If progressives don’t want people acting in self-defense or defending others on the subway, then the state has to keep us safe — but Gov. Hochul still won’t protect us from the deadliest subway environment in three decades.
It’s reasonable for New Yorkers to fear that Good Samaritans will be less likely to act, even after the acquittal of Daniel Penny on a criminal negligence charge for the death of Jordan Neely, who had threatened other subway passengers.
Who wants to sit at the defense table for eight weeks?
As Imani-Ciara Pizarro, one of two random stabbing victims at Grand Central on Christmas Eve, told The Post, witnesses to the attack “just froze.”
Causing reasonable people to think twice before helping someone else makes the subways even more dangerous than they are right now — despite Hochul’s absurd rhetoric that they are safe.
Hochul’s response to the horrific murder by fire of a still-unidentified woman on a moving F train Dec. 22 was beyond caricature: Her office bragged on X about about her March “action” to deploy the National Guard to the trains.
“Crime is going down,” the post boasted.
Her follow-up was hardly better: Thanks to “brand-new security cameras,” Hochul noted, police had arrested a suspect in the arson murder, and added a caveat: “Make no mistake: any crime is one too many, even with subway crime going down.”
Which subway crimes are down?
The crime people most worry about — homicide — is breaking decades-long records.
This year, 12 people have lost their lives to violence on the subway, and most of the incidents have been unprovoked stranger-on-stranger killings.
The victims began with grandfather Richard Henderson, killed in January on a Brooklyn train as he tried to calm a dispute over music, and end (so far) with the Coney Island conflagration.
That makes 43 people killed on the subways since March 2020, when three murders within weeks — with few people even on the subway in those early pandemic days — ushered in a disorienting surge of violence.
Astonishingly enough, one of those 2020 murders — that of subway motorman Garrett Goble — was also arson.
This year’s dozen killings smashed the post-2020 record of 11 in 2022 — a year during which concern about subway violence propelled GOP gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin to a near-win over Hochul.
For decades prior to 2020, after having stomped out underground violence beginning in 1990 by stopping small crimes before they escalated to big ones, New York clocked one or two subway murders a year.
Before 2020, it took 20 years — going back to the new millennium — to tally 43 subway killings.
This is so bad, it doesn’t matter if other crimes are “down.”
Anyway, other subway crimes aren’t down — at least, not anywhere close to the pre-2020 normal.
This year, through November, subway passengers and workers have suffered 947 violent felonies. Yes, that’s 9.5% below last year — but it’s also 14.1% above 2019’s figures.
Adjust for lower post-COVID ridership, and the per-ride rate of violence is higher, up by almost two-thirds.
Another thing about those homicide stats: Four killings since 2020 — more than 10% — have been determined to be self-defense cases, including one just this month.
These, theoretically, don’t count in the NYPD’s annual murder figures.
Indeed, while you might think twice about defending someone else post-Penny, the urge to defend oneself remains hard to overcome.
The day of the fatal Brooklyn fire, at least four men surrounded another sleeping man on a Queens 7 train, robbing and assaulting him.
The man fought back, fatally stabbing one assailant — and (so far) he doesn’t face charges; his surviving robbers do.
Violence begets justified violence. And if progressives don’t like that, they must stop the initial violence.
How?
Scratch the surface of a subway murder or near-murder, and it’s easy to figure out the problem.
The suspect in the mid-December fire, 33-year-old Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, illegally entered the country after having been deported in the Trump era.
Zapeta-Calil is an extreme example of why it’s bad policy to invite tens of thousands of unvetted young men with nothing to do into your country — especially if you’re not going to enforce low-level laws that rein in misbehavior.
He’s been taking advantage of our shelters, getting high on synthetic pot and blackout drunk.
Neely, whose death on the Manhattan F train sparked the Penny trial, was also high on K2 when he threatened passengers.
New York, having decriminalized drug use, does nothing to prevent such psychosis-inducing intoxication.
Or, take last week’s non–fatal Grand Central stabbings — allegedly committed by Jason Sargeant, a man with a history of arrests for criminal mischief, farebeating and assaulting an officer.
Elected officials don’t want people like Penny defending others on the subway, but won’t protect us from predictable violence.
So our subway system becomes every strong man for himself, with weaker people on their own.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
