it becomes harder to distinguish -- you can’t, in the moment -- between somebody ‘just’ shouting at you and someone worse. You don’t need to be a neurotic doomer to feel this. And calling the cops is not a bloodthirsty response.

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Nor am I clear on why a man committing assault by the legal definition (a threat paired with the present ability to follow through) is an acceptable outcome we must simply endure, but a victim fighting back by either calling 9/11 or through direct violence in the moment is not.

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I think we're not actually in any disagreement here, if you're being followed by someone who's shouting at you, it's absolutely defensible (no defense even needed, really) to call the police. All I am saying is that there's a line between that case and the one presented in the article.

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Well my point is that in practice, the line between that case and the one presented in the article isn't clear. You don't know when one is going to turn into the other. My position would be that if you reasonably feel fear from an aggressive unstable man, calling the police is at minimum a "defensible" response.

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Yeah. I personally call the cops at the point at which the dude starts following me, but I would never call it “indefensible” if a different woman drew the line at a different place.

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The problem is that there's a substantial grey area in terms of what constitutes a direct threat. The individual in this case, for example, stated that he didn't care if he went to prison for life. What conclusion would any reasonable person draw from such a statement?

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I agree with you that calling the cops would have been pointless but...

"The ugly reality is that as long as they aren't actually hurting or killing people, individuals like these can pretty much do this kind of thing as much as they want with no repercussions."

The danger is that these guys are pretty clearly looking for victims. What if you had been a 5'2" woman? What if you had been somebody who was drunk, or in a wheelchair, or otherwise incapacitated? What if you had been developmentally disabled and was far too trusting of strangers?

"I do know that my personal solution was to move into the suburbs."

Yup. But on a personal note I am filled with rage thinking of all the people I saw get beaten up and ripped off who don't have that luxury. They're still there.

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About a year ago, I was walking on a stretch that is a little shady, and someone who gave the vibe of being mentally unstable gave me one of those "fake punches" as he passed me. I mean, he pretended to punch me but deliberately (probably deliberately) didn't make contact. I walked away and shook it off and fortunately nothing more came of the encounter.

Maybe I should have called the cops? It's judgment call, but I can see the argument for saying I should have. He might do that to someone else and accidentally actually hit them. Or someone who is willing and able to might fight back and hurt him.

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Agree, super hard to make the right decision, especially if you're (e.g.) a small woman being yelled at by a large man.

I would have likewise concluded that violence is imminent in the case of Mr. Neely and agree that some measure of assault was justified. But I think it's pretty clear that *he did not deserve to die*. We can argue about other edge cases, but with respect to the homeless tunnel man FdB mentions: well enough outside of the grey area.

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But what does "deserve to die" mean in the first place? If somebody pulls a gun on a cop and is shot did he "deserve" it?

All the DA, the police review board, the union, etc. are concerned with in this case is whether or not the cop was justifiably in fear for his life/well being. It's the public that takes that a step further and adjudicates some killings as objectionable while others are not.

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This “deserve to die” language is out of hand. If someone (and here I’m referring more to situations with criminals) escalates a violent situation to the point that it results in their death, they may not “deserve” to die in the sense that we wouldn’t have, say, assigned the death penalty for armed robbery. But if a victim ended up killing them in self defense or a cop ended up shooting them because they wouldn’t give themselves up, it’s on the criminal for putting themselves in a situation where they got themselves killed. They could just have chosen not to break the law and victimize others. We don’t give burglars the death penalty but if someone shoots a home invader I blame the home invader 100%. I wouldn’t describe it as deserving death but I would say that criminal is responsible for putting himself in that situation.

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May 8, 2023·edited May 8, 2023

You keep using “assault” in the colloquial sense of moving forward to fight somebody. It’s conflating self-defense with aggression through blurry terminology.

Neely committed assault prior to be being engaged. He paired threats with the present ability to follow through with them, even without actually following through with them (if he flung a fist and connected it would be assault and battery, for instance). It is precisely because Neely was assaulting people that the Penny was not committing assault by strangling him. The offense in question is “excessive force”, which is also bad and probably illegal but is not assault.

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Yeah, sorry, not my intention to conflate them - I was just using the term in, as you say, its purely colloquial sense.

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I know I'd support both mace and concealed carry.

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It’s definitely reasonable to call the police in that situation. That was a plainly bad claim by Freddie, imho.

If you’re a female walking alone and you feel unsafe, trust your instincts, don’t suppress them. It is not your job, nor are you necessarily an expert, to assess whether the man in the example is harmless or not. The police can do that better than you can. It’s one of the reasons they are there.

Now, whether anybody actually responds to your call is an entirely different question. But there is no moral culpability in calling the police.

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Except if the person you feel is threatening is part of a supposedly “marginalized” group. Then you might get attacked as a racist or a transphobe or man hating privileged white woman with a name that dare not be spoken.

