In A New York Minute, Everything Can Change

Jordan Neely didn't die because he was black or mentally ill. He died as a consequence of New York City public policy.

The death of Jordan Neely was a tragedy, but was it “needless” as it is being cast?

To blame Daniel Penny for taking the risk of protecting himself and his fellow subway denizens is simply creating a scapegoat for a government’s criminal permissiveness. Invariably the blame seems to fall to the person forced to act by circumstances beyond his or her control and to the larger society for not giving the government enough money for mental health services.

But what about New York’s revolving door “justice system”, one that features “bail reform” (which is just a euphemism for the same style of catch and release program as we see at the border)? What about the fact that “mental illness” has become an excuse to do nothing while blaming people who have nothing to do with the event in question? What about massive government waste for Diversity, Inclusion and Equity efforts when that money could be going to mental health support? What about the families of the criminally mentally ill? Do they not have a responsibility here? What about feckless politicians and other city and state officials who use issues like these as political wedges?

It is true that Jordan Neely didn’t need to die, but there is no question that a system that had encountered him over 40 times and allowed him to walk around free while under an active felony assault warrant and didn’t intervene, no doubt put him on a path toward his death and that same pattern is repeating with all the other Jordan Neely’s out there.

The fact is that the New York City government and many other major cities – Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Atlanta - are failing at controlling violent crime at the street level regardless of its genesis, they have turned a blind eye to the general safety of the public by cutting police presence, mothballing police units focusing on serious crimes, rapidly streeting criminals (even those committing serious assaults), and radical progressive District Attorneys treating crime as if it is a function of oppression and law enforcement as if it is racially discriminatory.

Taken in toto, all this amounts to the failure of a basic task expected of a government: public safety. These same governments used “public safety” as an excuse to exercise complete control over the general law-abiding public during a “pandemic” when it gave them more power. They found the power to hold people hostage in their own homes while threatening their livelihoods with cancellation if they didn’t behave the way they were ordered to behave.

This amounts to the outsourcing of individual safety to the individual.

But this outsourcing comes with an additional risk to the individual. If you do act to protect yourself or others and the regime does not approve of what you did or how you did it, you can bet you will be treated more severely than any threat you may have encountered. As in the case of Daniel Penny, if you subdue a criminal with a felony arrest warrant after he threatened an entire subway car of people, even if other passengers assisted you, you will be arrested and charged in the aftermath of the incident.

It is easy for the family of people like Jordan Neely to swoop in and claim that “he didn’t need to die” and he was “harmless” and “needed help” – but Neely’s unpredictability was known to the regular subway riders. It was known in 2021 that Neely had randomly punched a 67-year-old woman in the face as she exited the Bowery station in the East Village in Lower Manhattan, breaking her nose, fracturing her eye socket, and causing "bruising, swelling and substantial pain to the back of her head". 

Lawyers like Benjamin Crump have created an entirely new class of racialist ambulance chasers who swoop in, vulture-like, to “assist” the families who see a payday from misfortune, posting innocent, out of context images of the assailants to inflame the public and create the racist angle they need to extort money from government officials too afraid to tell the truth.

Politicians and activists are saying that you have no right to protect yourself because you should not be allowed to become the judge and jury. They will say the alleged assailant might have had a bad childhood, is a victim of systemic racism or is mentally challenged and that is your fault for not caring enough – even though they don’t give a damn until the subject becomes politically useful.

Screw them. These are the same people who release known criminals back into society with less concern than swatting a fly.

You have a right to protect yourself and a duty to help protect others – against immediate threats and stupid politicians, government officials and blood sucking “activists”. The first right enumerated in the Declaration of Independence is the right to life, we have a Second Amendment right in the Constitution to bear arms to protect our persons and our property.

We are given little choice but to act when the situation demands action.

In 1989, Don Henley released a song called “New York Minute” that included these lyrics:

And in these days, darkness falls early
And people rush home to the ones they love
You'd better take a fool's advice and take care of your own
One day they're here, next day they're gone.

Jordan Neely didn’t die because he was mentally ill or because he was black. He died as a direct result of being a known threat released into society by a government that no longer sees the protection of the individual citizen as its responsibility.