--:-- Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- [Discussion of subway protests]
--:-- Noelle King: We're going to dive into a story that has been dividing the city. A 24-year-old man, Daniel Penny, put a fellow passenger, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold on a subway train. Neely died. Penny has not been charged. Let's talk about what happened.
--:-- Samantha Max: I'm Samantha Max, a public safety reporter at WNYC and Gothamist.
--:-- Matt Katz: And I'm Matt Katz, also a public safety reporter at WNYC.
--:-- Noelle King: Take me back to Monday a week ago. What do we know about what happened on that train?
--:-- Matt Katz: There was a train passing through the Lower East Side, making its way uptown. We don't know exactly what happened, but based on the account of one man who was inside the train car, an independent journalist, Juan Alberto Vasquez, recorded the incident.
--:-- Samantha Max: According to Vasquez, Neely boarded the uptown F-train in Soho, screaming and ranting aggressively. He was yelling that he was hungry and thirsty, that he was tired, and that he was even willing to die.
--:-- Matt Katz: At some point after that, he ends up in a chokehold with various people on the train. The train stopped for several minutes, and then everyone was told to get off the train. That's when they found Neely on the ground, still in a chokehold.
--:-- Noelle King: Who is the man that put Neely in a chokehold? Daniel Penny, 24, from Long Island. He was a Marine, not active at the time. He's now lawyered up with a prominent attorney.
--:-- Samantha Max: His attorney released a statement offering condolences for Neely and saying that Penny acted to protect himself and others until help arrived. They also mentioned that Neely had a documented history of violent and erratic behavior, the apparent result of ongoing and untreated mental illness.
--:-- Matt Katz: But we don't see that in any of the video that we have. We haven't heard that exactly from other eyewitnesses yet. We know that there's no evidence that Neely touched anybody on the train.
--:-- Noelle King: Tell me what we know about Jordan Neely. Who was he?
--:-- Samantha Max: He was a 30-year-old man who was known to New Yorkers for his Michael Jackson impersonations. He made a living doing this on the subways and platforms of New York City since at least 2009.
--:-- Matt Katz: He was part of a little community of Michael Jackson impersonators who worked the streets of New York City. Our colleague spoke to somebody who knew him from foster care, who said he used to share the money he made from doing this impersonation on the subways and platforms with other kids from foster care.
--:-- Samantha Max: Jordan used the money that he made on the subway trains to pay for haircuts, laundry, and food for other kids from foster care.
--:-- Noelle King: We've asked about Neely's criminal history, and the NYPD is not giving any official statement. But other outlets have reported on many arrests for low-level offenses that Neely had in his past.
--:-- Matt Katz: There was an interesting story about a victim of Neely's who came forward and gave an on-the-record interview to the New York Daily News, saying he was punched in the face by Neely just while standing there on a subway platform a few years ago.
--:-- Samantha Max: Neely was arrested after that, and the victim thought Neely should be getting treatment for what seemed to him like untreated drug addiction and mental illness.
--:-- Noelle King: I was born in Brooklyn, and I lived in New York for much of my adult life. I left in 2019. But my memory of New York is that it is not uncommon on a subway train to see someone like Jordan Neely who appears to be struggling or is kind of yelling, acting out.
--:-- Samantha Max: It's not uncommon. I mean, I only can speak from anecdotal experience. I grew up in New York. I've been on again, off again, riding the subways for 25 years. And from my anecdotal experience, there are more people who are displaying signs of mental illness or drug use on the trains now than they were several years ago.
--:-- Matt Katz: I've had personal encounters. I was on my way to WNYC a few months ago to guest host a radio show. It was eight in the morning. A man who appeared to be an aggressive panhandler got in my face, spit in my face. I was wearing a mask, fortunately, and then moved on.
--:-- Samantha Max: Nobody else on the train intervened. I understand that, but nobody even said anything to me afterwards. Like, "Hey, are you okay?" Or, "Hey, sorry about that."
--:-- Noelle King: This is a common thing. I've spoken to mental health experts in the last few days, and they say that there is no greater propensity for mentally ill people to be violent than the general population at large.
--:-- Matt Katz: In other words, we needn't be that scared of somebody who's displaying signs of being in a mental health crisis. On the other hand, it's scary when someone's acting erratically and maybe not wearing shoes or swinging around some object.
--:-- Noelle King: It's become a huge part of the conversation around public safety in New York City in the last couple of years. During the pandemic, there was a huge dip in ridership on the subways. And when you have fewer people, you just have fewer eyes on situations.
--:-- Samantha Max: And it also became a space where perhaps people who were experiencing homelessness were flooding to the subways. They have always been there, but they're continuing to be there with fewer other riders around.
--:-- Matt Katz: So it becomes sort of a self-perpetuating cycle where there are people who are afraid to ride the subway, so then they don't ride, and then ridership continues to drop.
--:-- Noelle King: The mayor and the governor have made a huge point of flooding the subways with police officers. They're in the process of installing surveillance cameras on every single subway car. They're sending mental health professionals into the subways.
--:-- Samantha Max: They're calling it "Cops, Cameras, Care." It's a comprehensive civic strategy that will do more than deal with a temporary fix.
--:-- Matt Katz: But the mayor and the governor have gotten a lot of criticism for plans that they've put in place to forcibly remove people who seem to be in the midst of a mental health crisis.
--:-- Noelle King: Let's talk about the protests that have been happening. Sam, you were at a protest and you talk about how people there were feeling.
--:-- Samantha Max: People are just really upset and disheartened. I mean, that being said, though, like, I think it is kind of a Rorschach test, because if you look at my Twitter DMs right now, there are some people that are not upset that this happened.
