On a Sunday morning two weeks ago, I was riding the F train from Manhattan into Brooklyn when I witnessed an incident that is typical of the kinds of unpleasant interactions to which normal New York City subway commuters are routinely subjected. A large black man got on, hip-hop music with profane lyrics blasting from a speaker hooked up to his phone. Two young gay men—one white, one likely Hispanic—who had been carrying on a conversation near where the newcomer sat down looked visibly annoyed and one of them threw a stern look in the new rider’s general direction. The black guy caught the look and immediately sprang from his seat.
“You got something to say?” he shouted.
Met with silence and an averted gaze from the two seated men, he persisted.
“You got something to say, say it, cuz I’ll fuck you up right here, nigga!”
The two men stared forward and downward uncomfortably. The man who had confronted them remained standing, continuing to blast his music, until getting off the train a few stops later. Only then did the two riders resume their conversation.
On May 1, riding a different F train near the Broadway-Lafayette stop in Manhattan, was 30-year-old Jordan Neely, a homeless black man with a history of mental illness who had been arrested 42 times, including for punching a 65-year-old woman in June 2021 and a 67-year-old woman in November of the same year. I should note here that someone who has been arrested 42 times has proven beyond any doubt that he cannot be trusted in society and should be confined either to a prison or a mental hospital for his own safety and ours. But he was out and about and, on May 1, he was aboard that F train threatening riders, up to no good yet again. Witnesses report that he was yelling, tossed down his jacket, was throwing around garbage and shouted that he was “fed up,” that he “didn’t care” if he went to “prison for life” and that he was “ready to die.”
amgreatness.com/2023/05/08/street-thugs-and-the-intellectual-thugs-who-enable-them/