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And why does this only apply to a small woman? Why can't I as a large, strong, man, also feel that way? Just because I can beat them in a fight means it's ok? Fuck that. A rock or a shard of glass quickly changes everything.

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I’m 6’1”, 190 lbs and I haven’t been in a fist fight since I was 15 (and it wasn’t much of one). An aggro, mentally unstable guy is likely to kick my ass. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

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Also, “beat someone in a fight” and “become badly injured in a fight” are not mutually exclusive.

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Also, being able to beat them in a fight is of little comfort since it means you might accidentally kill them and then get changed with murder and become a national pariah. Once use of force is required it can easily go out of control. The left likes to pretend it’s so easy to modulate force--after the fact it’s always “oh he should have used just enough force to restrain but not to hurt or kill.” The fact is once you’re in a violent confrontation the only way to prevail is to use more force than the other guy and in real life that can go wrong easily. There’s not a heads up display with a convenient gauge you can check to make sure you’re just short of the red zone. Which is why when you leave people on the streets who are prone to provoking violence, it puts them in danger too. We are putting citizens in a situation where they’re not allowed to defend themselves and also setting up the mentally ill to get hurt or killed by people defending themselves, whom we will then demonize. Everyone loses with this terrible system.

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“oh he should have used just enough force to restrain but not to hurt or kill.”

This is how you can tell somebody's never actually been in a real fight.

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I have not been in a fight, but what you’re saying matches with my previous impression of how violence works from reading those who have been in fights. It’s why it’s not self-evident that Penny should be convicted of anything.

What we know seems reasonably consistent with Neely’s death being an unfortunate low-% chance resulting from Penny attempting to restrain him without doing anything egregious beyond that. (It also seems consistent with Penny doing something egregious in his attempt - my point is that we don’t yet know).

I *do* feel comfortable saying that it was reasonable for someone like Penny to attempt to restrain Neely in that circumstance.

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Absolutely! Someone menacing others, for whatever reason, is putting himself at risk, not just frightening others.

And it's always possible for a fight to end with two losers and no winners; both combatants injured so badly that they die. That's why sensible people do everything they can to avoid fights. Even if you "win," you can lose!

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This is really what gets me about the Derek Chauvin case.

He was restraining George Floyd the way he was trained to, and it seems completely reasonable to me that the numerically superior group of people threatening violence against him as he was doing so would have been a legitimate distraction from keeping track of Floyd's vitals... But also, why would you expect there to be a danger in a restraint you were taught to use, and had used many times before?

The simple reality that every use of force poses a risk, and the easiest way to avoid being injured or killed in a police encounter is to simply not make it require force to arrest you, seems lost on so many people.

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The last time the subject of Chauvin came up here I brought up my own experience of the last time I got into a fight with strangers on the street. It was recent enough that it was recorded on cel phone, because cel phones are now ubiquitous, and the footage was turned over to the police as part of their investigation which is how I got it.

During the course of the fight I was on top of somebody briefly before I rolled off of them and tried to relieve them of a weapon they were holding. When he wouldn't let go I punched him a few times in the side of the head. In my memory the time from when I kneeled on top of his chest to the time when I hit him is only a few seconds.

But when I reviewed the footage I was horrified to discover that it was closer to 45 seconds. The fight was clearly over because I was on top of him for at least half a minute. In my mind I landed my blows during the flow of the fight but the video clearly showed I punched a guy that had already given up.

When you are in a situation like that time slows down. What seems like seconds to you is in fact minutes. Chauvin was guilty not of applying an illegal hold but of applying it for too long. Was his body flooded with adrenaline distorting his awareness of time? And might the same question apply to the Neely death?

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If you don't mind me asking, what sort of legal consequences did you face?

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None. It started out as a one on one fight between a friend and the guy I ended up punching and escalated from there.

EDIT: I was definitely nervous when I first saw that video however, because even in the course of a fight you are not allowed to keep punching somebody after they've given up. A less friendly DA or police response--or a more serious injury to the guy I hit--and I could have been in trouble.

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Hell, I am a large tomcat, but I am still a cat, 14 pounds after a good meal.

My world is full of cat-eating monsters, dogs, unscrupulous purveyors of sausage-type products, etc. and I can't call the cops.

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Or course it is reasonable to call the police! Anyone who has been in a real fight, or seen one up close, knows how quickly things can turn bad. One sucker punch to the head-->victim falls to the floor-->gets stomped on the head and is gravely injured or dies. It can happen in the flash of an eye before anyone can jump in to protect the victim . It is not reasonable to ask citizens to tolerate this kind of danger in public places.

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'Anyone who has been in a real fight, or seen one up close, knows how quickly things can turn bad."

I wonder if part of the problem is that most people today have NOT seen a real fight up close, much less been in one, and they are therefore getting their ideas about fights from movies and TV, where characters routinely walk away unharmed from a pounding that in real life would have landed them in a morgue.

