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Sure, fear is at play. But if one person can break through that, and say something when a fellow human being is being brutalized, it’s easier for everyone else to open their mouths, too.
they didn’t save those kids, because they did not give a fuck about those kids. If those had been rich white kids, they’d have been in there. We all can see that, because this stupid country is racist as fuck.
But yeah, keep putting words in people’s mouths here. It’s superhelpful.
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What I get from this thread is that there are some people who can’t imagine idly watching someone be murdered for fifteen minutes, and some people who already have their reasons for not intervening laid out.
I don’t think it’s really because the first group know themselves any less. If I’m ever in trouble, I hope it’s around them.
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Then you were not clear.
You basically stated that Penny killed Neely because he was a Marines-trained killbot. Let me break down everything wrong with that:
-first and foremost, it’s simply not true; there are hundreds of thousands of Marines and former Marines walking around not murdering people.
-that assertion takes away agency (and thus accountability for the murder) from Penny, essentially giving him an excuse for the inexcusable
-as @NukeML points out, that assertion also insults Marines and by extension all military and former military personnel. Not cool.
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Virtue signaling, isn’t it always?
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What I meant is, for the passengers who literally did nothing (not calling 911), one of them in the linked article said they didn’t want to be interviewed by police or attorneys. In other words, there’s an argument for doing literally nothing, which is liability. All the passengers who can be identified who were in proximity are now at risk of liability and certainly will be interviewed by police and might want to get attorneys.
It’s pretty awful situation. Things shouldn’t be like this.
I agree. As I said above, NYC is impressively safe compared to how it was before and to other big cities. I believe NYC’s murder rate is lower than the US overall. It does seem like public transit is one spot where NYC and other big cities are not doing well.
Edit" some quick searches, NYC’s murder rate is roughly comparable to Belgium’s. And those murders in NYC are probably not very evenly distributed and won’t impact most people. NYC is quite safe. No one says, “oh no, don’t go to Belgium, you won’t make it out alive!”
Self preservation only gives so much rationalization; for those who witnessed it, if they are not actual sociopaths, the traumatic memories will likely haunt them for the rest of their lives.
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Some have had worse luck than others.
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But apparently pointing that fact out is somehow “blaming” them for their inaction… Seems to me like what you’re doing here is talking about the actual consequences of inaction, which can be some PTSD for the inactive bystander. As I was trying to note with my back and forth with @MerelyGifted above, there are reasons why people might not act, including fear of putting themselves in harms way but also out of pure laziness or self-interest, and that context of the situation and the individual within it matters… doesn’t mean that even if people are acting from an understandable position of self-preservation, that they won’t feel guilty for that inaction.
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No it isn’t. Seriously, it isn’t. Upthread I posted MTA specific numbers for crimes. That LA Times articles uses one of the most disgusting misuses of stats I’ve seen and it is popularly pulled out for some of the most dishonest political rhetoric of the past few years. Crime was up 24% percent year over year from 2021. That sounds absolutely chilling. But 2021 was a weird year because Covid cratered ridership of transit systems globally. Systemwide LA saw a decline from over 300 million rides in 2020 to under 200 million in 2021, before rebounding to a little over 250 million in 2022. The rise in crime was a function of people actually using the system again, but that context is conveniently left out. Unfortunately the LA Metro uses a patchwork policing system, so I can’t link to clean numbers like the MTA, but Crime down on Metro system over past five years | The Source crime on the system was down over a five year period heading into the pandemic, fell during as ridership vanished and has returned to roughly comparable rates.
There is a long, very intentional push to demonize public transit in this country and the largely working class people who use it. We have had decades of improvement on safety and we can be absolutely certain that people will continue to lie about it. Somehow every reporter talking about gas prices in this country can remember not to use lockdowns as their comparison baseline, but the second they can demonize the poor, they leap to use the same period to compare crime stats.
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I don’t think people appreciate how deep right-wing antipathy toward public transit runs. The culture surrounding internal combustion automobiles is as (if not more) integral to American conservatism as is gun culture. This attitude is why they’re incapable of understanding what former Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro expressed so well:
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”
This is another reason conservatives hate NYC. Rich people often do use the subway.
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In the meantime:
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