Honestly with Bari Weiss: What Jordan Neely’s Death Tells Us About Mental Illness and Vigilantism

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Hi, I'm Eli Lake, host of the Re-Education podcast,

and I'm filling in for Barry Weiss today on Honestly.

Today, we delve into the recent killing of a homeless man in New York City's subway.

Homicide by Chocold.

That's now the official cause of death for a mentally ill subway rider

who was harassing passengers and then was restrained by a marine.

His name was Jordan Neely.

The announcement coming tonight for the medical examiner

who says Jordan Neely's neck was compressed during the encounter.

I witnesses say Neely was acting erratically to others,

but not directly threatening the marine.

Now, however, much debate about the role of bystanders

getting involved in potentially dangerous situations.

His death has stoked our culture wars and our debate about crime in the big cities.

Was Jordan Neely a casualty of white supremacy?

He was asking for food and water.

He was hungry and houseless and experiencing a mental health crisis.

Black disabled people have been telling you for years now

that blaming violent behavior on mental illness only excuses white people

while criminalizing black people, and it leads us to getting killed.

It leads black, disabled and mentally ill people to getting killed.

Was he another example of a criminal justice system

that has stopped enforcing petty crime?

We don't know if there were drugs in Neely's system.

We don't know anything like that.

New York authorities know, but they won't put it out.

We know enough that there were people on a subway car

where this guy Neely was ranting raven,

and we know that Neely had 40 arrests, some of them violent.

He attacked senior citizens, hurting them grievously.

Nothing happened to him because that's New York City.

You can punch people in the face, old people,

and walk away and they're not going to bother you.

Or was Jordan Neely a victim of a mental health system in our country

that has failed both its patients and society?

Jordan was not annoying someone on the train.

Jordan was screaming for help.

We keep criminalizing people with mental illness.

People keep criminalizing people that need help.

They don't need abuse, they need help.

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To dive into these questions, we have three terrific guests.

Rafael Mangual is a legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute.

Kat Rosenfeld is a novelist and a columnist for Unheard,

and Jonathan Rosen is the author of an absolutely riveting new memoir,

The Best Minds, which examines his childhood and adolescent friendship

with Michael Water, a brilliant graduate of Yale Law School

who suffered a schizophrenic break and murdered his pregnant fiance.

Kat, Rafael, Jonathan, thanks so much for coming on this show today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Now, I want to just start and going around the room,

and we'll start with Kat.

I want to just ask, what brings you into this conversation

about Jordan Neely, and why is this something that you care about?

Well, I mean, to begin with, I think that what happened is such a tragedy

that it's difficult to look away from,

especially if you're somebody who is interested in the way that people respond

to something like this, which was sort of my entry point into it.

I noticed, I had less to say about the death itself,

which I do just think was incredibly tragic and preventable,

and more to say about the discourse that surrounded the death,

which I thought was very revealing of a lot of the kind of points of tension

that exist in the culture more broadly.

Rafael, I mean, look, I'm someone who has spent a lot of time

thinking about public safety and public order,

particularly within the context of well-functioning urban environments.

And this case is, in a lot of ways, illustrative of some of the real downside risk

when you don't get that formula right.

I mean, in a lot of ways, New York City is just a miracle.

We have eight and a half million people on top of each other coexisting peacefully,

despite being from radically different backgrounds,

and having radically different dispositions,

and 95% of the time, it goes unexpectedly well.

I mean, just from a historical perspective,

but it really is important to have safeguards in place to make that system function.

And having something like this go wrong on the biggest public transit system in the world,

I think is an important catalyst for a really important conversation

that I really look forward to having here.

Jonathan, what brings you to this conversation?

I think the thing that makes it so hard to talk about

is the thing that makes it important to talk about.

I mean, there are so many ways people have argued about it.

It's a horrific tragedy in every way.

It's possible to identify with both parties in a way.

I mean, when you see someone who could have and should have been

helped, who wasn't, who was killed, who should not have been,

you automatically feel that there have been many failures.

But I think that there's a vacuum that everybody's living in,

and it's not just the absence of mental health services.

It's the absence of a feeling of safety or police services.

And so it's possible.

I've been on the subway with my daughter,

and it's always when it was with my little daughters,

where you think if this person comes any closer,

I don't even know what I'll do to protect her.