I've certainly have had some strange conversations in the past with people who simply don't accept the reality of how deadly a knife attack can be, or how quickly a person armed with a knife can close on you (the average person can cover a distance of 21 feet in less than 1.5 seconds - Google "Tueller Drill' if you don't believe me).

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I agree that saying "its not defensible to call the police" is...wrong.

This used to be a universally recognized *deescalation* tactic: "okay, you aren't hearing me say back off and leave me alone, so you can stop it right now or I'll get someone else to help. Me saying that didn't work? Okay, look, I'm on the phone right now, I'm talking to the 911 operator right now, are you sure --- SURE -- you want to continue this interaction?"

I've called the cops during street interactions, and for the interactions that *required* a call to the cops, that ended all of them. Sure, I got called a snitch bitch, but the man following me stopped doing it, and I walked my happy ass out of that situation, and then I told the 911 operator "okay, I'm safe, he's done, you don't need to send anyone."

I think mentally ill people are not *stupid*, and if the societal expectation is that the police must never be called until violence has already happened because the police will *always* escalate a situation, you are inadvertently normalizing (I hate the word, but!) a wide range of antisocial behavior.

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This feels like a needlessly vicious misreading to me. The example is calling the cops on someone not for harassment or violence but for rocking and talking to themselves. That isn't a reason to call the cops!

I agree with your broader point that a lot of the "this is life in New York, don't be a pussy" grandstanding - and hyper liberal "the mentally ill deserve to live unmolested at all moments in all circumstances because their journey is beautiful" etc etc - seem to trade on the assumption that women should just absorb a certain threshold of threats and violence as a tradeoff for living in this city. That's something I've been outright told, as a woman living here - don't want to be followed , spat on, screamed at, jerked off at, leered at, groped, etc.? Shit out of luck I guess.

The gendered reality of random public violence is important. The fact that Neely had violently attacked random women before is important. But I think in this case you're jumping the gun.

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May 8, 2023·edited May 8, 2023

Yeah I tried to revise to skirt that kind of reading. An aggressive man shouting at you (which the post does describe) is not the same as a man rocking and talking to himself. I don't think we really disagree, except maybe I view de-policing activism less charitably than you do.

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I’m a woman, and I practice a martial art. My instructors have told me repeatedly: do not use [martial art] outside the dojo unless you have absolutely no other choice. Run, hide, de-escalate if you can.

But if you have no other Choice, and you legitimately fear for your bodily integrity/life, then use what you have learned to *incapacitate* your opponent as quickly and efficiently as possible. And here’s the kicker: in real life, unlike in movies, there’s no obvious distinction between “incapacitate” vs. “permanently injure or kill.” There’s no “shoot the legs, not the torso” in [martial art].

When Freddie says not to call the police, that’s understandable, because so many unarmed people have been killed by police. But it also means that more people find themselves in a situation where they have to take their survival into their own hands, and that can end badly.

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I have a CCW permit, and I was taught the same thing. If I had my way, everyone granted a concealed carry permit would have to attend an official award ceremony featuring the awarding of the Golden Track Shoes and the Painting of the Belly Yellow. The only way to be sure of winning a fight is to avoid one! And if you can't leave, fight until you have the chance to flee.

There's no "shoot the legs, not the torso" with a gun, either, for two reasons: you're likely to miss if you attempt to shoot the person in the leg (not an acceptable outcome if your own life is on the line!), and you can easily KILL someone if you shoot them in the leg. People have bled to death from gunshot wounds that sever the femoral or popliteal artery. If you're not justified in actually killing your attacker, you're not justified in shooting him, because any gunshot can be fatal!

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Yes, anyone who ever says “why didn’t they just shoot him in the leg” is an ignorant and unserious person who can be dismissed out of hand because they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.

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It didn’t come across in my comment, but I was using “shoot the legs, not the torso” ironically. I know it doesn’t actually make sense, for the reasons you state.

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A human female of my acquaintance, a Tae Kwon Do black belt and a fairly large and athletic woman, said that pretty much any human male could beat her in a fight.

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Years and years and years ago, I almost did a very terrible thing. I was temporarily confused about what I was looking at and almost shot some children. Luckily, I figured out the deal before pulling the trigger, but it had me shook to see that there was apparently nothing inside me that would have stopped me.

It also shook me to realize that had I done it, I would have been practically immune to legal consequences. The law would have been on my side; turns out you can do all sorts of horrible things in a war zone as long as you can honestly say “Yeah that was an oopsie moment” afterwards.

I came to the conclusion that I was fundamentally a bad person. But also, I sort of became neurotic about analyzing morality and legality in murky contexts. Sort of a never-ending judgment on the self that was being projected onto others.

My judgment on the killing, as per my limited knowledge of the event, is as follows:

I don’t know if NY’s citizen’s arrest laws are the same, but in California you are still proactively held to be criminally and civilly liable for use of excessive force when subduing a criminal mid crime.

