December 24, 2024 - 3:00pm
This year will go down as the deadliest in the New York City subways in decades, if not ever. The indescribably savage immolation of a woman passenger on the morning of December 22 brings the number of murders in the subway in 2024 to 11. Since 2020, 40 people have been murdered in the system, more than the total number dating back to 1990.
Images of the scene from Sunday morning are ghastly. A human figure is engulfed in flames while a man, eventually identified as the killer, sits calmly watching a few yards away. The murderer, an illegal migrant from Guatemala, evidently used a lighter to set his victim’s clothes aflame. He was caught later that day, snoozing on another train.
New York City has dined out for years on the claim that it is the “safest big city in the country.” And while it is true that Gotham’s overall homicide rate remains low among American cities, the lived reality of New Yorkers gainsays those cheery numbers. Violent crime is on the rise, and has increasingly become purposeless and unprovoked — a function of hostile psychosis as much as any rational motivation.
The rise in subway murders speaks to the growing sense that violence in New York City is not confined to dangerous, outlying precincts that are easily avoided. The subway system, with its hundreds of stations, offers violent offenders the same 24-hour access to the metropolis as it does for tourists or commuters.
No other global city sees this kind of mayhem in its mass transit systems. China, which has half of the world’s 20 largest subway networks, reports virtually no violence or even crime on its subways; travel guides confirm the general safety of mass transit in China. The large subway systems of Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, and even Delhi are considered safe for passengers. The Paris metro and London tube are plagued by pickpockets and occasional robberies, but actual violence is rare, and the same is true for Mexico City.
These cities and others take it for granted that their mass transit systems are meant for people to travel from one point to another, and this primary purpose is enforced as a matter of the common good. Vagrants or mentally ill people are no more permitted to sleep or linger in the subway than they would in a school. Moreover, paying the fare is not considered a voluntary act, and fare evasion is monitored and punished with on-the-spot fines.
New York, on the other hand, has allowed its subways to become a kind of annex of the mental health system — a rolling dayroom for our thousands of untreated seriously mentally ill persons. “Homeless outreach” workers may be seen on occasion timidly approaching some wretching, stumbling vagrant on a subway platform to offer vague assistance, but decades of non-coercive intervention — informed by the anti-psychiatric movement of the sixties and the persistent idea that leaving schizophrenics to their suffering is the humane response — have reduced these interactions to kabuki.
At the same time, the anti-police Left has fought steadily to decriminalise fare evasion, insisting that making people pay to ride is a form of war on the poor. The decision by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and the other DAs to no longer prosecute fare evasion led cops to not bother about enforcement. What’s more, the legalisation of marijuana has been tied, in New York and other jurisdictions, with an intensification of hallucinatory symptoms among the seriously mentally ill. State level bail reform has made it impossible to keep even serious offenders in jail, even for “cooling off” periods. And New York has been reluctant to use its first-class “assisted outpatient treatment” law to compel mental health treatment under concerns that it violates the freedoms of the mentally ill to live as they please.
The problem of disorder didn’t arrive all at once. To borrow from Adam Smith, “there is a great deal of ruin in a city.” A concerted effort to bring New York back from the brink during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations created a virtuous circle which the progressives methodically set about disrupting, passing laws and regulations at multiple levels of government to dismantle the mechanics of public safety.
Elected officials in New York continue to shake their heads and offer bromides about social housing, mental health services, and compassion as solutions to the spiralling crisis of subway violence. But until the people of the city demand a strong response to rising disorder, they will continue to get what they keep electing.
Seth Barron is managing editor of The American Mind and author of The Last Days of New York.
SethBarronNYC
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SubscribeThe casual acceptance of such a horrific act says something about the rot that has infected society and the institutions that govern it. Add to this the histrionic outrage at Daniel Penny. It’s hard not to be nihilistic.
Penny wasn’t necessarily wrong to subdue Neely, but did he really have to maintain the chokehold AFTER Neely went limp? That’s where the controversy arises.
It’s a subtle but important difference. Personally, given the circumstances, if I were a DA in the present climate, I wouldn’t have wanted the Penny case to go to a jury at all. The entire scenario screams out the possibility of jury nullification, where a crime is legally proven but the jury throws out the law due to extenuating circumstances and the overall mood of the city/country. A good DA would probably have been able to get Penny to plead to a lesser charge with a minimal sentence based on his military service and lack of a criminal record. I wonder if the DA wasn’t subjected to political pressure from the mayor and other local officials to go for the top count despite the risks of going to trial. Wherever the impetus came from, this seems like the kind of situation where liberal politicians were trying to send a message and ended up having a jury throw it back in their faces in order to send their own message. Personally, I doubt any lessons will be learned by anyone concerned.
The DA in question is a gentleman called Alvin Bragg who owes his position to George Soros.
And that explains that. Well, good to know he probably deserved what he got, that is embarrassed as a lawyer and criticized by both his political tribe for failing to get a conviction and by his enemies for trying to get one in the first place. I’m not sure the acquittal we got was justice, but it was closer than sending the man to prison like a cold blooded murderer, and given those were the only choices, I can’t fault the jury for deciding as they did.
