NYC Crime: Separating the Sheep from the Goats.
NYC Crime: Separating the Sheep from the Goats.
On the preventable tragedy of Jordan Neely and root causes ignored by the activist class.
Having grown up in New York City and coming back to it on the regular from the Elysium-like existence of my magical woodland hamlet, I now get a good workout walking from Hell’s Kitchen to the East Village instead of taking the subway whose crime incidents have increased by 30% in 2022 from the prior year.
There is no expectation that the NYPD would keep the peace or that the justice system would keep criminals locked away, or that mentally unwell homeless people would be prevented from assaulting people.
When talking with fellow New Yorkers, there’s starting to seep in a recognition that crime has indeed risen but the Giuliani-Bloomberg salad days of a safe New York City are seen by them as an exception to what was the “normal” state of being.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan called such normalization “part and parcel of living in a big city” back in 2017 in response to rising terror attacks, coincidentally right before his meeting with at-the-time NYC Mayor Bill “Beginning of the End” Deblasio.
While terror attacks are less predictable than theft and violence, the way that people act and the values they hold can give you a good idea of whether to expect any of these three to occur.
That being said, I don't know if I have more to fear from the presence of a poor psychotic homeless man or an upper middle class progressive activist who advocates for the "Part and Parcel" status quo of the former terrorizing people through making a mockery of our justice system.
Both are the extreme ends of under and over socialization that the majority of New Yorkers have learned to call normal, but recently there seems to be a shift in the air that will separate the sheep from the goats.
It goes without saying that a human death is a tragic thing, especially when a society that would have been oriented differently (such as integration VS racist segregation) could have prevented it from occurring, but there is an inverted order of operations inside the heads of leftists when it comes to responding to threats.
In the tragic case of homeless former Michael Jackson impersonator Jordan Neely, he was choked out by a 24-year-old Marine veteran after screaming in a threatening manner as described by freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez to the New York Post:
“He said he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail. He started screaming all these things, took off his jacket, a black jacket that he had, and threw it on the ground.”
In addition to this, Vasquez reported Neely as saying "'I'll hurt anyone.'"
While it has yet to be decided whether charges will be pressed against the young vigilante, there have already been protests in the city by people who see this act as an unjust murder against someone experiencing a mental health episode, but at what point would you would be able to judge someone to be a threat so as to take action?
We can disregard Neely’s criminal record of 44 prior arrests which includes assault since in all likelihood the vigilante marine would not have been aware of this, but when the verbalization of “I’ll hurt anyone” has been uttered and there has been a general escalation of violence in the subway from low-trust mentally unwell individuals over these years, would the right alternative have been to gamble on this being a bluff on the part of Neely?
While I am not a self defense expert by any means, there were probably ways to subdue Neely without a 15 minute chokehold, but when there are threats to the lives and well being of others in a small space like the subway car, it may be easier to speak in hindsight without having been in this particular situation.
Former military veteran and police officer (and BTR regular) Counterpoints wrote to me that “literally exactly what they did” should have been the right procedure “but don’t restrict the air way.”, and that both scenarios of intentional murder VS amateur chokehold are likely.
While it would be interesting to hear what more self defense experts deduce happened from the footage, I will note one big difference between this case and George Floyd: that there was only the marine along with a black and Hispanic gentleman by Neely’s legs as opposed to a group of 4 experienced cops with handcuffs.
Either way, activists calling for justice when a mentally ill aggressor gets subdued remained silent when a “mandatory persistent violent felon” like Andre Boyce pushed a 34-year-old man onto the tracks at the 96th Street subway station during an argument, cracking his head and dying of injuries afterwards.
What should be a bipartisan agreement on the need for law and order has become politicized in that the criminals are seen as more of the victims than the victims themselves by these activists, while the approach of just locking up the bad guys by those on the right does not address the root cause.