Like, cops are given an auto pass until there’s compelling reason to think they went overboard (like it or not, think it’s fair or not, think it’s good policy or not), but normal citizens are not granted that same preemptive approval and if they fuck a dude up more than they needed to it could get bad for them.

I do not know for certain whether circumstances required the choker to maintain the hold for 15 minutes. It’s not impossible that the victim was struggling so hard that he didn’t feel safe to let go; another interesting aspect of citizen’s arrest laws are that once you grab a dude you are legally required to hold him til the cops come, because if you tackle somebody and then let them go because it’s too much trouble then it’s just assault and battery. I don’t know if there were periods of squeezing and letting go and squeezing and letting go during the choke, because 15 minutes is a LONG ass time to go full pressure.

There’s a lot I don’t know and I’m not absolving nobody of nothing. Chewing through the details to see if the laws were actually broken is what the court is for, so the less wild rhetoric and obnoxious assumptions we fling around social media the fairer the judgment will end up being.

But I will say this- I’m one of the normies who you invoke. My crazy homeless people are in LA but it’s all the same game.

Every time I leave the house I got a work knife on me, because I suck at jiu jitsu and I’m old enough that my joints hurt and I got no wind anymore. There but for the grace of God go I.

Either solve the problem of people acting wild and violent in public spaces or you can expect these wild and violent events on a steady drip.

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Your article is brilliant, subtle, and compassionate. You are right; mental illness is bad. I am currently the CASA (court-appointed special advocate for a child) for a young boy who has a serious neurological condition. Some parts of his behavior may improve, but he will always have mental illness. It’s hard for his parents, teachers, and people like me to love and care for a child who is unpredictably violent, screams a good deal, and is miserable much of the time. If our society cannot face its fears of the mentally ill and provide concerned help, children (and adults) like the boy I support will always be in danger. And our community becomes more hardened and cruel. Thank you for writing such a powerful piece.

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I remember in the not so distant past that progressives believes in broad policy to improve people's lives, now it seems like the movement has shifted to telling people to accept that some people just are homeless, just are drug addicts, just are mentally ill and we need to just accept that. Instead of getting people out of tents and into housing, we should just accept tent cities. Instead of getting people who are addicted to a drug as horrible as fentanyl, we should just make sure people have narcan around them. Instead of giving the mentally ill all the care they need to live happy lives, we should just tolerate their behavior and suck it up. I am just so fucking done with it and I am sick that I was ever a part of it.

Oh and I was assaulted by a homeless man once, who took it upon himself to follow me for three blocks then stick his finger down the back of my pants and into my ass crack. I was basically terrified of any many walking behind me for months. Allow people to feel instinctually threatened but also don't allow them to be threatened.

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Great comment. The second to last sentence in your first paragraph gets to the heart of it all.

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That's the difference between a campaign and an actual administration. When the left was trying to seize control of all the major institutions in society they had to promote this idea that they were going to make those institutions run better. Now that they're in charge they're mostly looking for ways to manage expectations and create excuses for not actually doing their jobs.

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Out of curiosity, what specific members of the left have seized control of major institutions and are not actually doing their jobs in your opinion?

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The problem of homelessness seems to have exploded in a number of large cities recently. I would say it's gotten much worse since Trump. Who's in charge there?

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I don't think many on "the left" would consider an Eric Adams or a Lori Lightfoot to be a part of their coalition, which is why I'm asking. Hence the question. I find it helpful in these types of conversations to get specific.

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"The left" as a term represents a large and diverse coalition, everyone from AOC and Bernie Sanders to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

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yeah well, you know that's just like, your opinion man.

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It's weirdly selective too. Nobody on the left would ever say 'shitty healthcare is just how it is, if you want great healthcare move to Sweden'.

But apparently a shitty public transport system or a shitty police service is something we must just accept rather than reform.

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Excellent point. Let's hope we don't drift into "some people just can't afford insulin, don't shame them." or some shit.

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This is because those categories used to be understood as oppression but now are cast as identities. The moment "the homeless" because an identity politics group was the moment that their condition became normalized by the left

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IdPol is such poisonous nonsense. I have literally seen researchers harrassed and threatened with violence for working on a cure to congenital deafness. Why? Because being disabled is their identity now and seeking to correct it is "genocide.

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We have more pressing concerns than healthcare, education, treatment, infrastructure or any of that useless frippery.

At least we have *pronouns*.

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I mean that's most critical

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What concerns me is so much of the talk on the left is about funding. We need more funding to help people like Mr. Neely. Well, Mr. Neely had a bed in a treatment facility that was offered to him as a way to avoid jail. Jail he was sentenced to for beating and severely injuring an elderly woman. And after two weeks he walked out.

The taxpayers of NYC paid for his treatment ,we did what everyone is saying should be done. But he was allowed to leave and now he is dead.

