If you need more evidence that charging Daniel Penny with manslaughter won’t make a difference to our three-year-old subway-crime crisis, look no further than the same day’s news: another slaying on the train, the fifth this year and the third with the alleged killer claiming self-defense.
Until we quell danger on the trains, we won’t stop people from reacting to that danger.
Hours before a Manhattan grand jury indicted Penny Wednesday for the death of Jordan Neely on an F train in May, deadly chaos unfolded on a Brooklyn J train.
Yet another disturbed man with a violent history, 36-year-old Devictor Ouedraogo, paced the car, removing his shirt and menacing passengers.
One witness said he threatened to “erase someone.” Police say Ouedraogo punched a woman.
The woman’s companion, Jordan Williams, 20, fatally stabbed Ouedraogo; he, like Penny, faces a manslaughter charge.
With one big difference: Williams, who is black, spent two nights in jail awaiting arraignment, whereas Penny, who is white, remained free.
(This is under a criminal-justice system progressives consider reformed.)
And Penny benefited from support and donations from around the world — meaning he can afford to go to trial.
Williams’ case risks being lost as just another subway “dispute” homicide, minority on minority.
Unless national conservatives take him up, too, as having had no choice but to defend himself and others, he may be forced by financial considerations to take a plea.
Progressives have no interest in Williams, but they are pleased the grand jury indicted Penny because they see it as racial justice, holding a white man to account for killing a black man.
Fine; it’s up to a trial jury to decide whether he’s guilty.
But by focusing on punishment and not prevention in Penny’s case, all progressives have done is ensure more minority men are killed on the train — and other minority men are charged in their killings.
Most deadly subway “disputes,” including self-defense claims, reflect subway demographics — that is, minority on minority.
That’s the case not just in the newest one but with the year’s first claim of self-defense.
In April, 25-year-old Mark Smith stabbed 18-year-old Isaiah Collazo to death on a Brooklyn D train, after a dispute arising from the fact that Collazo’s friend pulled the emergency brake.
A grand jury refused to indict Smith, agreeing he acted in self-defense. But not before he got entangled in the criminal-justice system.
Progressives usually love root causes and systemic problems.
So you would think they’d see three claims of self-defense homicides on the subway in three months as a . . . systemic problem with root causes?
The problem isn’t whether any of Williams, Smith or Penny was justified in his deadly actions.
It’s that we have five dead men on the subways this year, and most would be alive if we were securing subways as we did until 2019.
Ouedraogo’s killing Tuesday is the 30th subway homicide since March 2020.
Before 2020, it took 15 years for 30 people to be killed on trains.
Though subway robberies and assaults are down over the past few months, homicide has accelerated, from seven killings each in 2020 and 2021 to 11 last year.
We are tolerating more subway disorder — and some of it inevitably turns deadly.
To assess disorder, look at fare-evasion stats. Fare evasion went from an estimated less than 4% of riders in 2019 to more than 11% this year.
We have known for 30 years that when you stop fare beaters, you stop disorderly people before they terrify a train full of people.
People who aggressively beg, who rant that they are going to kill someone, who punch or slash strangers, who stick needles into their arms in view of other passengers did not pay their fares.
It is government’s job to aid the severely mentally ill. But whether the state and city do that job or not, the severely mentally ill do not belong in the subway, where people can’t escape them.
Police are writing more tickets for fare evasion — through April, 45% more than in 2019 — but it’s not enough to reduce the disorder the city allowed to fester over three years.
It also doesn’t help that, with prosecutors not criminally enforcing recidivist farebeating, a civil fare-evasion writeup is just a paper tiger.
Even before 2019, half of tickets went unpaid.
Reduce the fear pervading the subway, and you reduce chances that people react to disorder to defend themselves, whether justifiably or not.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.