NYC NOW - May 9, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Police arrest 11 people at Broadway Lafayette subway station during a vigil-turned-demonstration for Jordan Neely on Monday night. And amid new details about Daniel Penny's deadly choke-hold on Jordan Neely, WNYC’s Michael Hill sits down with public safety reporter Samantha Max to discuss the historical context of vigilante justice in New York City, examining past cases and analyzing changes and consistencies over time.

NYC, how I see, why see, why I see. Welcome to NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Tuesday, May 9th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. On WNYC, police say they arrested 11 people at a vigil-turned demonstration last night. People had gathered outside the Broadway-Lafiet subway station to mourn and protest the killing of Jordan Neely at the hands of another passenger last week.

Chief of Department, Jeffrey Madre, says officers found a Molotov cocktail on the scene. People have a right to speak up when they believe in injustice occurs, but we cannot have people who are coming out to protest. We want to be a peaceful protest, bringing out dangerous substances like this. Photos from the scene appeared to show injured protesters, but police declined to comment on any of them. Police also arrested a photojournalist. They say they issued a summons.

and released that person. Taking a look now at your forecast. 64 with some sunshine out there, mostly sunny and 69 today, and then tomorrow, sunny and 72 as we begin a warm-up. Thursday, sunny and 79, then on Friday, here come the 80s. Much is still publicly unknown about exactly what happened on the F train last week.

The moments before a passenger, Daniel Penny put Jordan Neely an unhoused man in a deadly chokehold. But the tales that have surfaced so far bring to mind several cases of vigilante justice from New York City's history, when people took matters into their own hands to stop someone who they perceived to be a threat. Neely's death also has sparked praise from some and outrage from others. WNYC Samantha Max has been looking back at history to see what's changed and what has stayed the same. Sam, you've looked back on the city's history, as I said, and especially at one case from 1984.

I remember this one involving a person named Bernie Getz. Who was he? So Bernard Getz was a white man who was riding the subway when he encountered four black 18 and 19-year-olds. And what we know from back then is that at least one of them asked him for $5. And Gets, he had actually been mugged in the subway system a few years earlier and had decided to buy a gun after that because that experience had scared him. So he had said at the time that being approached by these teenagers kind of scared him again. He thought that they were going to rob him and ended up shooting all of them. The teens survived, but they were all injured. One was actually even paralyzed.

And after some legal back and forth, Gets ended up being charged with several crimes. He went to trial. He was acquitted on everything except for illegal gun possession and spent eight months in jail. He also went to a civil trial with this teenager who was paralyzed and he was ordered to pay $43 million, but he declared bankruptcy and never ended up paying out that judgment. You called up Gets last week. Did he have anything to say about the Neely case? You know, he didn't want to talk to me at first, but in a pretty brief conversation that we had, had before he hung up on me, he did tell me that he was surprised that Neely's death has become a

news story. He claimed that 40 years ago, journalists didn't even report on the killings of many police officers and taxi drivers. And today, this is a new story. What can I say? It's times of change. Anyway, anyway, that's it. So. Did you have any thoughts on people? Okay, in this case, what happened to you? And that was the conversation. Yeah, I hang up there. You came across another case that also touches on the idea of so-called vigilante justice. Tell us about that one. Yeah, so this case, a historian named Fritz Umbuck had actually told me about,

it was a person named Ronnie Sumter. He was 39 years old at the time, a black upper Manhattan resident on the way home from the movies with his three-year-old son. And they were at the Columbus Circle subway station when a homeless man allegedly spit on him and actually punched him in the face. Sumter claimed at the time that he tried to run away, but he couldn't. And he ended up slamming this man's head into the subway platform and kicking him, and this homeless person died and was never actually even identified. The person was buried in an unmarked grave. And, you know, this case was different because this was a father

who said he was afraid for his life and afraid for his son, who was just steps away. He had also been assaulted and a grand jury declined to indict him. He was interviewed in a 1990 feature story in New York Magazine about vigilante justice and what had happened to him and kind of shared his experience. I tried to get in touch with him, but never heard back. Those two incidents, Sam, happened more than three decades ago. What commonalities do you see between then and right now? I mean, the homelessness and mental health crisis in our subway system definitely still persist. Anyone who rides the subways regularly can see that. And there's also still this fear about crime on the subway.

Those fears have gotten even worse in recent years with the pandemic when there were increases in crime and decreases in ridership also that came with it. Ron Cooley, the attorney who represented the teen that Bruey, and he gets paralyzed. So some people just don't seem to be acting on facts, but they're acting on their fears right now. So you see somebody who is mentally ill and acting in a way that is disturbing to passers by and may be frightening to passers by.

And they then consider their fear to be an objective threat So Coobee says that fears about crime have blurred the line between real and perceived threats. What's different about the Neely case and the public reaction to it? I mean, first, there's still so much we don't know about what actually happened on that train car. So it's hard to really get into the nitty-gritty specifics of any of these cases. But one big change to note is the crime rate. There definitely was an uptick in crime during the pandemic here in New York City and in so many other cities across the country. But the numbers are far lower than they were in 1990.

That's the year that we actually peaked with, you know, more than 2,200 murders. There were way more felonies on the subways at that time. More than 18,000 reported felonies in 1990 compared to just about 2,300 last year. there's also been a shift in the conversation around topics like mental health, homelessness, racism, policing. I think, you know, as a society, we've learned a lot more about, you know, how to be more mindful on those things. I know, we still obviously have a ways to go. And, you know, while some New Yorkers have defended the strap hangers who restrained nearly, others have taken this case as an opportunity to push for change, more than a dozen people even just.

jumped onto the subway tracks last weekend to protest nearly's deaths. So there's definitely momentum around this case to push for change. Sam, I have to ask you this. What role does race, the color of the victim, the color of the alleged assailant? What role does race play in the assumptions people make in these cases? You know, I'm not going to try to put my head into the brains of Daniel Penny or anyone else who was in that subway car, including two other men who in the video appear to be helping to restrain nearly and whose racial and ethnic backgrounds we don't know. But we've clearly learned a lot more about implicit bias in recent years and the connections

that our brains make even when we're not trying to make them. And everyone's brains make assumptions about race. It's just part of how we navigate the world that we live in, how we make sense of all the stimuli around us. We also make assumptions about people based on how they're dressed, how they're acting, if they're acting erratically, especially on the subway where everyone's being hypervigilant. So all those different factors come into play when you come into a situation that you're not expecting on the subway car.

Samantha Max covers public safety for WNIC. You can find her story on Vigilante Justice at gothamist.com. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More this evening.