For those opposed to mandatory treatment - what is your response?

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Freddie, your fear that normies will become convinced that "our movement doesn’t care about them and can’t be trusted to establish basic order" is undoubtedly true.

The supposedly unfortunate by-products of progressive policies in cities (e.g., when "normies" and young families are terrorized by the homeless mentally ill) are features, not bugs, to many American progressives. I find myself bemused that you seem to be puzzled as "your movement" consistently sidelines, ridicules, ignores, and stereotypes you when you try to apply your basic decency and moral intuition in arguments with deranged misanthropes who are just working out their daddy issues on Twitter.

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After having lived in Seattle for 8 years and Oregon for 42 years before Seattle, It seems obvious, at least to me, that progressive policies in these 2 cities have had negative outcomes.

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Don't you see the only possible explanation is that they simply haven't gone far enough. They need to ignore reality and double down on these concepts and policies. What do you believe, your lying eyes or what is intuitively obvious to self-righteous 19-year olds?

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Lol. True Progressivism hasn’t been tried?

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Wait, what kind of demented, deranged normie ever thought that today's progressives would give so much as the tip of a turd for them or their safety or concerns?

If anything, today's Wokemon champions at best view normies as props and supporting cast in an especially dreary morality play. At worst, they are actively hostile.

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Any normie that goofy or stupid ought to be involuntarily confined.

For, like the safety of the normie, not to mention that of the public.

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My fear is that normies, especially the well-off ones, are actually easily fooled by the wokies saying we just need to go further, and vote for the furthest left idiot no matter what because they think it’s good and don’t want anyone to think they’re Trumpy or something.

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>The supposedly unfortunate by-products of progressive policies in cities (e.g., when "normies" and young families are terrorized by the homeless mentally ill) are features, not bugs, to many American progressives

Curtis Yarvin theorizes that leftism is an act of solidarity between people who will rightfully be low-status under any system that rewards competence, attempting to overthrow that system in favor of one in which they stand a better chance of being rewarded with status. Under this theory, promoting the welfare of criminals, homeless drug addicts, and other publicly antisocial actors, at the expense of the welfare of prosocial, productive normies, is an important component of that solidarity.

At the time I read it, it seemed uncharitable to a movement that I know contains many well-meaning people, but in recent years it feels more and more like he was right.

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Turns out I misremembered, it wasn't Yarvin, and I had a shitload of trouble finding it because the guy's web site isn't there anymore. I had to dig into the history of a group chat where I had linked it to some friends and retrieve it from the Wayback Machine

Anyway here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230419084114/https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/

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I've never heard that theory and it is certainly compelling explanation for the priorities/behavior of some activists (e.g., their going apoplectic about the death of a single career criminal and complete lack of concern for the 1000x innocent victims of crime in black inner city neighborhoods). I find that social psych dynamics can often be illuminated by Paul Graham's "Four Quadrants of Conformism."

I suspect the type of progressive that you describe is in the far top-left quadrant (conventional-aggressive) quadrant, and supported by a mass of lower-left quadrant (conventional-passive) types who are often quite competent but refuse to push back for fear of being called the insult du jour.

Anyway, your point is compelling but I need to think on it more.

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I've seen this dynamic play out in technical fields which get invaded by people of low technical competence, who insist that everything should be reorganized according to social justice principles that coincidentally would put them and their friends in charge. They can get surprisingly far through a combination of vicious bullying and spouting platitudes about "empathy" and "inclusion" that nobody could be seen to disagree with.

I don't think this really has anything to do with leftism as I or Freddie understand the term, but we may be losing that battle of definition.

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FWIW if you actually watch the video it's possible to make the argument that the intent was just to restrain Neely rather than harm him. There are multiple people involved in restraining him and after he stops struggling they let him go and roll him onto his side so that he doesn't aspirate his own vomit.

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Excellent piece. It is essential that we shed the delusion of mental illness as "just different", "harmless", and stop romanticizing it.

Severe mental illness is, in my opinion, a curse; full stop.

Some people, either for their whole lives or a portion of their lives, simply cannot function independently for all kinds of reasons, and need help. Thinking otherwise is an extreme form of individualism that just is not realistic and doesn't appreciate human nature.

I don't know what will or should happen to Neely's killer, although I think I suspect I would be more lenient on him than Freddie...I'm not sure to be honest. The whole thing is terrible. But I can say that his actions were at least fairly understandable given the breakdown of basic law enforcement. If this kind of thing keeps happening, eventually ordinary people will, for better or (usually) worse, start taking matters into their own hands. People shouldn't need to fear for their safety on public transit.

Getting even a few hundred very ill people off the streets in a big city could really change the quality of living for a place.

All things considered I prefer haloperidol to headlocks and risperdone to restraints.

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Freddie has written intimately and extensively about the new social narratives claiming that mental illness is just some fun or harmless personality quirk.

