Earlier: Maybe We Need More Mass Incarceration?
From the New York Times:
‘I Am Shaken’: Spate of Violent Subway Attacks Unnerves Riders
Three riders were assaulted in the system over three days, as reports of felony assaults, burglaries and homicides continue to climb.
By Christina Goldbaum
Nov. 20, 2020It was 2 p.m. on Tuesday, on what would have normally been a busy weekday as the Thanksgiving holiday neared. Alex Weisman, a stage and television actor, stepped off a train at a subway station on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and was punched twice in the face by a man who fled.
The assault broke Mr. Weisman’s skull in two places and tore one of his retinas.
“There was nothing else I could have done to protect myself,” Mr. Weisman, 33, said on Friday. “I am shaken by this.”
The day after Mr. Weisman was attacked, a man was shoved onto the tracks at the Bryant Park station after arguing with another man whom the police believe was a panhandler. On Thursday, a woman was pushed off the platform at the Union Square station by an emotionally disturbed man who appeared to be homeless. She lay between the tracks and avoided serious injuries as a train passed over her.
I would imagine that no single type of crime is more damaging to the question of whether people are going to move back to New York City than incidents of being shoved onto the subway tracks. That’s pretty much the worst New York terror.
The trio of violent attacks on the subway is part of a worrying trend: After overall crime on the system dropped significantly during the citywide lockdown this spring, violent crimes, like assaults, started to surge.
My impression is that when a story makes the newspapers about some random assault, such as the crazy man who punched actor Rick Moranis, the assailant has usually been arrested quite a few times before.
For example, remember the Free Hugs Guy, Jermaine Himmelstein, who was arrested in 2016 for punching a woman on video in Times Square? Well, that was only the tip of the iceberg: he’d punched lots of pretty white women before when they didn’t want a Free Hug, including a young lady I know. But charges after the Times Square assault were dropped on grounds he was mentally unfit to stand trial. So then in 2017, Himmelstein was arrested again for harassing a tourist woman.
My point is that it appears that a sizable fraction of unprovoked (and non-larcenous) attacks on pedestrians in New York City are carried out by a small number of repeat offenders. Lock them up and you can put a dent into numbers.
But I also suspect that crazy men tend to be susceptible to the general climate of opinion. When respectable media is declaring a Racial Reckoning against whites, is it all that surprising that lunatics tend to take this message into their own hands?
