The Use and Abuse of Jordan Neely

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, May 07, 2023

 

Anyone who lives in a major urban area routinely encounters someone like Jordan Neely — a mentally ill person who needs help, isn’t getting it, and, at best, lives at the margins and, at worst, is a threat to himself and everyone around him.

 

Neely was a product of our urban civilization, of the choices it makes and specifically of its callous disregard for the mentally ill swathed in a faux compassion.

 

At the end of the day, no one really cared about Neely, not enough to get him the help he needed — indeed, to insist on it. Now that his life has ended tragically and he offers the potential for a convenient political narrative, he will be valued more as a supposed symbol of the evils of racism and of the power structures of our society than he was as simply another deeply troubled man who haunted our streets.

 

This is disgusting. Jordan Neely will get posthumous hagiography, when what he really needed was a regular dose of his meds.

 

Neely’s all-too-short life exemplified phenomena that will make no one sense to anyone looking back at this period decades from now (at least one hopes).

 

Imagine if we emptied out the nursing homes so people with dementia could wander the streets eating out of trash cans and sleeping on grates while office workers stepped around them on the way to work. It’d be unthinkable, right? But for some reason we allow a class of other mentally impaired people, schizophrenics, to do the same thing.

 

Why? In part, as the highly regarded new book The Best Minds relates, it’s the hangover from the romanticization of madness beginning in the 1960s that created the predicate for de-institutionalization and a host of other policy mistakes.

 

The cracked theories of the likes of Michael Foucault aren’t as fashionable anymore, but there’s still an industry of civil libertarians and so-called advocates for the mentally ill who resist measures to compel treatment for people who otherwise will end up sleeping in subway cars and, in some extreme cases, pushing people in front of them.

 

Even in places like New York City, which has, in theory, recognized the problem of the homeless mentally ill (Mayor Eric Adams says the right things), there’s never enough follow- through, or resources, or authority under the rules to truly deal with the problem.

 

Jordan Neely was typical in that he wasn’t unknown to authorities; rather, the opposite. He was arrested constantly, and constantly in and out of shelters and hospitals. And it made no difference. That his loved ones were both afraid of him and frustrated that he couldn’t get the proper treatment is also drearily familiar.

 

The best-case scenario in such situations — and it’s not much of a best case — is that the mentally ill person lives a miserable life on the streets and everyone who encounters him is trained to suppress their normal human instincts and walks past and looks the other way.

 

But there’s always a possibility of something worse. Over the last couple of years, Neely had punched two elderly people in or outside subway stations. With the wrong punch, he could have killed someone.

 

Then, there’s the potential consequences of his menacing behavior to him. Although most everyone in New York avoids confrontations with disturbed individuals acting aggressively on the subway and elsewhere — even if they see them harassing or hurting people — there’s always the chance of someone mounting a physical defense of himself or others. That’s what happened on the F train last week, with a tragic outcome.

 

We’ll learn more about the particulars of the confrontation and how justified Daniel Penny was putting Neely in the chokehold for as long as he did. Yet we do know that, in the largest sense, it never should have happened. After all the years when his mental incapacity and bizarre and threatening behavior had been well-established, Jordan Neely never should have been on that subway car out of his mind. All sorts of people will now claim to speak in his name and honor his memory. But not enough people honored him when he was alive — when he was allowed, like so many others, to moulder in his illness, an ongoing personal tragedy even before the terrible end.