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Yes, and it is much needed. Especially given what he has disclosed about his own struggles. I admire his work immensely despite having some significant political disagreements.

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what's the evidence of an actual breakdown in law enforcement in NYC?

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The large rise in violent and property crime in the US as a whole over the last few years is undoubtedly multivariate but it seems like a safe bet that problems with law enforcement are contributing to the problem.

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you'll have to prove to me that there was a large rise in violent and property crime in the US first. I'm not saying it's not possible but in DC people think it's true when it's not. Then we can discuss NYC specifically and law enforcement on the subway and how it's changed in a way that might result in this incident.

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Look at the homicide rate from 2019 to the present day. The jump from 2019 to 2020 was the single largest year on year rise in modern recorded history.

Keep in mind that homicide rates in the US peaked in 1992 and then declined thereafter. The rise in rates of the last few years has undone decades of progress. Currently the national rate is back up to what it was in 1996.

As for DC in 2012 there were only 88 homicides. In both 2021 and 2022 that number was over 200.

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homicides are only one type of violent crime and I'd argue the one people should be least concerned about because the chances of being murdered by a stranger are incredibly low (although not nonexistent as we see in the case of Mr. Neely)

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I chose homicides because they are the gold standard for crime reporting. There are plenty of factors that may impact reporting for crimes like shoplifting. For example, if the police never bother to show up the public may be disincentivized to make a report in the first place.

On the other hand it is far more difficult to ignore a body.

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Conveniently murder is one of the few crimes that's really hard to hide in stats (you can still shave off a few per year) which is why it's such an important stat but please pretend that things are actually better. I don't believe it, no one else believes it, and I suspect you don't really believe it but it makes you feel morally superior to ignore reality for ideology. So fine, murder isn't a big deal and is just part and parcel of living in a major city.

Regarding this specific incident, a bunch of dummies didn't want long term involuntary psych care back in the 80s or so (this one was bipartisan), then more recently a bunch of dummies wanted to "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police" (you can try and weasel word this that somehow defund means something different if you want), and now we're at the final stage and we finally have that community policing that everyone wanted but for some reason everyone is upset about it.

I'll level with you I'd have preferred Neely to have been locked up in an asylum to get the treatment he needed, I would have settled for him being kept from hurting regular people had they had kept him in prison, but if I'm forced to choose between living in a society with the three men that subdued him or Neely going around violently assaulting people as he had previously done and was threatening to do immediately prior to his death then it's a no-brainer. I'm willing to accept the deaths of some number of violent criminals at the hands of civilians since we don't want the government to keep them from hurting people.

This is what you choose when you want government to abdicate one of their few essential functions. Congratulations you won, enjoy the spoils of victory.

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"The rise in rates of the last few years has undone decades of progress."

Crime statistics from the NYPD show that overall violent crime in the city remains 70% lower than '92: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cs-en-us-city.pdf these stats are definitely worse compared to 2014-2016 but still pale in comparison to the level of violence we saw in NYC between 1990 - 1992.

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NYC is one example. But how about Chicago, Philadelphia or Baltimore?

Plus if you read my comment you'll see that I'm clearly talking about the national rate.

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Skyrocketing crime rates, police officers retiring in droves, DA publicly stating he does not intend to prosecute certain crimes and immediately releasing those that are arrested?

Those all seem to relate to law enforcement.

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Romanticism is a a luxury belief, a luxury belief par excellence.

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This is really good and nuanced. It's so tempting to be like, "Eyeroll. If you you're scared of the city move to the suburbs." Of course it's frightening sometimes. Logically you know it's probably fine, emotionally/physically you're going to go into fight / flight, while having to sit still, which is a really uncomfortable feeling. I think something useful might be some kind of public service campaign by mental health professionals that deal with homeless people about what to actually do in a situation like that.

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What we should do is call 911 so the men in white coats can come and haul him off to a state mental hospital where he can get the long term care he needs in a secure locked facility.

When did the liberal default become these people should be left to die on the street rather than in the hospital getting the long term care and treatment they so desperately kneed?

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Yikes. Isn't it also possible that he was understandably upset because he was hungry, thirsty, and lonely? I'm not trying to deify him but I've been interviewing homeless people in New York for a story and they're all basically like, "That could have been me." Let's not diagnose people in the comments of a substack.

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At the end of the day I don't care if somebody is sitting in a pile of their own urine and feces because they are in the midst of a psychotic episode or if they are sitting in a pile of their own urine and feces because they just put a spike into their veins.

Letting somebody live like that is killing them slowly. They may not qualify for involuntary confinement due to the "imminent harm" clause but I think the lesson of the last 40 years of the homeless epidemic is that is far too weak a standard.

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I mean... people also do that because the shelters are terrifying and disgusting. Let's see ... what if we built shelters that aren't terrifying and disgusting?