And I'm not an ex-Marine, and I'm in no way a person who thinks violence is a solution.

So I think it's important, but really hard to talk about,

because it's very easy to be misunderstood.

Yeah. All right.

Well, let's start with some level setting here.

On May 1, a 30-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely,

who appeared to be in the midst of some kind of psychosis,

was acting aggressively on the train.

He was screaming that he was hungry.

He was screaming that he was thirsty,

and he didn't care if he went to jail.

He was saying this loudly, threatening a lot of people.

And then kind of after a little bit of this,

24-year-old man named Daniel Penny, he was a former Marine.

He jumped forward and put Neely in a chokehold.

Then anywhere from five to 15 minutes later, Neely was dead.

Those were the basic facts.

But as soon as the story kind of went out and became viral,

we went into our kind of culture war split screen.

We had tweets from people like Ayanna Presley,

who said black men deserve to grow old,

not to be lynched on a subway,

because they were having a mental health crisis.

Jordan deserved better.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Jordan Neely was killed by public policy.

He was killed by the demonizing of the poor by many of our leaders.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk liked a tweet that called Neely a worthless individual.

And Vivek Ramswamy, the GOP candidate running for president,

he donated $10,000 to Mr. Penny's Legal Defense Fund, or his legal fees.

Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican congressman,

who once offered Kyle Rittenhouse an internship.

He called Penny Subway Superman.

In other words, the left says Penny is a bloodthirsty racist,

and the right says he's a hero protecting innocent commuters.

I just want to maybe stop there for a minute,

and let's talk to the panel.

I mean, obviously we're missing something here.

Maybe let's start with you, Raphael.

What are we missing in the kind of original responses to this story?

I think the main thing that's being missed

is that it doesn't have to be a sort of pro-Penny or anti-Neely conversation.

It is possible, for example, that Daniel Penny's actions were defensible,

both from a legal and moral perspective,

and for it to be possible,

that Jordan Neely shouldn't have been in the position that he was in.

And those more nuanced conversations are hard to have

when these events get racialized or these events get politicized,

and I think that's unfortunate.

When I first became aware of the Neely story,

the first thing that came to my mind was actually a story for,

I think it was last year,

where a guy got onto a New York City subway,

was clearly having some kind of mental break.

You know, sort of the same thing that people describe Jordan Neely as doing.

He was kind of walking up and down the car, being really aggressive,

and then he grabs a woman by the hair,

and he stands her up,

and he walks her down to one end of the subway car,

and she's terrified.

She is, you know, white as a ghost,

and is holding back tears,

and he makes her sit next to him,

and he's yelling at her.

And you're watching this with this incredible amount of suspense,

like, is he going to kill her?

Is he going to start choking, or is he going to beat her?

And I remember the headlines in the Twitter commentary

after that video went viral,

and it was all about condemning the other men on that train

for not getting up in this woman's defense and doing something.

And I remembered a video from Los Angeles a couple years ago,

where the same thing, you know,

there was a guy being very threatening on a subway train,

and a big burly dude got up from behind him, choked him unconscious,

and was on the morning news the next morning being celebrated as a hero.

And one of the things that I wish people would grapple with more

is that, you know, we're really sending mixed messages here.

Do we want people to intervene for the safety of others

when someone threatens that safety?

I think that's one question.

And that's separate from the question of whether the system

is operating well when people like Jordan Neely find themselves

unsupervised roaming the subway,

when they're clearly not in a position to take care of themselves.

And I wish that those were two conversations we could have

at the same time in a way that wasn't as fraught as they've become.

We use this word break to refer to people

who are suffering from severe mental illness.

Jonathan, in your new memoir, you spent a lot of time talking

about this idea of a break for mental health reasons,

a break with reality caused by your friend's schizophrenia.

Maybe just describe what that means.

Well, everybody's illness manifests itself differently.

100%. Yes.

So being detached from reality is the essence of the thing.

So maybe it isn't a break, maybe it's an evolution almost.

Well, I think what's interesting about this story

is what's interesting about every one of these stories,

just reading all the details about this story

can give you all the information you need about how many cracks

there were, let's say, in the system.

He was using, as we know, drugs.

And even marijuana for people who have a predisposition

to schizophrenia or who have it can be a cause of violence.

