The Jordan Neely Tragedy

National Review Online

Tuesday, May 09, 2023

 

Jordan Neely did not deserve to die after a former Marine restrained him by the neck on the F train in Manhattan. His death is a tragedy. Before the fatal altercation, Neely had been screaming at subway passengers that he was willing to go to prison for life. Though his death was ruled a homicide by the coroner, the Marine who restrained him, Daniel Penny, has not been charged, although Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is investigating the matter and under pressure to take action.

 

Politicians, including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D., N.Y.), wasted no time in calling Neely’s death a murder, and even a “public execution.” Professionally divisive Bishop Talbert Swan complained that Neely’s medical and criminal history had been released, but no information about “the white marine veteran that murdered him.” (It should be noted that a black man helped Penny restrain Neely.) Writing in the Nation, Elie Mystal said, “This is a story that could only happen in America, where white supremacy and anti-Blackness combine to make the violent murder of a human being on public transportation into the kind of thing white people can do & then go home.” By the weekend, New York City’s Midtown subways were being snarled by social-justice protesters.

 

In point of fact, this is a story about New York. Constrained by outdated law and updated progressive shibboleths, the city’s amply funded institutions had effectively abandoned Neely to his psychosis and his addictions, leaving him on the street to be a danger to himself and others.

 

Neely had been arrested 40 times in recent years, many for minor infractions like turnstile jumping, but more recently for assault. In 2021, he punched a 67-year-old woman in the street, breaking her nose and causing severe facial injuries. He repeatedly bounced in and out of the hands of well-funded institutions in New York: hospitals, mental-health facilities, and shelters. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Neely was on what outreach workers refer to as the ‘Top 50’ list — a roster maintained by the city of the homeless people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment. He was taken to hospitals numerous times, both voluntarily and involuntarily.”

 

When he was facing charges for his assault, the city’s judicial authorities bent over backward to induce him to take up a 15-month drug-rehab program, even promising to reduce his felony charges. Neely abandoned the facility after 13 days. A warrant was out for his arrest.

 

We would not be hearing sermonettes about anti-blackness and white supremacy if Jordan Neely had died of an overdose in a shelter or on the street. Or if he had been killed, as dozens of other young homeless people have been killed on the subway in recent years, by a perpetrator of his same skin color. Ocasio Cortez and Bishop Swan would have had nothing to say, because Jordan Neely only became interesting to them when his death could be used to indict whites collectively. It is an attempt to scapegoat the reactionary other for the utter failure of progressive blue-state institutions. It is a disgrace.

 

New York City has some of the most well-funded mental-health resources in the world. But not enough is used on the truly needy. People suffering from severe mental-health distress and serially violent criminals cannot be taken care of merely by “street teams” who make homelessness on New York’s streets easier to endure. They need shelter, structure, and treatment.

 

Just last year, New York City mayor Eric Adams spoke of the “moral obligation” to help those in distress, whose internal chaos becomes the city’s public disorder. He sought to stop the city’s ineffective policy of bouncing people from one institution and back out onto the street without real plans for ongoing care. We commended him, with the reservation that New York likely needed more than the planned 50 new psychiatric beds — including updating its laws to allow for involuntary confinement of the mentally ill who are a danger to themselves or others. Jordan Neely’s tragic death shows that when it comes to the institutions that care for those who cannot care for themselves, there’s so much more rebuilding left to do.