After homeless man choked on subway, NYC grapples with treatment of mentally ill

After homeless man choked on subway, NYC grapples with treatment of mentally ill - The Washington Post

NEW YORK — During her nearly 25 years in Manhattan, Allison Kunzman has developed a strategy for dealing with people she encounters on the subway who appear mentally unstable — de-escalate.

“At that point the brain synapses are not working in a logical way,” said Kunzman, an executive producer for film and television. “You disengage him and extract yourself from the situation. But that’s the most scared I’ve been on the subway because he had this huge stick and he could have beat the s--- out of us.”

In the days since a 30-year-old Black man was choked to death by another subway passenger in New York, city residents have been divided about whether the incident was an example of racist vigilantism, or a legitimate response to danger, in this case erratic behavior from a mentally ill, homeless person. It comes as city officials work to address crime in one of the country’s largest subway systems, pledging to add more than 1,000 police officers to calm the nerves of nervous passengers, while homeless advocates worry that the incident is the latest example of a polarized nation turning its back on some of the city’s most vulnerable people.

While city data shows that crime within the train system is down this year, some passengers, like Kunzman, say it has become an increasingly uncomfortable place and that they’ve had more frequent encounters with homeless people, many of whom are mentally ill. They report being screamed at, threatened and intimidated. Homeless advocates, meanwhile, say Jordan Neely’s death at the hands of a 24-year old White passenger reflects the constant danger faced by the city’s thousands of homeless on a daily basis.

“Riders on the subway deserve to have a ride where they don’t feel threatened. And the mentally ill deserve to have the treatment and the protection that would allow them to work out their struggles in the protected space,” said Gregory Umbach, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “We can’t have a subway system that’s both a system of transportation and housing for the homeless. Those are incompatible goals.”

On Monday afternoon, Neely was behaving “ hostile and erratic” and shouting that he was hungry and thirsty while riding the F train, according to police and witness accounts. In a video taken by another passenger, Neely, can be seen flailing his arms and kicking his legs as the White passenger put him a chokehold. Two other passengers are shown helping restrain him.

Neely’s death was ruled a homicide by New York’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Police officials have said they are still investigating the incident and no charges have been filed.

Protesters have called on the passenger who administered the chokehold to Neely to be arrested, filling the subway station where the 30-year old died to chant, “ Justice for Jordan Neely!”

It appears Neely died because “he was acting in a way that made people uncomfortable but wasn’t really hurting anybody,” said Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Studies have shown that homeless people are far more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than to be the perpetrators, he said.

“Part of the experience of being homeless is that constant fear,” Berg said. “People who are homeless die as a result of crime all the time, but it’s often not quite so blatant as this one.”

The relationship between New York’s residents with mental illnesses and the rest of the city is the worst she has seen it in her more than two decades in the city, said Kunzman, the executive producer.

“I used to know all the homeless guys in my neighborhood by name where they were at and would bring them food and clothing or blankets, a lot of them chose that life,” she said. “Now, I really feel like whether it’s the pandemic or the financial situation, there are some really desperate people with a lot of mental illnesses, and I don’t think it’s just drugs, I think a lot of people truly have snapped.”

She doesn’t have much hope that city officials will be able to address the root causes of those problems, but is looking forward to one thing: With warm summer days on the horizon, she’ll be able to get around more on her bicycle and avoid the subway altogether.

New York City’s subways have been stage for high-profile crimes before. In 2022, 10 people were injured by gunfire after a shooting in Brooklyn. There have been numerous reports of people being pushed onto the tracks, sometimes to their deaths. Last year, Michelle Alyssa Go was shoved onto the train tracks by a houseless man with a history of violence and mental health issues.

One of the most famous incidents occurred in 1984, when Bernhard Goetz, a White man, shot four Black teenagers he said he believed were going to rob him. Goetz became a folk hero in a city dealing with sky-high crime. The media called him the “Subway Vigilante.”

“We cannot end up back to a place where vigilantism is tolerable,” Rev. Al Sharpton said in statement comparing Neely’s death to Goetz’s actions. “It wasn’t acceptable then and it cannot be acceptable now.”

Tackling New Yorkers’ sense of insecurity has been a top priority of the city’s mayor, Eric Adams (D), a former police captain who pledged to take a tougher approach to reducing crime, upon taking office. Last year, the New York Police Department removed hundreds of people suffering symptoms of mental illness from the city’s transit system. Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) have announced plans to put 1,200 more police officers at subway stations during peak hours.

Crime on New York’s transit system climbed about 30 percent last year as more riders returned to public transit as the covid-19 pandemic abated, according to New York Police Department data. But crime on the city’s transit system was down about 8 percent in the first four months of 2023, the police data shows. And current crime levels in no way compare to the wave of violence that engulfed New York decades ago.

There has long been a disconnect between the perception of crime on the subway system and reality, said Dennis Kenney, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who spent months in the subway studying crime in the 1980s when it had reputation for danger.

Most crime on the subway back then could be boiled down to schoolchildren robbing one another for lunch money, he said. But stations and trains felt dangerous, marked with graffiti and pools of urine. “It was dirty, it was smelly,” he said. “The physical conditions of the subway were terrible.”

Jay Thomas, who has lived in New York for more than a decade, said she has recently noticed more disruptive passengers, often with mental illnesses, riding the city’s trains.

On a recent morning commute, she was dozing off until she was awaken by a man pacing up and down the isle yelling, Thomas said. Some people scrabbled to other parts of the train but she decided to stay put and just avoid eye contact. Eventually the man moved on to another car.

Such incidents can be frightening, she said, but staying out of the mentally ill person’s way is often the best approach. Neely’s death is proof of a rising tide of hostility toward that population, particularly Black residents with mental illnesses, Thomas said.

“What we’re dealing with here is plain and simple racism and ableism,” said Thomas, who is Black. “How do you see someone like that, who is clearly frail, hungry and emaciated and put them in a chokehold, not for just a few seconds, but for 15 minutes, you’re this big guy and you do something like that to someone so weak, that can only be explained by hate.”

Neely’s death is about more than race, said Omar White, 32, a frequent train passenger. It is also a reflection of the mental health crisis facing the city, which more police on the subways will not solve, he said.

“What will happen is you’ll see people who are just riding the train, maybe they’re high, drunk or whatever but they’re not posing a threat, they are going to end up getting accosted by the police,” White said. “Like with stop-and-frisk, they had good intentions but the police went overboard and they just used it as another way to crack down on Black people.”

There should be more non-armed staff in the stations and riding the trains ready to respond to issues on the subway, White said. The best approach when confronted by someone who appears to be mentally unstable is to try to ignore them, he said.

“I was just confronted by this guy who was saying he was going to rob me last week. He was clearly unstable. That whole thing didn’t escalate to anything bigger because I ignored him.” he said. “Now I would have defended myself if it had gotten to a self-defense situation, but besides that I don’t feel like I should be putting my hands on anyone.”

Hatzipanagos and Duncan reported from Washington