--:-- Matt Katz: I was speaking with two men who I had mentioned who were on the train and they came onto the platform as all of this was going down. Their names were James Kings and Johnny Grima. They both throughout their lives have experienced homelessness.
--:-- Samantha Max: James Kings, he was telling me like he felt as a Black man who has lived much of his life unhoused, like that could have been him. And he just was really scared by that and just feeling very unsettled by it.
--:-- Matt Katz: And I think they both also felt really helpless, like they had stumbled onto the scene when it was too late for them to do anything.
--:-- Noelle King: This is a prism for how people view so many different hot button issues. Safety in public places, the treatment of young Black men, the broadening mental health crisis in the wake of COVID, the effectiveness, the usefulness of policing.
--:-- Matt Katz: And it's become, through the media and social media, a major debate now in the larger national culture war.
--:-- Noelle King: Despite a lack of details that we have about what's going on, we already had Elon Musk liking a tweet referring to Jordan Neely as a worthless individual.
--:-- Samantha Max: And that you know you see that kind of rhetoric now.
--:-- Matt Katz: So and then the question is for so many people and the debate is was the person who put him in a chokehold a bloodthirsty racist or was he a hero who was protecting innocent commuters?
--:-- Noelle King: Is this about the government's failure to provide shelter and food to the poor because Neely reportedly had complained about being hungry and thirsty before he was put in a chokehold?
--:-- Samantha Max: Or does this whole incident show the failure of government to provide law and order?
--:-- Matt Katz: And this is just an evidence of the fact that people have to take matters into their own hands.
--:-- Noelle King: Matt, I wonder if you can put some of this in context. There are instances, some very famous instances in New York history of either what was described as vigilantism or people not intervening when somebody was being hurt or even killed.
--:-- Matt Katz: One of my earliest New York City memories is Bernie Goetz. He was a white man who shot four unarmed young Black men on the subway in 1984. Vigilantism will not be tolerated in this city.
--:-- Noelle King: Another case from a couple of decades before that, Kitty Genovese. Her murder in 1964 shocked the collective conscience of New York City and eventually the world.
--:-- Matt Katz: But what do we really know about what happened to Kitty Genovese? The urban legend around it is that this woman was murdered and she screamed and nobody came to help her.
--:-- Samantha Max: While many of the facts behind that original report turned out not to be true, the image of New Yorkers standing by as a young woman was killed has become a part of the fabric of New York City's history.
--:-- Matt Katz: And that was brought up in the wake of this incident because there were other people on the train car who were either involved in helping the person who was doing the chokeholding or standing by.
--:-- Noelle King: What about more recently? I think one thing that definitely comes to mind was early in 2022, there was a woman named Michelle Goh who was walking on the platform at the Times Square station.
--:-- Matt Katz: And a man in the midst of a mental health crisis threw her onto the tracks and a car hit her and killed her.
--:-- Samantha Max: Friends say Goh spent the last decade advocating for the homeless and was trying to help those like her alleged killer.
--:-- Matt Katz: And that was a situation that I think really scared a lot of New Yorkers because it was just a completely random encounter.
--:-- Noelle King: And then just a couple months later, we had on another subway car a man named Frank Robert James who ended up opening fire into a crowded subway car at rush hour.
--:-- Matt Katz: Miraculously, he did not end up killing anyone, but he did severely harm a lot of people.
--:-- Samantha Max: And that was another man who was struggling with mental illness. He posted hours of rambling, profanity-laced videos on YouTube and other social media platforms that attracted little or no attention.
--:-- Matt Katz: This one from a month and a half ago when he criticized the mayor's plan tackling homelessness in the subways.
--:-- Noelle King: Their plan is doomed for failure. He since has pleaded guilty.
--:-- Samantha Max: And that's a case that, you know, I think, again, sparked a lot of concern among New Yorkers and folks who I've been talking to in the months since.
--:-- Matt Katz: There are definitely certain people who have changed their ridership habits because of it. But there are also New Yorkers who are still every single day taking the train in spite of it and just kind of keeping it in the back of their mind.
--:-- Noelle King: When we bring our thoughts back to Jordan Neely, are there policies that might have prevented this incident? Is there something that should have been in place that currently isn't?
--:-- Samantha Max: I think the subways have been flooded with cops, and yet it is impossible to have a police officer on every single subway car all the time.
--:-- Matt Katz: So when this happened with Jordan Neely, there were no police officers there, and it took several minutes even once they were on the platform for police officers to arrive.
--:-- Noelle King: So that is certainly question number one of how many officers is enough and whether or not police officers actually do make people feel safer and who they're making feel safer.
--:-- Samantha Max: Because certainly at the protests I was at, there were some people who felt less safe having the police officers around.
--:-- Matt Katz: I think another thing is, you know, the mayor and the governor, they've been sending these outreach teams into the subways, particularly at the stops that are at the end of the line once the train has stopped before it turns back around.
--:-- Samantha Max: Where they are often finding folks experiencing homelessness. And the idea is that they'll be offering resources to them, trying to get them the care that they need.
--:-- Matt Katz: But it's still, you know, only scratching the surface of the amount of need that's had.
--:-- Noelle King: And we also have a huge shortage of affordable housing and places for folks to go.
--:-- Samantha Max: And a bunch of psychiatric hospital beds that went offline during the pandemic and are just now starting to be brought back online.
--:-- Matt Katz: But even so, there's just more need than there is capacity to serve at this point.
--:-- Noelle King: Samantha Max and Matt Katz are both public safety reporters for WNYC in New York City.
--:-- Samantha Max: Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Matt Katz: It was engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and fact-checked by Laura Bullard.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
