The System Didn’t Kill Jordan Neely. Daniel Penny Did.
Information {that a} mentally sick man had been killed final week on a New York Metropolis subway and the dialog that adopted nearly instantly turned a synecdoche for the broader societal debate about rising crime, public dysfunction, racial divides, and attitudes in the direction of the homeless inhabitants. However whether or not they notice it or not, these on reverse ends of that dialogue appear to agree on a core level: It was, in some sense, the fault of “the system” that Jordan Neely was choked to dying on the F practice.
“Had he been in therapy, Jordan Neely’s dying in a subway automotive could have been prevented,” wrote Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Stephen Eide in Metropolis Journal. The Metropolis Journal has devoted an excessive amount of vitality arguing that current upticks in city dysfunction recommend the necessity for a extra punitive or carceral strategy. On this account, if Neely hadn’t been out and about—both as a result of he was in jail or maybe involuntarily in a psychological well being establishment—he would not have died.
However that line of pondering usually fails to account for the truth that Neely was engaged with the prison justice system repeatedly all through the course of his life. He was launched from Rikers Island, the infamous New York Metropolis jail, in February of this 12 months, reportedly after spending 15 months behind bars. It’s true that Neely wouldn’t have been accessible to be killed on the subway final week had he been indefinitely locked away, however we do not lock folks up with a purpose to shield them from being choked.
Eide, refreshingly, is conscious of those limitations. “Felony-justice reformers would possibly level out, accurately, that Neely’s many previous arrests didn’t stabilize him,” he famous. “However nor did no matter contact he could have had with homeless outreach groups, social employees, safe-haven shelters, and outpatient clinics.” That is additionally true, although I might argue it hints at the truth that the system can’t stop each hurt, irrespective of what number of sources society equips it with.
The inverse conclusion is extra fashionable, although, and it traverses typical tribal strains. “We should always demand a full accounting from all of those [New York City] officers,” says Errol Louis in New York journal. “Neely, it appears, had encountered lots of the clinics, hospitals, and social-service organizations we collectively (and optimistically) name a social security web, together with the Bowery Residents’ Committee and Bellevue Hospital.” Although Louis would not label the carceral system because the perpetrator, he arrives at an analogous judgment: The federal government might have saved Neely, given the prospect.
That it is a doubtful declare needs to be obvious from Louis’ personal accounting of the tragedy. Private and non-private actors alike sought to intervene in Neely’s life for years. He had labored with an Intensive Cellular Therapy group composed of psychological well being road counselors who present companies to homeless folks. The Bowery Residents’ Committee, which particularly works in subways, had been in contact with Neely since 2017. He had been out and in of Bellevue Hospital for a number of years. Outreach employees interacted with him a number of occasions within the months main as much as his killing.
New York is a metropolis of over 8 million folks, lots of whom battle with psychological well being points. About one in each 120 New Yorkers is homeless, in accordance to The Bowery Mission, which interprets to about 70,000 folks. No authorities, even with essentially the most strong and muscular of applications, will be capable of save each resident affected by psychological well being points, an absence of housing, or each, as the 2 usually go hand in hand.
“I haven’t got meals. I haven’t got a drink, I am fed up,” Neely yelled, in response to Juan Alberto Vazquez, a contract journalist who captured Daniel Penny holding him in a chokehold for a number of minutes. Neely reportedly suffered from schizophrenia and melancholy, together with his psychological well being deteriorating after his mom was murdered and her physique stuffed in a suitcase when he was 14 years outdated. “I do not thoughts going to jail and getting life in jail. I am able to die,” he stated.
He died shortly thereafter. Folks will argue about how affordable it was for Penny to initially restrain Neely. However “the system” was not on the subway with him that day. Daniel Penny was, although, and he allegedly choked Neely for quarter-hour. Vazquez’s video, which caught a portion of that interplay, exhibits Neely writhing, making an attempt to clutch up at a subway seat, one leg slowly kicking. Ultimately, one other passenger could be heard telling Penny that he was “gonna catch a homicide cost.”
“My spouse is ex-military,” the passenger stated. “You are gonna kill him now.”
Penny maintains he did nothing mistaken. “Mr. Neely had a documented historical past of violent and erratic habits, the obvious results of ongoing and untreated psychological sickness,” his attorneys stated in a assertion. “For too lengthy, these struggling with psychological sickness have been handled with indifference.”
It is on this vein that Penny finds unlikely frequent floor with writers like Louis. “Jordan Neely was already lifeless,” he wrote in his New York piece, metaphorically put to dying by authorities negligence.
Inconvenient to that declare is that the federal government was deeply concerned in making an attempt to assist Neely. And he wasn’t, in actual fact, lifeless. Till a person killed him—one thing no grievance concerning the system can clarify away.
