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Notes -
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/us/jordan-neely-daniel-penny-new-york-subway-death-charge/index.html
Daniel Penny, a 24-year old Marine, turned himself to police after being charged with 2nd degree manslaughter for the killing of Jordan Neely. It looks like I was initially wrong. I said that drugs may have played a role given that the original NYTs story, which I replied to, from a week ago said that Neely had been choked for only 2-3 minutes and released and was unresponsive. The updated story is that he was choked out for much longer, as long as 15 minutes, which would have def. been lethal, and the video is pretty bad.
So retract my original argument in which I posit drugs played a role. This is why you should always wait until you have all the information before forming an opinion. I didn't think the story would blow up like it did. I just assumed it was some random altercation. The video is why it went so viral. I think Penny is not without some guilt here. Keeping someone in a choke for so long is going to end in death. It's likely Neely was not rendered unconscious near-instantly from blood loss to the brain, such as from a sleeper hold as I assumed from the original story (I assumed Penny put Neely in a hold, and then Neely went limp in 20-30 seconds and did not come back), but far worse, had been suffocated to death, like being held underwater because his windpipe was restricted. That's why he was flailing around. It would have been more humane had Penny just shot him although that would have carried a worse charge.
A second degree manslaughter conviction is not that bad. only max 15 years for killing someone, and with parole Penny may only spend 5 years, which is a pretty lenient sentence for killing a guy, and not even in self defense or accident. By comparison, Ross Ulbricht faces multiple life sentences despite not killing anyone. I cannot say Penny is not without some blame in this matter. But In Penny's defense, the police took too long to come, and despite Marine training he and his accomplices didn't know what else to do.
I’m surprised no-one mentioned the way this incident has been covered on the /r/NYC subreddit. Given that it’s a deep blue city and Reddit is a deep blue site, you’d think everyone would be up in arms about Neely’s death. But the dominant mood is dramatically more pro-Penny than here, for heaven’s sake. Multiple posters saying that he did what needed to be done, people have a right not to be hassled by psychopaths on their commute, even some highly upvoted comments calling out progressivism by name as the ideology that created this problem. I’m utterly bemused and perplexed. Am I missing something?
On a related note, if Trump is canny, he’ll make his candidacy about law and order this time. The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue. And while I don’t have good polling on the issue, my sense from reading the city subs on Reddit is that crime is creeping up voters’ list of priorities. Oh, and as an issue it’s less alienating than immigration for many Latino voters, while being able to be plausibly connected to immigration with Trump’s base (“I’ve been gone four years and we have chaos in the streets of our cities, chaos on the border”).
It’s really simple- if you live in NYC and use public transit you get hassled or violently threatened by people like Neely fairly regularly (not every day but often enough).
It’s not pleasant and for men it’s emasculating and for women frightening.
Hm. In the 11 years I have lived in NYC, I have taken the subway every day, except during the early days of COVID, but I can't recall every being being harassed or verbally threatened by homeless people. Nor do I recall friends complaining about it. I have certainly had my senses assaulted by smelly homeless guys once in a while, but that's it.
I have lived in Manhattan for close to ten years now, taken the subway some unknown thousands of times, and I see this quite regularly. Just a couple of weeks ago I was in a 2 train that was packed like sardines, and I was standing near a couple of women who were doing their best to ignore the drunk hissing in their ears right behind them (this guy actually had a bottle of something and was taking swigs from it). I've never been assaulted myself, but that's probably because I'm a man. I know women who have been assaulted or harassed on the subway - one of my paralegals was stalked by a random vagrant, and had to get out before her stop and run from the station.
Aesthetically what bothers me isn't just the smell, it's the fact that an astonishing number of these people often have open, suppurating wounds that they don't even seem perturbed by. I vividly recall this morbidly obese woman sprawling herself out over a whole set of seats on the train to Astoria one day, and her leg was hideously swollen and visibly rotting. She was too stoned to care.
Yeah, I meant to say that I am rarely on the train at times when people are returning from bars drunk, and the last time I was on the train at 3 am some drunk kid threw up on the floor. But OTOH, I have never heard of anyone being run over by a drunk driver on the subway.
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