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Saying that society should recognize that these people are garbage and not give a damn about them is a position that can only be taken if one is very selective about whom this categorization refers to, and this selectivity is why activists protest and call opinions such as yours inherently racist, or classist, or whatever. When Mr. Penny decided to put Mr. Neely in a chokehold, his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Giving him a free pass on this seems reasonable enough, but only because we have the additional context that this was a black, homeless, schizo, ne'er do well. Suppose, on the other hand, a white, middle-class, student at a prestigious university (possibly your son) got drunk and started making a scene on public transit. A group of black passengers were made uncomfortable by his behavior and the young man died after on of these passengers put him in a choke hold. When I was in my early 20s being drunk, loud, and obnoxious on public transit was a regular occurrence, as we could go to the club in the city on 50 cent drink night without having to drive or park. Just a few years ago a friend of mine went into a similar rant about Taco Bell on the train back to the hotel after the 2018 ACC Championship Game in Charlotte. And if the counterargument is that Neely was obviously a dangerous hobo then that just confirms the suspicions of all the social justice do-gooders that you expect the rules to be different for certain people, and we're supposed to expect people to be able to tell the difference based on the way a guy's dressed or whether we think he's mentally ill or homeless or, mast damningly, whether he's white.
I remember a similar storyline back when black guys getting shot by cops was in the news more often, and most of the conservatives I know kept pointing out that one has an obligation to obey when a police officer tells you to do something. As a guy in his '30s this seemed reasonable, until I looked back at my own life and realized that by these people's standards I'd have been dead a long time ago. Yes, I agree generally with the argument that if a police officer decides to arrest you then what happens afterward happens on his terms, not yours, and if you have a problem with that you can bring it up in court. On the other hand, any teenager who is told to stop by police is going to start running. I wasn't a bad kid by a long-shot—I only got two write-ups in four years of high school, and one was for a class cut—but I still liked to occasionally indulge in the kind of mischief kids indulge in, like drinking in woods of indeterminate ownership or stealing pumpkins from farm fields and shit like that, and this would sometimes end with a fat, black cop chasing a bunch of spry kids through fields and woods. I once got away because I crawled under a fence that the guy couldn't fit under. If we took these statements about a duty of compliance to their logical conclusion, the officer had every right to shoot me. After all, I had clearly committed a crime, ignored his orders and fled. And it was clear that he wasn't going to catch me unless he could stop me from a distance. And this was for the same type of "quality of life" shit a lot of law and order types are complaining about. How would you like it if property you paid for was being used without permission by people on quads and dirt bikes during the day, cutting trails you don't want, contributing to erosion, and scaring away huntable animals, and then at night the same kids would come back and build fires and leve beer cans and fast food wrappers everywhere? People in rural areas have gotten in trouble for putting up tripwires and spike strips and other kinds of booby traps to keep people from trespassing, and while there's some pushback it's understandable that parents get pissed when criminal trespass results in serious premeditated injury. If we develop standards they have to apply to everybody, and few people realize what the implications of this would be.
The easiest solution here, as far as I can tell, is to have different legal regimes for rural life vs. urban life. Let urban life be for the bug-man law-and-order types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense legal regime, and for the rowdy teenagers and drunkards who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the rural areas where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle. (I don’t mean barbarian in a negative way, but simply to draw a contrast between that ethos and the cosmopolitan lifestyle I prefer.)
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life that would have resulted in me being killed or severely punished under the type of legal regime I’m advocating. I’ve been drunk and stupid before, but never in a way that would cause strangers to feel threatened by me; maybe that’s just because I’m small and not physically-imposing, so my drunk behavior doesn’t present as menacing even if I’m performing the same actions as you and your friends did.
I do have the “privilege” of being white and middle-class-presenting, meaning that people are far less likely to assume the worst of me than they are of someone who looks and acts like Jordan Neely; fortunately, that disparity in perception is justified by statistical reality. People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
The legal system was perfectly fine with letting Neely (and many similarly situated) continue his one man reign of terror. Fix that, and then maybe it'll have the legitimacy to judge the Marine.
A "reign of terror"? Are you deliberately taking the piss? He's not Jack the Ripper (the marine, however, did kill someone).
Yeah, "public nuisance crimes" are not what I would call a "reign of terror." No one knew who this guy was until he was killed. An open container of alcohol in public? Turnstile hopping? This forum will get incensed over the fact the FBI uses loopholes and process crimes to punish politicians and rich celebrities who lied to said FBI, and then turn around and seriously claim that these are very legitimate crimes that prove Neely was dangerous and it was a massive failure of law and order for him to still be on the streets. I haven't found any reference to kidnapping; the only serious or violent crimes I've seen reference to are 4 assaults (over 8 years) and without knowing more about those cases, it's wildly irresponsible to jump straight from "arrested" to "definitely guilty." Like, it's entirely possible that he did commit those crimes, and others, and the DA just let him go out of misplaced sympathy. It's also possible he got into altercations with other mentally ill homeless but it's unclear who was at fault. Or that he was misidentified, or was the victim of a false accusation for being weird and noisy in public (it's totally impossible that someone could overreact to him dancing and being loud on the subway, right? that would definitely never happen?).
I think it's highly unlikely he's never committed any legitimate crime, but spouting a number like "42 arrests" is actively misleading and "reign of terror" is a frankly embarrassing level of unsupported, pearl-clutching propaganda.
And it's even possible the veteran had mind-reading powers to get any of this information!
You're engaged in mockery, but when the veteran put him in that chokehold, he didn't even know any of this. Literally the only information he had was what he observed, Neely walking back and forth and angrily ranting. This was apparently sufficient to put him in a chokehold for, what, 10 minutes? 15? You can see some of the video here; Neely is barely responsive and the restraint continues. Like, sure, be skeptical of claims that he was as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. But also be skeptical of claims that he spent all his time terrorizing the populace and execution was the only solution.
There's a lot of subway weirdos. I suspect the crime rate would be much higher than it actually is if every subway weirdo regularly committed crimes.
What a sad and boring society it would be if we executed all weirdos.
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