None of this is “advancing the conversation.”
4 Likes
Would you jump in to a situation like that, or even start shouting at the guy?
It’s easy to say “Of course I would!” calmly in a forum post. Reality is a lot more challenging. I know that I wouldn’t win fights in these situations and wouldn’t be brave enough to jump in.
And people have surprisingly little awareness of what’s going on around, even a terrible incident like this.
This is really shocking. It seems like something is totally dysfunctional in NYC or NYPD that would let this happen.
Right this is a very key point. The fact is, Mr. Neely did instigate the situation by threatening to harm passengers if they didn’t give him what he wanted. That does not justify what happened after but it certainly is part of why no one intervened. It’s an example of the trolley problem happening in real life.
The level of “I don’t want to get involved” plus indifference in the NYC subway is quite shocking. In the linked article one of the people interviewed didn’t want to be named because they didn’t want to make a police statement and have to get an attorney. I can’t blame them - they may have civil liability in this too, plus they could be blamed and have a lot of trouble.
I’m not convinced, see below about this incident last year…
Whatever they might charge him with, look at the comments from the bystanders in the linked article and on other websites. They are not sympathetic with Mr. Neely. At all. If you’re a prosecutor do you want to take a risk that one out of the twelve on the jury feel the same way people on the subway and in the article feel?
In fact one guy jumped in and helped Mr. Penny restrain him.
If you want to see a truly shocking situation of NO ONE HELPING on the subway, this from last year. This guy threatens everyone on the car. Everyone just moves away and tries to avoid looking at him, which is basically what we see here. He sits down next to a female who unfortunately didn’t move fast enough, and as he’s restraining her, she freezes up and mouths to the other passengers “please help me”. Spoiler alert, NO ONE DOES, they just sit there and avoid looking at the attack in progress. Finally it looks like someone (the guy videoing) intimidates him enough that he leaves.
From 2020, a story where subway bystanders do intervene in a terrible assault. Have things changed since 2020? Or are these just anecdotes that don’t show a trend?
The fear center of the brain (the amygdala) doesn’t do cogitation. That’s the cerebrum’s job.
8 Likes
I have. But I wouldn’t jump into fight - I’d say something like - he can’t breathe. Calmly- not right in the guy’s face.
Where have we heard that before?
10 Likes
Do you mean not trained to identify mental issues in themselves, or others?
There’s quite a few veterans here on this forum. Be careful of broad brushstrokes.
10 Likes
Yes. Regardless that you weren’t addressing me, I have spoken up before when I saw some violent fuck-shit about to go down; and God willing, I will be able to intervene again if ever needed.
Now, would I go over and start assaulting the guy who’s choking another guy? Probably not, as I am not big and strong, or very formidable physically; I doubt that it would do much good.
But I am rather loud and compelling, and I cannot fathom staying silent…
Never forget:
To my ears, it sounds like the usual wannbe-tough guy-authoritarian BS excuses; and I have to wonder if anyone here would be making those same excuses if the man who died had been White.
11 Likes
Plenty of us would have and plenty of us have in other situations. It isn’t an uncommon thing.
No it really isn’t and acting like it is, is deeply disturbing.
No one does anything until 30 seconds into hair pulling. Then as your own posts noted someone did step in and everyone left alive. Yeah it takes some time to kick people into gear. The situations were different.
They don’t. We actually have crime data going back decades and they are just that anecdotes and bad situations. Consider the video you reached for, a year old video, with terrible audio cherry picked by a political poster with a rich history of lying about the contents of the media he posts. The MTA posts a ton of crime data. Here’s a sample report from August of last year, showing the mid year breakdown going back more than 20 years. Major felonies per day are roughly stable compared to recent years, and about half of where they were in the late 90s. https://new.mta.info/document/95496 If you actually dig deeper the information is available going back a few decades earlier, but at that point there has been enough changes in the standards of reporting and definition of crimes that it becomes harder to meaningfully compare.
9 Likes
9 Likes
That is certainly true. NYC, LA, SF and other big American cities are doing very well with overall crime rates. NYC’s overall murder rate is comparable to London’s, if I’m remembering correctly (couldn’t quickly find stats).
I wasn’t wondering about a trend in crime, but a trend in people letting terrible behavior go on NYC’s subways in particular. I know the crime trend is pretty good compared to earlier times.
People warning about NYC being dangerous are way off, based on the stats.
