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In this NYT article, race isn't mentioned, so I assumed it was either a black-on-black or black-on-white killing, but apparently it was white-on-black! It's unusual for the NYT to not mention race in such a situation. Could it be that they're finally downplaying all races in their
crime reporting, and not just the ones that it's offensive to speak negatively about? That sounds too good to be true, but I want to believe.
Seems like at least two guys, maybe three restraining the one dude. https://twitter.com/_barringtonii/status/1653941898023665665
Everyones only focusing on that shot with just the marine and the guy, probably taken later than the above pic
Not everyone, Black Lives Matter thinks all three should be prosecuted. Because the mentally ill homeless are ordinary people's social and moral superiors and raising a hand against them, regardless of provocation, is verboten -- and black homeless especially so, of course.
If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?
The killing is only tangential, and likely accidental. If someone is presenting a credible threat of violence, is it right to physically restrain that person, even if the restraint carries a chance of death?
It is almost impossible to have a physical altercation with a 0% chance of lethal outcomes. Punches kill people all the time. Seemingly non-lethal chokes (like a blood choke that you release when struggle stops, which is what the video seems to show) always carry a risk.
The marine does not snap his neck or do any other obvious action expressing intent to kill. So is he justified in doing any physical restraint?
It depends on exactly what was going on in the car and how potentially lethal that choke hold is. The guy was not assaulting anyone he was reportedly throwing trash around. If he's throwing plastic bags and paper then unless you're extremely confident you can safely restrain him you probably shouldn't do something precisely because the risk of violence for escalation is not worth preventing someone from having harmless trash thrown at them. If he's throwing glass bottles or heavy objects pointedly at people then restraining him seems justified to prevent harm. I don't know what the typical risk of death with that chokehold is. If it's really easy to kill someone if you hold slightly too long and anyone taught that hold would know that then his use of force was clearly disproportionate. If it's a one in a million chance then he's probably not.
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I'd really like to discuss this sentiment. I see this kind of hyperbolic statement expressed all the time, often in the form of "There shouldn't be a death penalty for X" or "Doing X doesn't mean they deserve death". Where action X provoked response P which lead to the person's death.
If this isn't just a rhetorical sleight of hand, I really don't get it.
Let's say somebody decides to take a stroll on the Autobahn. I approach him at 200 km/h. Instead of swerving off the road, likely killing me and my passengers, I instead hit the brakes, and subsequently, him. He dies. Would people now come out and say "There shouldn't be a death penalty for people strolling on the Autobahn" or "Taking a stroll doesn't mean he deserves death". No, but he risks justifiable reactions by others that could lead to his demise.
What kind of logic is this?
It's not rhetorical sleight of hand, it's a disagreement about the burden to respond proportionally that falls on people who are provoked.
The logic is that you're only allowed to use necessary and proportional force in self defense. If someone else throws the first punch in a bar fight you can fight back and claim self defense, but if you start stomping on their unconscious body it's clearly not necessary. If someone throws an empty beer can at your head and you pull out a gun and shoot them that's not proportional.
The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.
Your Autobahn example is not comparable because it reduces the whole thing to one moment where there's a life or death choice comparable to justified self defense. The people in the subway car had other choices, they could have endured having trash thrown at them, the man could have used a less dangerous hold, he could have stopped squeezing slightly sooner.
I live in California, I am annoyed regularly by a particular homeless man who lives near where I work and I have had fantasies of doing violence to him. I think it will be tragic if the guy who inadvertently killed him spends significant time in jail. But I don't think it would be good to have a legal code that says you can choke someone out if they throw trash at you and if you happen to do it a bit too long and they die well then there's no consequences.
The Left's position in isolation isn't the biggest issue. Although I can argue that it's vastly underestimating how messy actual violence is to think you can easily damn someone for imperfect defense.
The issue is that position as part of a package of other positions that make self-defense more necessary - like weakening the ability to contain segments of the population that disproportionately create these safety concerns by trying to make the prison system "fairer" (i.e. less punitive).
Yeah, I think the second paragraph is a big part of it. If once every now and then a homeless man threw trash at people on a subway, then endure it and wait for the police to show up is pretty tolerable. If they're doing it constantly and the police do nothing then the temptation to take matters into your own hands is quite high. Effective policing is an important public service the state needs to provide.