Can we please stop diagnosing people in the comments of a substack? I'm not against the idea of involuntary confinement for people with severe mental illness but also you can't be like, "this person looks homeless let's put them in a mental hospital."

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I think the conditions of the shelters are irrelevant. Isn't the issue at hand what Mayor Adams is proposing in terms of making it a lot easier to commit somebody against their will?

Neely walked away from the halfway house where he was supposed to be confined to finish out his prison sentence.

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The condition of the shelters can't be irrelevant. Even the more normal homeless guys I know won't go there, even if they're not afraid of violence or rape, because their stuff WILL get stolen. Even a locker for their stuff would be an inducement to sleep in a loud, obnoxious shelter rather than on the street on top of all their stuff.

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It's hard not to read this as "yelling at random people on the subway is a totally understandable reaction to being hungry, or thirsty, or lonely", which is...not the case. It's antisocial behavior and to say otherwise kind of cuts against the point of the article. There are any number of charities in NYC that could have solved any of those problems, and like as not Mr. Neely was familiar with them: it's just that he was badly mentally ill, so much so that he could not make use of the resources which were available to him to solve his ostensible problems, and took to harassing people on the subway instead. I think FdB's whole point here is that we should a) not minimize the level of disruption and discomfort caused to the (generally, though they did choose to live in NYC, so no guarantees) mentally hale subway riders, and b) also not overreact and respond with excessive force, i.e., kill the man.

In the case of repeated offenses of this nature, involuntary commitment is basically the only answer if you want to have functioning public spaces.

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Are you kidding me? How about if you spend exactly one day dirty, hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, maybe you're going through withdrawal, the cops hassle you, you have to pee on the street because as a society we've decided against public bathrooms, and anytime you try to engage with someone they make a disgusted face and ignore you and move away. I'm not downplaying his anti-social behavior. I don't like being yelled at! But I've reported on homelessness for like 15 years and I can certify that LESS compassion is not a solution.

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Re: both this and the other side of the thread with @Slaw, involuntary commitment in this case *is* compassion. Yes, 100%, shelters and inpatient facilities aren't top quality, we can improve those. But that needs to be done alongside the acknowledgement that the latter facilities are *necessary* and that the only long-term-viable solution for some people (please note that I am not saying *all* homeless fall into this category) is confinement. Otherwise you are, as Slaw says, just killing them slowly, and by your pity without true compassion, dooming them to a miserable life prior to that death.

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It's not about not being top quality. It's more like I've talked to people who'd rather sleep outside in the middle of winter because they describe men's shelters as "like Rikers except people have weapons." I asked a woman I knew why she didn't just go to a shelter and she matter of factly told me "Because I don't want to get raped anymore." Look, this idea that street homeless people are *just* there because of housing prices or whatever is absurd. People who have their shit together but just got evicted almost always have some option that's not the street. If you're sleeping on a gross NYC sidewalk you have problems. I *do* think tho that while involuntary insitutionalization should be part of the conversation, it should *not* be the go-to

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Tana,

He had a bed in a long term care facility where he could be taken care of and not be hungry or thirsty. He walked out.

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Actually, the closing of state mental institutions was not a liberal idea; itwas a bipartisan idea for which then-Governor Ronald Reagan took the lead in California in the 1960s.

The problem with state mental institutions was that they had traditionally been, and generally still were, hell holes that functioned more to segregate severely mentally ill people than to treat them. It is that aspect (which Freddie notes only in passing (". . . they don’t want to have to be around the other patients. The erratic behavior, the screaming, the general unpleasantness") that still makes people hesitate to support expanding involuntary commitment. I'd like to think conservatives would feel reluctant to support it too. That doesn't mean we shouldn't expand involuntary commitment, but it's a sure sign that we understand that doing it ethically and humanely would cost a great deal of public money, and there's not likely to be much public support for that.

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The question is whether the alternative--leaving the mentally ill to the streets and the jails--is an even worse "solution".

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In individual cases right now that may indeed be the question, Slaw. But long-term, mental illness is not going away and is more likely to rise as ordinary society is increasingly fragmented by technology and the fraying of traditional civil networks. Framing the question as a choice among these very bad alternatives offers no livable solution.

We have a concatentation of interrelated problems: mental illness, homelessness, addiction. The latter two have exploded over the past 50 years and exacerbate the social effects of mental illness. We shut state mental institutions just as these trends were beginning so now we have low and poor quality capacity to deal with these issues.

The original federal model would have poured support into "community health centers" to provide adequate care to deinstitutionalized patients and their successors. That legislation was undone in 1981 (who knows how adequate it would have been?) and since we've lost track of the history of the problem we're left cluelessly asking the wrong question. . . . But you're right: until we start taking long, expensive action to correct the underlying problems we've looked away from for decades, your question is the one we're asking.

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1. There is an argument that deinstitutionalization is a causative factor behind the massive rise in street homelessness.

