The death of 33-year old Jordan Neely yesterday was senseless. Abhorrent. Enraging, even. He was mentally ill, hungry and thirsty. He needed a social worker with a police officer escort, a sandwich and a bottle of water, not a vigilante doing an MMA impersonation as his train pulled into the Broadway-Lafayette station in prosperous Soho.
New Yorkers run into homeless, mentally ill people on the subway every single damned day. And the political robots — from Bloomberg to Cuomo to Hochul — all recite the same figure: one billion dollars. Over one billion dollars has been spent on the homeless problem, all for naught. As if we should give them a dog yummy for throwing taxpayer dollars into the void.
Worse, the vigilante that strangled Jordan on the floor of a dirty subway train faced no consequences. From Allison Wiltz:
Homelessness shouldn't be a death sentence in America. Yet, when Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless Black man known throughout the community as a talented Michael Jackson impersonator, shouted about his discomfort, being hungry, thirsty, and "fed up," throwing his jacket in a New York subway, a White Marine responded by pinning Neely in a chokehold for fifteen minutes, a move that left him unconscious according to the now-viral video of the incident. Paramedics could not revive him. Now the Black community is mourning, having lost another Black man to senseless brutality. Alvin Bragg, New York's district attorney, has not filed charges against the unnamed White man so far.
And what was the Governor’s response? "People who are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of mental health episodes, and that's what I believe were some of the factors involved here. There's consequences for behavior," she said.
Consequences. A 15-minute choke hold is the consequence, apparently.
The Governor, of course, is playing to the New York Post “all-crime-all-the-time” narrative, data be damned, with subway ridership still only at around 60 percent. She is giving what the late, great social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to call “boob bait for bubba.” I find Kathy Hochul, quite frankly, to be a horrible, talentless Governor, altogether lacking in human-kindness. She has no ear for the music of governance. Of a blue state, besides, where most people actually care for the least of us, not tax breaks for the already wealthy. I've held my tongue until now, but no more after that robotic, dehumanizing answer.
As the first woman Governor of the state of New York, I felt that I should hold back on the minor criticisms of her administration. Because — what do minor criticisms do but add to the headwinds of bigotry that are already baked into her job already? I wanted to be an ally. There were so many other political events — national, international — that were more worthy of my public outrage. And then this happened and it is the straw that broke this camel’s back.
One of the problems that I have not brought up until now is how badly the Governor has failed to provide critical mental health services to the homeless in the New York City subway system. And, as Governor, this is her job. To be fair, she inherited a nightmare from all the previous Governors that failed to confront this issue, but COVID was the greatest opportunity to finally — once and for all — deal with the problem. Or at least it gave a sitting Governor the political capital to make some difficult decisions on a difficult matter.
There was no question that it — the mental heath-homeless crisis — was going to get worse. The entire planet is dealing with the mental health aftermath of COVID. Who in their right minds in this administration did not predict that the subways would end up absorbing all of the mental health horrible outcomes in our region of the last three years? Who in their right minds in this administration did not predict that the homeless problem in the city was about to explode exponentially? Who in their right minds in this administration did not foresee that this was going to get ugly if they didn’t get out in front of it and do the hard, unsexy legwork?
I take the New York City subway every day and some nights and there is just no way around it, mentally ill fellow human beings fill the subways, especially in the after-hours. It is heartbreaking to see a human being, in the dead of winter, lying on the cold, hard seats wrapped only in a blanket. I have seen people smoking cigarettes, crack cocaine, meth — anything you can imagine, really — on these trains. Self-medicating. With no police in sight, despite the massive spending — always spending, never results. Where are the police? Often checking their cellphones by the subway entrances, not in the cars where things get really complicated. It is so much easier to just stand by the entrance and look for fare beaters than to deal with the real problems of mental health in the subways.
The solution to this problem is far too complex to solve on a substack newsletter, even one as smashing as mine. But a few things have become quite obvious. Tackling homelessness as a criminal issue has failed, as well it should, because it is not. Public vigilantism is obscene talk radio fueled garbage. But if we don’t act now, there will be more of it. In fact, I predict right wing outlets will portray the marine strangler as a “white, working class hero,” a Kyle Rittenhouse, a Bernie Goetz.
We need to spend more money on public health — especially mental health advocates and social workers. Cities need to make this our number one issue going forwards. What do we need to do to keep our fellow citizens from these outcomes? Cities should share data on their successes and failures. Every city should be seen as an experiment in solving the problem. I reiterate: Cities need to make homeless into our number one problem, so that we don’t get Governors, like Hochul, speaking like a Chatbot, caught unawares.
Finally, the billion dollar investment into homelessness is an abject failure. Democrats need to acknowledge this and stop using it as a talking point as to how much one allegedly cares about the issue. The Bloomberg administration used to do the same thing. Whenever a reporter asked about homelessness — the most unsexy, difficult and politically unrewarding urban issue of our time — a member of the Bloomberg administration would recite, on cue, the figure of one billion dollars in investments. For what? For this?
For a billion dollars plus, couldn’t we just buy all the failing hotels in the city, storefronts and just house the unhoused, with police officers providing safety and on the condition that the newly-housed interact on a regular basis with social workers and mental health professionals? Is that too simplistic? Is there anything better? Because at one billion dollars plus and counting, this is just not damn well working.
And we seem to be at the vigilante phase of dealing with this — our long neglected urban problem — which is a dangerous place to be in a city of ten million stories.
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