Yes, yes, of course, the white soldier who did what actual police officers did not in the case of the burning woman and intervened to save his fellow travellers should have been imprisoned. That seems entirely reasonable for a regular decent guy trained to put the safety of others first. Jeez…
“A good DA would probably have been able to get Penny to plead to a lesser charge with a minimal sentence based on his military service and lack of a criminal record.”
Why should Penny plead guilty to ANY charge? What’s wrong with you?
I doubt subtlety was top of mind in that metro carriage at the time. And the man was still alive when the authorities eventually arrived.
A good DA wouldn’t have brought charges against a hero who saved a carload of passengers from yet another crazy slasher. I’m hoping that Bragg loses his job early in the Musk administration.
It’s what not convicted by a jury of your peers is meant to mean.
Steve Jolly, in demonstrating his lack of facts about the Penny show trial. His cynical heartless take on justice, certainly shows he has learned nothing from the case. However, those New Yorkers on the subway to hell certainly learned to stfu and let evil rampage.
You would take the chance that he was not faking, would you? Not too bright, and possibly not too long to live. What do you do when you have a tiger by the tail?
In the cases I have seen, I am amazed as the self-restraint of the police officers. It must take a lot of training. Most of the criminals need to be subdued with maximum force. It is obvious from almost the first contact that they are dealing with professional criminals.
And how, in a real-life situation, is anyone supposed to know? Criminals try to avoid arrest: that’s what they do. They do it professionally, as a way of life. You cannot have a situation where the professional criminal becomes a victim if someone doesn’t handle them in a theoretically perfect way.
He was probably scared witless and that’s why he did so. Choking the woke is fine IMO BUT – from a gallows after a fair trial, but when they act as illegal combatants Occam’s razor applies- gun, then knife, then hard object and finally choking
And if you thought a restrainer would let you go if you went limp, why would you not go limp? And then what? The violent attacker is loose and free to commit more violent attacks.
After a fight, the police arrest the winner, and assist the loser into an ambulance.
You have never tried to subdue someone jacked up on drugs
This is of course an accurate analysis – and while the Democratic Party may talk a good talk about the need for mass transit – how it’s good for the environment or just more efficient than personal automobiles – as long as they (1) don’t enforce vagrancy laws and (2) don’t reform the permitting laws that make building new rail lines needlessly slow and expensive (just witness the fact that California has spent about a billion dollars on its high speed rail line over the last 15 or so years and has no operational track to show for it).
And you also touch on a bigger point that I’ve dealt with before in my own writings like this article called “Identity Politics Blows Up in the Democrats’ Face.”
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/identity-politics-blows-up-in-the
Basically, even though Democrats love to focus their rhetoric and moral vision on the needs of various “diverse” victim groups, they’re losing votes among these very people (blacks and especially Hispanics) since they know full well that the soft-on-crime and DEI policies that the Dems are promoting mostly harm poorer people like themselves – i.e. those who have to use the subway, where despite the leftist belief that policies is somehow elitist and white-supremecist, blacks and whites in real life have an equal interest in not being set on fire.
Hopefully the people in New York will wake up to what is going on and give city-level Democrats and soft-on-crime people the same thrashing that the Dems got nationally last month.
The progress created by progressives is frequently regressive.
An illegal migrant sets a woman on fire on a subway train. Watch some unhinged commentator link the event to Trump’s victory and the xenophobia of the MAGA movement without one shred of evidence. Personally, I think it would be interesting if this criminal turns out to be one of the many such people bussed directly to NYC by the state of Texas. I have little doubt that if this turned out to be the case, the liberal government of NY would take the opportunity to blame Texas, not federal immigration policy or the lack of border control for the tragedy. Somehow I doubt the working class folks riding the subway will see this as anything other than what it plainly is, a good argument against open borders policy and a failure of local law enforcement.
The murderer had been deported by Trump, readmitted by Biden, and housed nicely by Hochul and Adams.
Retching, Mr Barron.
Democrat politicians who run these large cities, democrat donors and democrat-funded District Attorneys have consistently excused the Leftist violence inflicted upon Americans during the recent years of ‘mostly peaceful protests’ and the ‘Summer of Love,’ with phrases akin to:
“Violence is never the answer, but ….”
Anyone with half a brain knows that every word preceding the “but” in such a sentence is a lie.
They excused, and excused – and then excused some more – the very acts of deviancy perpetuated by their cities’ criminal elements and angry haters. They push radical DEI-socializing initiatives that pit living American against living American in overtly racist, classist and ancestral-nationalist ways.
They allowed this crime and lawlessness to take root, simply because they believe the perpetrators – those who hold the molotov cocktails – are Leftists, just like them.
They were in lock-step as the perpetrators attacked the police, beat and murdered people in the streets, and burned mom-and-pop businesses to the ground.
Now these cities are rotting from the inside-out … the voters continue to be murdered. And Democrats have no one to blame, but themselves.
Governments have three core duties: defend the borders, maintain law and order, guarantee a stable currency.
