Murder Is Not a Policy Outcome

How Jordan Neely lived does not explain how Jordan Neely died.

When you really think about it, it’s strange how the whole awful discourse that has arisen after the killing of Jordan Neely in a New York subway station has centered around Neely, the victim, and not Daniel Penny, the man who did the killing. Usually, when an act of violence is committed, we focus on the perpetrator; here, all anyone wants to talk about is the person who got choked to death.

See here and here and here and here and here and here. Social media and Twitter has talked about Neely relentlessly but Penny barely at all. To the extent that the killing has driven a larger debate, it’s about mental health services, and certainly not for the man who asphyxiated someone on a train.

Whatever careful words people wrap around their reporting, the relentless focus on Neely gives away the game: people see the problem at the heart of this episode as homelessness, not violence. If there’s a policy issue here, in the eyes of many, it’s that Jordan Neely existed in that condition, in that moment and place. Neely’s violent demise was a natural, if tragic, continuation of his story.

Undoubtedly it was a policy problem that Jordan Neely existed in that condition. As the voluminous reporting of his in-and-out encounters with the mental health system and the criminal justice demonstrate, he had clearly not received whatever whatever help he needed.

The argument being offered by so many seems to go something like this: homeless, mentally ill people like Jordan Neely need to be dealt with, somehow. One way of dealing with them is to lock them into cages or hospital rooms. Another is to let them live in the world like the rest of us, with support from social services. But if we cannot resolve the issue one way or another, then we cannot be surprised if they are attacked — even snuffed out — by the people forced to encounter them. What comes next is not the fault of people on the ground, but firstly the policy choices that put them there.

In short, the framing collapses Neely’s eventual killing into a policy narrative about Neely’s mental health and life conditions. His killer is transformed into another obstacle he encountered in his difficult life — the challenge that finally proved insurmountable.

According to media, here are the factors in Jordan Neely’s death, ordered by roughly decreasing importance: his schizophrenia, his homelessness, underfunded social services, a punitive criminal justice system, lack of access to housing, and encountering a young man on the subway who strangled him for 15 minutes.

I would propose that when we talk about Neely, we focus on that last factor first, the most, and separately from the rest.

Yes, like countless others, Neely was an unfortunate victim of an imperfect — often broken — social support system. He was also a victim of a homicide. Don’t smash these things together.

Even if the system had failed Neely in every other way, it didn’t have to fail him this way. We could have protected him, despite all the rest.

When we pretend otherwise, we turn murder into an instrument of policy. Don’t treat violence against socially inconvenient groups as an unavoidable final stop, the penalty of our other schemes failing. It isn’t, and framing it as such ultimately minimizes and excuses the violence itself. It changes Neely’s killing from the worst thing to ever happen to him — the most significant way in which he was failed by the system — to simply the last thing to ever happen to him.

Let’s talk about what really got Jordan Neely killed, instead. It’s not because he was mentally ill or homeless or even confrontational on a train. In any sane society these are not sufficient reasons to explain someone getting choked for a quarter-hour until dead.

Instead, Neely was killed by social forces that make someone like Neely a valid target for violence, and make a 24-year old white marine see himself as an appropriate instrument of that violence.

We could even talk about how so much of our society is structured around a base resentment of the social underclass, and how so many of our decisions are propelled by the constant search for rationales to target that underclass. We could talk about how people always seem to find their way back to ideas and actions that isolate, segregate, remove, or destroy whoever they perceive as a social undesirable. We could reaffirm that government and law need to restrain these instincts, not to give the powerful better tools to hurt the weak.

Problem is, it’s not just 24-year-olds in subway cars who can quickly rationalize violence against unwanted and disliked groups. It’s middle-aged newspaper editors, city mayors, and far too many voters. The social forces that were the proximate cause of Neely’s death are the same forces we all marinate in. Rather than ask whether those forces have led us somewhere horrible, it’s so much easier to see Neely’s fate as the inevitable closing act of a ruined life.