Like going back a little bit to the original question you asked

is that when people say we failed him,

what do they wish had been done?

And the reason why I think that really matters

is because he was in lots of programs,

but if they continue to presume his ability

to ascend to the program, then he was in them

not in a way that would have addressed

the nature of his being detached from reality,

whatever that cause of it was.

I mean, Jordan Neely was someone who shouldn't have been killed.

My friend, someone who should not have killed someone.

What they had in common was that there was not a system in place

that understood that their illness had robbed them

of their ability to make a choice

and other people had to intervene.

That's the hardest thing.

And for me, it kind of sleeps at the center of the thing.

He'd been sent to Bellevue a year before

and released after five days.

Kat, I want to ask you, I mean,

what are we missing in the debate in general?

And then what does it mean that we have this problem

where there are people who are among us,

whether it's on a subway or whether it's part of the homeless,

that are, you know, you could argue ticking time bombs

that are danger to the rest of us.

And yet, they're also human beings.

And they, I mean, what kind of equality

do these are under the law, if at all?

That's such a difficult thing because, of course,

it's impossible in the moment to tell the ticking time bomb

from the guy who's just being a nuisance.

And I think that this is the crux of a lot of the conflict

in this conversation, that it is so hard to know on the subway

where there is always a certain amount

of antisocial behavior going on.

There are always people acting in transgressive ways.

Some of them are funny.

Some of them are gross.

You know, some of them are scary,

but it's part of the fabric of life in New York

to encounter this stuff.

Right.

And for the most part, you really just ignore it.

There's a sort of a tacit agreement that you don't react.

You don't make eye contact.

A friend of mine recently moved to the city

and I joked with her that, you know,

she wouldn't really be able to call herself a New Yorker

until she left a subway train

and found that somebody had ejaculated on her coat.

And I was kidding, but not really.

It's just, it's one of these things that you experience

as a person who lives in the city.

And so to know when a situation that is scary

is something more than ordinary scary

or something more than ordinary antisocial behavior

when it's actually a prelude to violence

is absolutely impossible.

And you can see this in several of the stories

that Raphael mentioned of people stepping into intervene or not.

It's very difficult to know not only how the person

is going to react to attempted intervention,

but also what's going to happen to the bystander

who attempts to step in.

You know, sometimes the aggressor or the transgressor,

someone like Jordan Neely ends up dead

and sometimes the bystander does.

The other thing, the other part of this equation,

what we miss when we talk about this,

there's all this discussion of the system failing Neely.

And I even used this language myself

in the piece that I wrote about it.

And I think I actually regret having phrased it

in quite that way

because I don't know for certain

that failure is exactly what happened here.

As Jonathan was pointing out,

we have a system in place

with which Jordan Neely was very well acquainted.

He had dozens and dozens of interactions with this system.

And when you have somebody

who is sort of trying to hurl themselves

over the edge of a cliff

and they're trying to do this 20 times,

and the first 19 times somebody catches them

and hauls them back from the precipice,

and then the 20th time there's nobody there

and they tumble and they die,

you know, is that a failure?

It's a tragedy for certain.

But I think that when we talk about this as a failure,

we fail to account for the sense of inevitability

that in many ways surrounds something like this.

One of the things that you saw over and over

in the conversation from people who knew Neely

or had encountered him prior to this

was that if it wasn't this moment when he lost his life,

it was going to be another one.

Something like this was going to happen

and it was a question of when, not if.

I mean, even people who enjoyed his presence on the subway,

you know, came out on places like Reddit saying,

I used to see this guy.

He used to be a Michael Jackson impersonator.

He used to be a lot of fun to watch.

He's clearly been spiraling and out of control

within the past few years,

which of course the city also knew.

He was on this list of the 50 people

in the entirety of Manhattan, most in need of help.

Right, let's just review some of Jordan Neely's background.

So he was just 14 years old

when his mother was murdered by her boyfriend

and that caused Neely a myriad of mental health issues

as one could imagine,

including depression, schizophrenia, and PTSD.

And shortly after the incident,

he was placed in foster care,

probably not good at all for his mental health.

He would become homeless and work on the streets

as a Michael Jackson impersonator for tips,

as we mentioned,

and his mental illness slowly declined

at the time of his death.

