I remember where I was 40 years ago when I learned Bernard Goetz had turned himself in to police in New Hampshire after shooting four would-be muggers on the New York City subway. It was my grandmother’s bedroom. I had been watching her tiny television, adjusting the antenna to get a clear picture. His mugshot was electrifying.
I was 10, and this was the man the adults around me in Brooklyn were calling a hero. People were tired of riding the subways in fear, and they felt vindicated by someone who had decided to do something about it himself.
Last week, Daniel Penny was cleared of all charges in choking Jordan Neely to death on the subway last May. People have been quick to call him the Goetz of our time. Yet we live in a different city: Crime is a tiny fraction of what it used to be, and the risk of robbery remains at a historic low. By most measures, the subways are no more dangerous than the rest of the city.
But yawning gaps in our ability to prevent mental health crises on the subway have New Yorkers on edge. For decades now, in the name of more humane treatment for people with serious mental illness, institutionalization has been replaced by a patchwork of outpatient alternatives that haven’t proven especially effective for many people, nor kept pace with demand.
Acknowledging this problem, the Adams administration is trying to more assertively engage people in distress and bring them in for psychiatric evaluations and treatment.
Still, nearly every commuter has a story of enduring an outburst and wondering if they needed to flee their subway car or the platform. The chances of getting randomly shoved onto the tracks by a violent stranger are small, but it happens with a steady drumbeat, and just the thought of it is terrifying. Today’s Bernie Goetz is a citizen pushing back not against crime, but against unmanaged behavioral health problems.
I spent most of my career in the NYPD around these problems on a big-city scale, but they manifest across the country. When I served as the chief of police of Burlington, Vt., there was a man, Mike Reynolds, who embodied the broken way we view the ideas of freedom and dignity for people with serious mental illness.
By the time I left the force, he had been involved with police more than 1,100 times, and the number has since exceeded 1,700. He would assault business owners who asked him to stop harassing customers, swing broken tennis rackets at the heads of pedestrians and fling bodily fluids at police and firefighters. I once had to stop my car in the middle of the street while Mike finished urinating on the double yellow line, explaining to my son that, as a state, Vermont had decided to allow him to do this indefinitely.
Then, one morning in bed, I sat up with a start: I realized we hadn’t heard about Mike in a few weeks. I’d hired a veteran social worker to be the police department’s behavioral health policy lead, and I gave her a call from home. “Find out what happened to Mike,” I told her. “He’s either in jail, or he’s dead.”
It turns out he was in jail. Apart from dying, that was the only way the city would get a reprieve. It wouldn’t have been from involuntary psychiatric commitment, though officials had tried. I had formed a special state-level task force just about Mike, to figure out what we could do to protect the people of my city while getting him effective treatment. After a few meetings that took a lot of patience on the part of the state’s mental health leadership, the answer became clear to me: We could do nothing.
The law set the bar for involuntary treatment so high that Reynolds would basically have to attempt suicide or nearly kill someone to meet it. Until then, he was free to walk the streets and act according to impulse, and our only recourse was to keep charging him with crimes until one of them led to incarceration, which judges were hesitant to impose… because he was mentally ill. Between concerns about liberty and the desire not to criminalize mental illness, it added up to circular neglect.
Neely had a similar trajectory. He had been arrested dozens of times, one of them for breaking a woman’s nose in a random attack. Instead of prison, he was offered 15 months of supportive housing and intensive outpatient psychiatric treatment. He absconded from the program after 13 days, and the city never enforced the resulting arrest warrant. His condition deteriorated as he roamed the city until one day, hungry and thirsty, throwing garbage and threatening people, he boarded Daniel Penny’s subway car.
There’s been lots of talk from well-meaning people about how “the system” and “the city” failed Neely. They’re not wrong, per se, but they dodge the real reason the system failed — because they presume offering voluntary treatment and services is the entire ballgame, when it falls short in countless cases.
Most often, the “system” fails because it isn’t serious enough about delivering critical care to people who are in no mental state to realize how much they need it, and how dangerous it is for them to ignore that fact. And so it is no surprise it produces incidents like the death of Jordan Neely, and that juries find them lawful.
We can argue about whether Penny held the chokehold too long, but subduing a man in crisis who declared “someone is going to die today” isn’t vigilante justice; it’s defense of self and others. If the government is truly a capable guardian, people have an obligation to step back and let professionals protect them. If not, they can act.
Given the challenges police have meting out force with precision, we shouldn’t be surprised when citizen encounters end badly: Chokeholds are prohibited by the NYPD exactly because they are effective but hard to control. In the midst of a close-in struggle, an adrenalized person has tunnel vision and isn’t thinking of his opponent’s airway, even if they were trained in the Marines.
I doubt Daniel Penny wanted the defining moment of his life to be strangling a mentally ill man to death on the subway. But if Goetz sent a message on the city’s behalf to the muggers of New York 40 years ago, Penny sent one to its government. Criminals may be impulsive, but they can respond to incentives and deterrents. People with serious mental illness won’t be chastened by Neely’s death, because that’s not how mental illness works.
Nothing will prevent the next death except a government that admits its approach has created these fraught and dangerous encounters and gives its police and mental health professionals more effective, high-impact tools to head them off well before they end in tragedy.
Liberty is only one ingredient of a person’s dignity. Another is respect for their welfare. For people with serious mental illness, that means understanding how precarious their situation is, how vulnerable they are and how compromised their judgment can be in the midst of crisis.
Leaving those who are sick to their own devices in the name of liberty amounts to letting the most troubling parts of them determine their life and set their fate. It also means the people around them will see them as a threat more so than as a person, in a very human calculus of risk. The purpose of government is to prevent that, because it degrades the dignity of everyone involved.
Our systems are full of underleveraged touchpoints where people in crisis can get help, from outpatient services to mental health and drug courts, psychiatric facilities and even jails and prisons. Some settings will be involuntary. That doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary, or a way to respect the acute needs of the hardest to treat populations. We have a duty to use them, with the good faith goal of returning people to society without shame or stigma.
Consider that if we ignore these opportunities, the alternative will sometimes be a chokehold.
Del Pozo is a policing, public health and criminal justice researcher. He served in the NYPD for 19 years and for four years as chief of police of Burlington, Vt. This originally appeared in Vital City.