Oh, FFS. Read the post that I quoted in my reply - which was saying he was a marine and thus a killing machine. That’s simply not the case. Literally hundreds of thousands of Marines and former Marines refrain from killing people every damn day.
Penny didn’t murder Neely because he (Penny) was a Marine. He just murdered him.
None of us know what we would do in that situation unless we were in it. But, yes, in the past when I’ve been in an emergency situation, when other people have froze I didn’t. And I tend to act without really thinking about all the possible outcomes - not necessarily great, but sometimes necessary. I’ve been in life-and-death situations a lot in my career, and that pressure doesn’t really phase me.
But fighting isn’t what was going to help Neely. Getting through to his attackers is what would. Some medical expertise from a doctor, nurse, or paramedic might have gotten through. Or a figure of authority giving orders, which a Marine would have instinctively responded to.
10 Likes
And done. It doesn’t say what you think it says.
I mean really, that’s just called another day on the subway.
That’s what gets me. The F train is a local route, so I’m sure within that 15 minute span in Manhattan it must have stopped at 3 stations, minimum. I get that not everybody is willing to physically insert themselves into a situation like that, but how hard would it have been to simply get out of the train and alert the conductor or transit police?
(And the same goes if you’re feeling threatened by a passenger. You don’t have to go fucking Bernie Goetz on someone just because they are being belligerent. Chances are they are already having a way worse day than you are. It’s not hard to change cars or trains, or get help.)
8 Likes
Heres my two pence, the reason the army guy killed him, is the only tools we ever gave him was killing, the answer to every problem all through his training has been kill it, he is the wrong person to solve that issue, but that is also true of most police in the states, the solution to a problem is to kill it, and everything is threat to you.
We need a 4th service that is not police but, has powers like that to take people away and arrest them and is what we send to mental health issue’s rather than people who only know how to kill people.
1 Like
A variation of that is what’s being called for when people talk about “de-funding the police”. It’s about diverting some (not all) of the financial resources currently demanded by cops toward first-responder social workers trained in identifying and de-escalating people experiencing mental health episodes.
The American right, however, prefers armed guard labour (cops and rent-a-cops) and violent rugged individualist vigilantes as a solution for situations like this.
I used to see that guy a lot around my neighbourhood in the 1990s. Walking free, unfortunately, but always with the mixed air of hope and dread that someone would recognise him.
The stats and reality never stopped right-wingers from misrepresenting the big coastal cities by implying they’re highly dangerous places where people are indifferent to others. One is far more likely to encounter rampant drug use and social isolation in small-town and rural and exurban America.
Some conservatives and Libertarians try to be a bit more subtle about it, but they’re not fooling anyone.
7 Likes
Actually, this is NOT a fact - at least, not a fact that has been established in court. Everything I have read on the situation says that Neely was being “aggressive” - whether he threatened physical violence against anyone is speculation at this point. I have ridden transit and on many occasions witnessed panhandling that could be called aggressive. And even if Neely’s actions were trending toward physical violence, Penny and the passengers had other options.
It’s not at all the Trolley problem. Please stop trying to excuse the passengers.
Isn’t that basically what most people are saying here? That the passengers could have stopped this but didn’t? What liability would they have had if they tried to stop Penny? This is an argument FOR intervening, not an argument against it.
Prosecutors aren’t supposed to take into account public feelings on this - and whatever culpability passengers may have, I don’t think they are happy that Penny killed Neely.
And in none of those situations NOBODY WAS KILLED. These are evidence that Penny mishandled the situation, not that Neely’s death was justified.
There appears to be more violence on public transit of late and there is a place to debate the multitude of causes behind that. None of that is relevant to whether Neely’s death was justified.
5 Likes
As stated earlier, millions of veterans go about their day to day lives without solving every problem by killing it.
Plenty of people who were never in the military kill every day.
This guy was a fucking asshole.
13 Likes
Knowing that, it is surprising no one leaving the train found a cop and said, “Some guy has another guy in a choke hold on the train.”
I thought they were beefing up police presence on the subway,
I have only been to NYC once, and didn’t get to experience the subway, as it just so happened to be the week there was a strike.
1 Like
Because it wasn’t; and those here trying so desperately to hand wave it away or justify it are very much showing us who they really are.
10 Likes
They have and the police are doing what police do, attacking people who jump the turnstiles and incarcerating homeless people who fall asleep. The cops are great if you need someone to shake down a bar or shoot your neighbor’s dog, but terrible for public safety.
8 Likes