Regardless of the aforementioned order of operations, there is an important point that the activists make when it comes to Neely’s upbringing:
“Advocates argued that the circumstances surrounding Neely’s life and death – his struggles with homelessness, food insecurity and mental health struggles – reflected longstanding failures to provide social services to impoverished New Yorkers.”
However, it is telling that the focus is an ever growing number of unstable people from horrible backgrounds being taken care of at the expense of stable families instead of undertaking the effort to build stronger families (including same sex couples) so as to prevent these problems from occurring in the first place.
This does not mean there should not be a social safety net and a much higher level of psychiatric help for those who fell through the cracks, but unless you stop more cracks from developing, the problems will keep compounding.
Neely’s particular circumstances are probably the clearest example of things that could have been addressed early on, as his mother was murdered by her boyfriend back when he was a teenager. Regardless of whether it was this and other bad experiences in life which broke him or something he had from birth, this tragedy certainly did not help his mental composition.
As responses to these unfortunate circumstances go, while I believe that the historical race-based segregation of the black community contributed greatly to the current “No love for the other side” that many black people from the inner city still feel towards outsiders, there has remained a racist “Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations” on behalf of leftist activists which perpetuates this state.
It may be due to wanting to boost their self esteem that the leftists project their own feelings of inferiority onto minority groups, viewing them as oppressed and disadvantaged, while strong family focused black communities would have no need for such saviors.
While perhaps bold of me to make a sweeping declaration, it is absolute common sense that the best long-term course of action is to work on families and education starting from exposure to positive role models at a young age, as well as encouraging a culture where future parents will make sure that their children don’t get involved with bad influences in the neighborhood.
Having this more resilient network also means that it would be much easier for cases of bad mental problems regardless of the better environment to be noticed early on and addressed.
That being said, such a reality will still take time to develop assuming it will be worked on. In the meantime, the first priority is to protect those who are the most vulnerable from criminals regardless of their childhood trauma by increasing policing and keeping violent felons as well as mentally unstable homeless off the streets.
There are unfortunately cases such as those of now exonerated George Bell who was violently coerced into a false confession from Guiliani’s NYPD back in the 90s. I had spoken with George’s brother back in 2019 in a series prior to the Break The Rules livestreams, and it reinforces the need for justice to go both ways so that innocent young men like Mr. Bell are not preyed on by the system.
But much like speaking about the US Military Industrial Complex without reference to the agency of bad state actors around the world, both need to be taken into account in terms of priority, as stopping Russia from invading Ukraine and creating World War III through going into Poland does not mean that we should not be watchful of our own government as well.
Since there is neither a focus on the long term building up of the family or the short term locking up of criminals in cities like New York, it is very likely that we will be seeing more people take the law into their own hands.
There is already an increase in private security for businesses and the wealthy as a response to inadequate policing in the US with 3.1 security guards for every 1000 civilians compared to 2 police police officers for the same number, according to the Security Industry Association.
Self-regulating communities such as Hassidic Jews living in California now have their women strapped with Glock-19s to defend from anti-semitic attacks. And it would not be the first time U.S. Jewish communities took matters into their own hands as the controversial Rabbi Meir Kahane organized defense squads and patrols back when Coney Island was a crime den in the 60s and 70s.
What you end up getting, however, is a low trust society where the wealthy are protected like lords in their castles and separate clans of self regulating minority groups rely on in-group preference, while the social contract that was supposed to guarantee a state of law and order is dissolved.
One way this can end is a right wing totalitarian dictatorship, though I would advise all three of the trad-pilled anti establishment readers to think about what this would be in reality when it comes to power corrupting.
Leaving that conversation for another day, the only way to reverse this troubling trend is for the urban sheep-like liberals grazing on self esteem lifting social media to become goats that can scale up the mountain to get a wider view of what the priorities are.
This type of separation of the sheep and goats can ironically bring us together on a more holistic vision for such a divided issue… the division of which only benefits those who want us to keep us ideologically divided for their own benefit.
Through this “order of operations” approach, we can not just prevent such a horrible event, but stop the events which lead up to a tragedy like this from happening in the first place.