The Jordan Neely story is a tragedy with important implications for America’s cities, especially concerning whether city residents have a responsibility and right to maintain order when officials fail to.
As a young woman, this question is of particular interest to me. I’ve had plenty of my own negative public transit interactions that have left me questioning whether my city is capable of protecting the basic rights of its citizens. Within my first year of living in Washington, D.C., I was cornered by a man on the Metro who tried to force me to watch a video of him masturbating, stalked by a drunk man who tried to follow me home from Union Station, and threatened by a mentally deranged homeless man who said he wanted to assault and skin me alive. It doesn’t help that the city strictly limits residents’ options for self-defense on public transit. Really, the only option available to young women in these situations is to keep their heads down and wait for the threat to pass or hope that a young man willing to defend their safety and integrity might step in.
That’s what Daniel Penny did this month when Neely, a homeless career criminal who had most recently been charged with punching an elderly woman in the face, began verbally harassing and abusing New York City commuters. The Marine restrained Neely when it became clear that he was a threat to himself and others. And he has been rewarded for it with a charge of second-degree manslaughter by a leftist prosecutor who knows a political narrative when he sees one.
Footage of the incident shows Penny, assisted by two other men, one of whom was black, restraining Neely in a chokehold after Neely began screaming at other passengers. The encounter reportedly only lasted a few minutes, and Neely fell unconscious and was then transported to a hospital, where he later died.
One witness on the train that day said Penny did not engage Neely until things began to get out of hand. “[Neely] said, ‘I don’t care. I’ll take a bullet, I’ll go to jail,’ because he would kill people on the train,” the woman recalled. “He said, ‘I would kill a motherf***er. I don’t care. I’ll take a bullet. I’ll go to jail.'”
“‘Gonna go to jail for life’?” she added. “What? What penalties involve going to jail for life? Could you tell me? Yeah, it’s not kicking somebody in the shin or punching somebody in the face.”
This woman clearly felt her safety was in jeopardy — and she was more than likely right. Several New York City residents have since accused Neely of trying to push commuters onto the subway tracks. The man had been arrested over 40 times in recent years and had another warrant out for his arrest when he died. But regardless of his rap sheet, if a mentally unstable man is threatening to commit a violent act against you or someone near you, it is common sense to take him at his word for it.
Progressives, for whom common sense is a rarity, would rather force city residents to accept this kind of behavior as a normal part of urban life. To be sure, in large populations where homelessness and drug abuse are more common, residents are going to be more likely to encounter people such as Neely. But the Left’s attempted normalization of Neely’s erratic conduct, and the underlying problems that led to it, is despicable. Just because Neely was homeless does not mean that New York City residents should have been forced to endure threats to their physical safety. Living in an urban area with a higher number of people in need does not mean that I am required to give up my basic right to safety. Indeed, if anything, it means I have the right to be even more vigilant in protecting that right for myself.
America needs to see the prosecution of Daniel Penny for what it is: yet another effort by the Left to normalize the breakdown of the rule of law. New York City’s collapse is just one example. In Portland, Oregon, officials have set up “safe injection sites” for addicts to “safely” use hard drugs. Washington state is even moving to decriminalize fentanyl, which is responsible for more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States over the past two years. In San Francisco, a former police commissioner recently dismissed frequent car break-ins as a “basic city life experience.”
The goal of policies and statements such as these, indeed, the goal of Penny’s prosecution, is to demoralize the public into accepting the failures of progressive governance. American city-dwellers need to, like Penny, start saying no.
* Article From: The Washington Examiner