I mean, he was on this, as you mentioned,

this top 50 list maintained by New York City

that listed a roster of homeless individuals,

most in need of assistance and treatment.

He was in and out of treatment

and contacted numerous times.

He was also no stranger to the police.

According to the NYPD,

he was arrested a total of 42 times.

A lot of times they were petty crimes,

but three of the 42 were unprovoked assaults.

He pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child

after dragging her down a street.

That I guess it's an alleged attempted kidnapping,

where he was sentenced to four months in jail

and to the assault of a man on a New York City subway platform

in February of this year.

He pleaded guilty to a felony assault

of a 67-year-old woman

whom he punched after she exited a train.

He was meant to serve a 15-month

live-in alternative to incarceration in the Bronx,

but he abandoned that facility 13 days

after the start of the program.

His last interaction with law enforcement

was on April 9, 2023,

when outreach workers called the police

after witnessing Neely urinating inside a subway car.

He was thrown out of the subway but not arrested,

despite there being a warrant out for his arrest.

Five days after the situation,

he was spotted by an outreach worker

once again in Coney Island they noted.

And he could be a harm to others

or to himself if left untreated.

This was weeks before he was killed.

So I guess there's a reasonable argument,

goes something like this,

the real crime maybe is not how he died,

but how a person in this level of distress

is left to die on the subway

when he was on a list of these top 50 New Yorkers

who were so concerning to law enforcement.

And I wonder if any of you guys have an answer to that question.

I realize that I'm not meaning to play a language game here.

Obviously he was killed by Mr. Penny,

but what I'm getting at is this larger point.

There were all these warning signs

and the system failed almost at every single step,

even literally two weeks before the incident.

So is that a fair way to look at it?

Yeah, I mean that litany of events that you just set out

is what illustrates the nature of the failure

and why I think failure is the appropriate word.

Because in some cases it may in fact be very difficult

to sort of tell where somebody is on the spectrum

of treatability within a sort of less secure environment

and someone who needs to be taken off the street

and put into treatment against his or her will.

But I don't think that that was the case with Neely.

I mean you have this incredibly well documented history

of severe mental illness,

of interactions with the mental health system,

with the Department of Social Services.

He has all of these indicators of risk.

He's homeless.

He's a drug user.

He also has this very lengthy criminal history

that illustrates a pattern of escalating

into more and more violent behavior.

It is not as if there do not exist mechanisms

by which someone like Neely can be forcefully taken off the street

and put into treatment and kept there.

What I think we have struggled with over the decades as a city

is to sort of settle the argument

of what compassion looks like.

Some people who just don't believe in that kind of response

I think see it as compassionate to try at every step

and almost no matter what to give somebody the opportunity

to live as freely as possible.

But when you're dealing with someone like Jordan Neely

who is clearly and obviously I would argue

incapable of taking care of himself and has been for so long,

it is in my view the complete opposite of compassion

to allow him to deteriorate in a public space.

Not just because of what that might mean

for the safety of the people that he comes into contact with

including the victims that he harmed when he was alive

but also for his own safety.

I mean this is something I've made in the context

of broader criminal justice debates

but sometimes the critique about the system

continuing to let people back out into the street

is not just about the danger that they might create

when they get released

but also about the danger to themselves

because they often become targets if they're not already.

And so I do think that there was a sort of inevitability

that was visible here

but it was visible most acutely to the people

who were in a position to say no more.

You've got to be protected.

So Jonathan I want to turn to you now

because you spent a lot of time on this in your book.

Talk to us what is the history over the long arc

maybe going back 50, 60, 70 years

of how our country changed its approach

to institutionalizing people with severe mental illness

and what were some of the factors that led

to this major change in public policy

which has really manifested itself in some ways

in the last 50 years as a problem of homelessness

and street crime

but we can trace that back to very specific decisions

and choices on the public policy realm.

Yeah so in a way to give a very short

and truncated version of the thing

what I would say is that in 1963

when John F. Kennedy announced

that the focus was no longer going to be

on the isolation of the cold custodial care

offered by asylums

and was going to be replaced

by like the warm embrace of the community

it was an announcement of a major shift

and it wasn't just a shift

and an approach to caring for the most severely ill people

because the people who organized

and were the engineers of that plan

really wanted to tear down the state system altogether.