I think the Left has worked itself into a shoot - to use wrestling lingo - on cops being if not useless or outright harmful, at least vastly overdeployed as a solution to problems.
I suppose I can see that argument for a high trust, low crime society. I just don't know how it maps to the US.
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Ah, now I think we are getting closer. I have several disagreements. Note that I am not making a legal argument but a moral one.
First, I find it incredibly weird to demand what amounts to infinite restraint and control from the attacked, but place zero accountability on the attacker.
Second, I think that disproportionate response is an acceptable deterrent for provocation. In the absence of competent authorities who step in (and this is evidently not the case when it comes to the NYC subway), it might be the only deterrent. This has boundaries of course, and there is such a thing as overdoing it.
Third, on the matter of alternative choices: I have seen this argument when it came to both pedestrians and drivers being attacked by mobs. Paraphrased: It is better to take a beating than killing someone. Again, this places infinite responsibility at the feet of the attacked, and absolves the attackers from essentially all agency. They are seen as holy children, the attacked as omnipotent angels.
Fourth, on enduring abuse: No. No, they shouldn't endure the abuse. I was bullied and beaten up for years. Nobody helped. It only stopped when, one recess, I took a very large stick and beat my attacker blue. This could have seriously injured him. He would have deserved it.
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This case might be different from the usual 'Is it really ethical to MURDER* someone just for being poor? (*murder: n. not provide $100k worth of state of the art medical treatment to prolong someone's life by a few months)'.
If you haven't put yourself in danger or created a situation where self-defense is justified or ..., nobody else has the right to intentionally or negligently cause your death. If a homeless guy is screaming at someone or throwing hamburger wrappers at someone, you can't take out a gun and shoot them. And you can't choke the homeless guy out and 'accidentally' kill them. (And if you could, that'd be a way to get away with intentionally killing them!).
If this guy was actively physically attacking someone or something similar, restraining the person could be justified, and then the killing would - maybe still be prosecutable (as minor fights happen a lot more than killings, and escalating them to killings can still be bad), but maybe not be. But if the guy was just being disruptive or screaming, the legal system shouldn't (according to today's ethics) allow that to escalate to a killing - it's disproportionate, it takes the 'monopoly over violence' away from the state and its adversarial legal system, etc.
One response is "the state isn't dealing with this guy and he was a danger, so it's good a vigilante dealt with him". Another response is "this guy doesn't contribute to society or his own life, and shouldn't be alive anyway". I'm sympathetic, but generally allowing random killings of people you judge in the moment to be bad has spillover effects outside cleaning out undesirables.
I get you, but these people aren't making a legal argument or an argument based on rule utilitarianism. They are making either a deontological argument or a virtue ethics argument that boils down to "always take it on the chin". Because any response whatsoever contains the possibility of escalation and that might get somebody killed in the end. Curiosly, it completely strips the attacker of agency and places all the responsibility on part of the bullied.
"The wiser head gives in" was the principle I was raised with. It took a lot of beatings for me to realise that the only way to stop a bully is to fight back. There seem to be people who never had to make that experience.
Turning the other cheek might work for sons of gods but it creates terrible incentive structures for everybody else.
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IMHO it's a participation trophy award mentality. These people live in such insulated bubbles where base reality has so little pull on them, they seem to honestly believe there is no such thing as cause and effect. Consequences are things laboriously pondered by a dense bureaucracy such that the proper outcome they learned about in college comes about. Any deviation from that, even if the direct result of Newtonian physics, is immoral and must be prosecuted.
I think it's their general condescending attitude towards black people and criminals and all the other "oppressed" and shunned and weak things whose agency is ignored in favor of blaming Vast Impersonal Forces - as Michael Brooks used to say "be kind to people, ruthless to systems".
Well VIFs don't threaten to stab you in the subway, crazy people do. So people defending themselves will sometimes fall afoul of that suggestion.
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This rings rather true to me and also explains the insistence of the PMC that outcome disparities must(!) never have anything to do with input differences.
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This article says he hadn't assaulted anyone. Other articles claim he "threw garbage at commuters".
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