Statistically, NYC still isn’t all that dangerous. But because the point of NYC is to take public transportation, even a small amount of chaos on the sidewalks and in transit imposes huge psychological stresses on innocent commuters, compared to cities where everybody commutes in locked Ford F-150s.
But making commuting in NYC more civilized doesn’t sound that hard.
You’ve got to hand it for Jordan Neely. These types often have a long criminal record. They rarely also have a long Reddit paper trail of them terrorizing a city.
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) May 5, 2023
Leftists sure known how to pick their martyrs. pic.twitter.com/aBNcIGuj9v
It’s common in NYC for dangerous loons to have a long paper trail in the media. For example, years before the “Free Hugs Guy” Jeremy Himmelstein went viral with a video of punching a Canadian girl in Times Square, the NYT and many other outlets had warned about him. The Free Hugs guy was such a pest in Times Square and Washington Square Park in 2012-2016 that he is portrayed in the Angry Birds movie.
I live 3000 miles away, but a woman I know was punched in the head by Jeremy in the 42nd St. subway station. The NYPD said in effect, “Whaddaya whaddaya, we already arrested him 15 times. They’ll just let him out again.”
Similarly, the paranoid schizophrenic who punched out 5’4″ 67-year-old retired comic actor Rick Moranis whilewalking down the street in Manhattan had been arrested six times previously just in 2020 for attacking random people.
My impression is that the number of egregious random attacks on pedestrians and transit passengers in Manhattan could be lowered significantly just by rounding up a few hundred of the most well-known psychos and putting them in a lunatic asylum.
New York City has a lot more potential criminals who semi-rationally respond to incentives, such as how aggressive the police are. But the stone crazies are relatively limited in number and their identity is often massively well documented by other New Yorkers warning about them online.