2. The question now is whether the huge amount of money being spent on homelessness is misdirected. Is it plausible that involuntary commitment is underutilized? If so does it make sense to take some of the money going to shelter beds and try to build new asylums?

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Slaw, deinstitutionalization occurred primarily in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There was some immediate impact on street homelessness. But the acute subsequent rise has been fed by two other major factors I'm aware of: growing affordable housing shortages in many urban and semi-urban areas, and a sharp increase in addiction (emphasis on meth, then Rx opioids, then fentanyl).

The "huge" amount of money spent on homelessness now addresses all of these issues: mental illness, housing unaffordability, addiction. But the underlying causes are very different. If you took some of that money to build and staff new mental institutions (which are extremely costly), you'd be left with that much less to address issues of addiction and housing unaffordability, not to mention the many homeless with mental illness that does not rise to any level for which institutionalization is appropriate (but which may keep people out of work and too poor to afford rent).

So I don't really think the way you've framed the question is optimal. I certainly agree we need to figure out better ways to target money and monitor its effectiveness. But most of all, I think we need to grant that what seems like "huge" public and private outlays are, in fact, absolutely inadequate in size to turn this compound problem around. Someday I think we're going to look back and say that what we now call "huge" was, in fact, "paltry," if our intent was to set us on a path to solve the problem.

We dug ourselves a deep hole for 40-50 years by failing to prioritize a growing problem. That saved us a lot of money (which is why the 1981 community health bill was repealed almost immediately after passage), but left us a far deeper mess. If we decide to actually get serious about paying the necessary bill it's going to cost many times more now.

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It's my (limited) understanding that the Reagan administration was under pressure by the ACLU, which advocated against involuntary confinement on civil libertarian grounds. Which raises an important point: involuntary confinement for reasons other than criminality is not a trivial legal matter in the US, for very good reason; and if it must be done, it would need to be administered very carefully, in a strictly limited way, by trustworthy parties. (Ha ha.) Freddie and others seem quick to invoke commitment as a solution, and perhaps it is, but I don't recall seeing consideration of this issue.

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The major federal initiative for closing institutions was made by the Carter administration, under which the community health center bill was adopted (late 1980). I can certainly see the ACLU taking the stance you describe: that is their job. Involuntary commitment obviously deprives individuals of civil liberties, and it's not the ACLU's role to advocate for that.

Reagan's role in closing institutions occurred during his time as governor (1967). The timing was correlated with a sharp increase in prosecutions related to mental illness in the years immediately following. Deinstitutionalization was initiated along with a plan for community health centers to mitigate such effects, but that plan was not carried out.

Reagan's other impact was as president: in 1981 he demanded that Congress nullify the previous year's legislation funding community health centers.

I can't imagine that anyone responsible would not be aware of the risks of potential abuse involved with authorizing broad involuntary commitment. In the past, state-run (and many private) insane asylums were places to quarantine/warehouse people so others could live more comfortably, not primarily for treatment purposes. I assume many people likely to support involuntary institutionalization are primarily motivated by the urge to quarantine, and use the treatment aspect as a rationalization. With this in mind, perhaps the question to ask is: How much are we willing to pay to make involuntary institutionalization ethically justified?

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Great article as always. My only confusion is that I cannot quite tell if you use language (“execution,” “murder”) that is both legally defined and emotionally charged, because you think that (a) these terms are justified in the particulars of the brown and Neely deaths, based on a specific weighing of the available evidence, or (b) because you think that such incidents -- any time anyone uses intentionally deadly force (brown) or sufficient physical force that it can unintentionally result in death (neely, at least based on current appearances) -- are always and everywhere morally equivalent to murder/execution.

It kind of seems like (b) to me, but I am not totally sure that’s the correct read.

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Full disclosure: I am in (what feels like) the tiny minority of Americans who does not believe that there is currently enough public evidence to conclude whether or not Penny’s actions were either lawful/unlawful or morally correct/incorrect.

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I'm with you in this (although I have admittedly not dug into what evidence there is, so it's possible I'm missing something). I remain open to the possibility that a) Penny was "looking for an excuse" to get into a fight, b) Neely was actively doing something that justified his being restrained, or c) the situation didn't justify the use of force but Penny somehow misread the situation as calling for it. I'm also open to the possibility that Penny intentionally used a chokehold thst could or would kill the guy or that, Penny did so not realizing the hazard, either from lack of knowledge or not thinking(its hard to think straight in a fight). Of course it could be somewhere in between these options.

I'm not sure that anyone knows the answer to these questions, even Penny. People are very quick to assume what he must have known or been thinking (e.g. of course all former marines know not to use this chokehold, so he must have intended to kill the guy).

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Due to OConnor vs Donaldson (74) involuntary care for mental illness in this country has required a prediction of “dangerousness” that no mortal professional can offer in good faith. Until we’re willing to change commitment laws we’ll be stuck in the same place.

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