The state system had been built in the 19th century

when there were people living on the street

and treated like they had demonic possession

and so it was an act of enormous kindness and humanity

there were no cures

but the idea was the state's going to care

for these people somehow

but they had fallen on terrible times

but the idea was to really not reform

the state system

but knock it down

to treat those hospitals like the best deal

and to start with year zero

and the community mental health centers were year zero

and what was extraordinary about that

is that meant even the name alone

they were health centers

they were not centers for people who were severely ill

and so their definition of mental illness

changed in the course of the creation

of these community mental health centers

psychoanalysis had left its mark on psychiatry

psychoanalysts believed everybody was made sick

for the same reason

you just had it in a different degree

so you were neurotic

if you had only repressed small measures of childhood

sexual angst

but if you had a lot

you'd become psychotic

even though they didn't deal with those people

if everybody is made sick for the same reason

then treating everybody is a worthwhile goal

and you can even use the language of a pandemic

it was a mental health crisis

and everybody has to be helped

so there were catchment areas

that's what community mental health centers were

as if they were going to be vaccinating people

and if every and if someone who's well

is just a potential sick person

then helping the well

which psychoanalysts have been doing for a long time

is a perfectly legitimate thing to do

and so instead of caring

for the most intractably ill

community mental health centers

were allowed to apply their own definition of

the definition of mental illness we all live with

so broad it's sometimes called health

and as a result

the one group of people

not merely neglected

but actively avoided

were the ones who required the most help

and so if you wanted an example

of why tearing something down

instead of reforming it

is a terrible idea

this is it

because the state hospitals were already reforming

they had satellite programs

that really were community mental health centers

and since it was the same system

if you became ill again

there was a hospital for you perhaps to return to

they didn't need to be vast anymore

it was all made possible by medication

somehow because the people who were organizing it

were actually psychoanalysts essentially in training

it didn't occur to them to wonder

about who was going to make people take their medication

or the idea that half of all the people

intractably sick enough to be sent to state hospitals

didn't see themselves as sick

as a symptom of their illness

and so the neglect has been there forever

and so we're now trying to rebuild

a community mental health system

and that's a good thing to do

it's just everything that you mentioned

that was seemingly going to intervene

was not designed to intervene

I was stunned when I realized that the 50 most wanted

are not like the FBI's most wanted list

people who must be sent

either medicated or sent to a hospital

it's people who because they're resistant

should be offered

moved to the front of the line

may be sent to a homeless shelter

that has fewer requirements

since they may be wary of going to the big

armory style places

and so even the quote you read

where they saw the outreach team

and he was treated by one of those street outreach teams

because he was on this special list

said he looked like someone who could become a danger

to himself or others

so if you're acting like someone

who might be a danger to yourself or others

the law actually is broad enough

to see that as being a danger to yourself or others

but the only thing I'd end by saying

is exactly what Raphael was saying

about how we define compassion

the treatment advocacy center

which was really very much connected

to the creation of outpatient treatment

and interventions like that

has a list of what they call

a thousand preventable tragedies

whereas the law professors of my friend

who wound up killing his fiance

they spoke of it as an inevitable tragedy

and it's only an inevitable tragedy

if the means of intervention

are unsuited to the occasion

and they are not the ordinary interventions

they're not even the ordinary interventions

for people with severe illness

they're for that small sub fraction of people

who either are resistant to medication

will not take it

and are too sick to care for themselves

and so I'm not sure it needs to be so tragic

it's just that we are still operating

inside of almost a cultural mindset

as well as a legal and political one

I want to now like sort of shift the conversation

back to public safety

and I want to go to you Kat in this because

in January 2022 a woman named Michelle Go

was pushed in front of a subway tram

and she was killed

roughly 27 people have been killed in New York subways

since March 2020

and meanwhile one of the most prominent

progressive responses to Neely's death

was that he wasn't a threat

Elizabeth Spears, New York Times bedwriter

tweeted that she has been

quote safely riding the subway for 23 years

and has never felt menaced by a homeless person

she said these imaginary monsters

in your head are addressable with therapy

so my question Kat to you is

is there a safety issue on subways

and is there a safety issue in subways in part

because we have a broken mental health system

yes

but let me let me continue

now in a city of

eight million people

with lots of different kinds of violence

happening all over the place every day