The Democrats didn’t just neglect these duties, they abandoned them altogether. They need to be kept out of power for a generation.
Those that have the pseudo marxism virus may be cured but we don’t yet know for sure how. (Though education works for some, myself included. However i was an actual marxist who believed in an amoral dialectic concept of history) Like the plague they should be quarantined and destroyed if they try to re-infect the population.
The dead woman’s last thought, I wish Daniel Penny was here to save me
Her name is Amelia.
Same in London and it’s reaching the suburbs too. Same stupidity of ignoring weed smoking means you know it’s everywhere the stench alerts you, and we’ve had the same mental excuses for attempted murder on the tube. All part of the moronic liberal progressive agenda…..until comes for them
Each time I see I see a vehicle run over a pothole, I think to myself, “He voted for this.”
Train stations filled with trash, creaking cars, conductors who don’t care about their passengers, black splotches of gum everywhere, and graffiti, of course. Every passenger voted for their own suffering.
You can’t fix dumb. Sigh ….
“Conductors”?! What luxury.
There have been 2 murders on the london underground that I know of. In one a customer killed a railway worker. Another where a homeless person pushed someone on to the tracks.
Both non-indigenous. One definitely an immigrant.
Jorge Ortega was one of the victims at 61 years old.
“Homeless person”. Wokespeak for what we used call a tramp.
One thing not often discussed is the prevalence of the very worst sort of criminals among the millions of migrants. After all, why not? A State is hardly likely to prevent its criminal and psychiatric population from leaving, and an Open Borders State by definition doesn’t control it. This applies to both the UK and the US.
Very true. Part of the issue is the progressive desire to stop this kind of discussion. Progressives must keep the borders completely open, because of the huge “Illegals Scum Industrial Complex”, the network of lawyers, social workers, and others who feast on the continued flow of illegals scum.
There is also the issue that illegal immigrants feel completely unrestrained by laws and law enforcement that the average citizen is constrained by. They are mostly unidentifiable and without papers, and hence feel free to do what the hell they feel like without personal consequence. A huge temptation for those that may not have strong moral qualms..
Also they don’t share the cultural expectations of the new country.
The stochastic (random) nature of mass illegal immigration is the problem. Western societies pride themselves on tolerance (outside of DEI) and are rightfully suspicious about making collective judgment on entire groups. This leads to the catechism that “migrants are simply seeking a better life.” While, this may be true in most cases, it gives cart blanche to those who are not. Since little to no discernment takes place, dealing with the criminals becomes intractable.
Making things more complicated is the fact that statistics can’t accurately account for how many people are here. In America, our Media has been using the figure of 11 million “undocumented migrants” for decades. Its ironic, apparently people without paperwork are more difficult to account for in statistics.
The lack of transparency about the number of illegals is a deliberate strategy on the part of Dems. Trump attempted to add a traditional item to the Census Form: “Are you a US citizen?” All Dems and some statisticians shouted this down, and as usual, Trump screwed up the process of revision, so it was never enacted. I think that today, it is certainly over 20,000,000 illegals.
Blaming Trump for this is a bit annoying.
Excellent point, Rachel. More evidence of the actual mslice behind thosevwho have pushed open borders.
Not just in New York. Violent crime is rising here too as are the number of traffic accidents where motorists don’t stop. The latter are almost inevitably caught or hand themselves in so their failure to stop is a combination of panic and indifference, both of which are a reflection of our progressive policies and Irish society generally today.
What is needed is for the cops to become cops again. They have been “human-right”ed into complete emasculation. Cops need to do stop-n-frisk, they need to beat the shit out of low-lifes, and they need to be able to shoot people.
I’m a lifelong new Yorker, and believe me people are horrified by this depraved killing. It’s a huge news story and everyone is terribly upset. There is no “casual acceptance.” I am just hoping that the clips and photos of a policeman (two policemen?) ignoring the burning woman are fake. I can’t find any real reporting about that aspect of the story.
But what will New Yorkers do about it?
Blame Trump and MAGA of course.
NY gave itself over to depraved violent wokeists. The incineration of Amelia is getting less coverage than that of the Penny show trial or the lionization of the murderer of the United Healthcare CEO. What is the woke assertion? Oh yeah…silence is violence. New Yorkers voted for this. Every show trial against Trump, every woke immigration policy, every AOC, Schumer, Nader, Hochul, every sanctuary city and state…they brought you to this disgusting hell.
What a surprise, another illegal ‘immigrant’. Trump has his work cut out. This far left crap had to stop. It’s irrational and backwards. Protect your own people first. Women and children especially.
“Statistics show” that undocumented aliens commit crimes at a lower rate than the population in general. But we’re never told who collected these statistics, where, how or when.
That is the wrong question to answer. We don’t care about the rate of illegals committing crimes. What IS important is the proportion of crimes committed by illegals – of all criminals, how many are illegals? That certainly goes up, up, up, every time there is a massive illegals scum surge.
Assassinations of executives also.
Brilliant, clear and accurate analysis. Thank you.
Beats me why there appears to be a kind of majority for people whose policies are so counter-intuitive.