Jordan Neely killing/Daniel Penny charges

Well, Babbit was part of a violent mob storming the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government shot by a police officer while Neely was being a big-time nuisance on the subway choked to death by a private citizen, so I don't think these two cases are comparable, or even in the same universe. I mean, what?

 

D. All of the above.

 

Never board the first car, the last car or (especially in the summer) an empty car.

 

Never take the A? I rarely take the subway anymore, but there is a 6th sense which you have about situations which may be unsafe. There were worse homeless, criminals and the mentally ill years ago, but some MAGA governor isn’t using it as a political wedge.

 

I had just moved back to New York City and bumped into a college friend on the 1. While we chatted, the homeless guy sleeping on the bench seat awoke, dropped his pants, squatted and shat on the floor of the car not 10 feet from us.

Bearing witness to that spectacle made me realize I had now, truly, returned home.

 

The empty car on a busy day ... yeah, no good. Haven't seen that in a while. And puke, don't forget puke.

 

On New Year's Day, always take the over on the amount of puke you see on the subway.

 

The last MetroNorth train at 1:53 am on the weekend was a Puke Train too. Bridge and tunnel amateurs.

 

This McWhorter piece - written before Penny was arrested - has some balance to it.

Opinion | A Killing on the F Train

Nothing Neely did remotely justified this fate. The fact that Penny, as of this writing, has not been arrested pending more information seems unconscionable regardless of legal niceties. Based on what is known, it seems obvious that cutting off someone’s oxygen supply for so long would risk killing him — especially following the notorious choking deaths of Eric Garner and, more recently, George Floyd.

At the same time, the conversation among political leaders in the news and on social media has largely ignored the experience of legions of subway-riding New Yorkers. It implies that Neely was merely a desperate human being who should not have been detained in any way short of the intervention of a trained professional — an opportunity vanishingly unavailable in a subway car at any given moment.

This perspective is rooted in an enlightened quest to sympathize with the plight of the mentally ill in a society grievously unprepared to help them. But in addition to minimizing the experiences of the other passengers on the train, it fails to put enough attention on the genuine public policy solutions needed by people like Neely.

We must be able to keep in our minds two things. One is that Neely was unjustifiably killed. The other is that the episode, in all of its horror, highlights what New York City subway riders are being asked to endure daily — and that this, too, is not just.

 

Apropos of nothing....

 

subway samaritan

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/13/daniel-penny-jordan-neely-conservatives/

The conservative response to Penny’s actions has drawn comparisons to Rittenhouse, who was acquitted on all charges after killing two people and wounding a third during unrest related to a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020, said Jon Marshall, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism who has studied the relationship between presidents and the press. Rittenhouse has been championed by conservatives, with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and others calling him a “hero.”

“What we’re seeing now for Daniel Penny after he killed Jordan Neely is that he fits within a long, ugly history of some media and politicians glorifying vigilante violence,” Marshall said. “There’s a history of the ‘us vs. them’ narrative, and the ‘us’ is besieged and under great threat, and that’s what justifies these acts of great violence.”