in the scheme of things 27 is not very much

at the same time

there's something about violence on the subway

that really sparks incredible fear

amongst people who live in New York

there's just this perception that it's a place

where you're vulnerable

that platform and that you know empty space

beyond it is right there

the third rail is right there

these strangers that surround you are right there

and if any one of them

decides to push you in front of the train

that's it for you

and I think that even the sense that that could happen

which becomes very heightened

once you have just a few high-profile incidents

of an attack on the subway

or a death on the subway

people really just lose their sense of trust

in the people around them

and that inculcates an enormous amount of fear

so whether the problem is really the violence on the subway

or the perception of the violence on the subway

and what that does to the way we look at the person next to us

on the platform

and the way we mistrust them

I think is an open question

but the interesting thing about the response that you highlighted

which was representative of a sort of a particular way

of reacting to this on the left

in some ways

seeing that really induces just incredible whiplash

like it does feel like gaslighting

and the most bizarre thing about it is that

most of the people making that argument

are the same people who can be found publicly

not that far back

arguing that tweets or ideas

or New York Times op-eds

make them materially unsafe

but you know the man screaming on a subway car

five inches from your face

who's much bigger than you

and who seems like he might be about to do something violent

why would you be threatened by that?

Why on earth would you find that menacing?

You're crazy

go get therapy

so that element of it is obviously very frustrating to witness

and I think it sows a lot of division

and the conversation around this

what I think is happening there

and I don't think it's helpful

is that people are applying a very academic understanding

of power to real life situations

where you have somebody who is institutionally

disprivileged

institutionally marginalized

but nevertheless capable of instilling absolute terror

into the heart of anybody

who's you know within a six foot radius of them

and people who are making this type of comment

they choose to focus on that idea of power as privilege

and I think it really misses

the fact that there are different kinds of power

and that especially in a situation like that

this privilege based conception of power

is very much like a game of rock, paper, scissors

where you have to have a consensus

on the part of everyone involved

that you know paper covers rock

and if you don't all agree that paper covers rock

then you have one person with a piece of paper

and another person with a rock

and what are they going to do with the rock

like you know who are you afraid of in that context

I think that there is this tendency to always bring

that conversation back to this very progressive way

of understanding kind of interpersonal interactions

way of understanding how power coalesces

that is really easy to implement from behind a screen

when you're talking about this at a distance

that completely misses the true stakes of an incident

like this in the moment in real life

when there seems to be a potential threat

just inches from your person

Jonathan I want to ask you to kind of pick up

on something that Kat was saying

which is this progressive elite idea

that power exists based on what kind of categories

you are going into a situation

and what I want to ask about that is

is history repeating itself now as farce

didn't we have all those conversations 50 years ago

and now we are having them again

as if we had learned nothing from the implications

of those conversations and the policies

that came out of them 50 years ago

or is it something a little bit new this time

I think it was farce 50 years ago

I think it's repeating itself as tragedy

I mean I think what Kat says is exactly right

but I think it could be applied to any number of situations

you know you sit in a classroom and someone tells you

that the gap between the signifier and the signified

means that language can never accurately describe an object

but you know if you told the teacher his pants were on fire

he'd immediately look down

and then you'd go oh the gap isn't all that big

and everybody would think you were an idiot

but most people understand that

and the greatest trick of all was to say

as they as very fashionable intellectuals did in the 60s

that not only did mental illness not exist

severe mental illness

but if it did exist

it was a mark of sanity produced by a crazy world

and if you live inside a system

where people try to apply that

and you are pretending that something irrational is rational

then your feelings will be deemed irrational

someone has to be irrational

it doesn't work it's not a system that can survive otherwise

and what you call gaslighting is simply a way of telling people

that their normal responses are in fact irrational ones

and a piece of it is in fact there are yes 20 something killings

but think about all that has to go surrounds those killings

and the nature of what they mean and the effect that they have

and in a way I remember I lived in Manhattan for first grade

and my first grade teacher years later was killed

she was buying tickets at Lincoln Center

and the person who killed her left the knife and her bag

and my mother who always believed in the safety of crowds

and Manhattan kept saying I don't understand

but it was the height of the institutionalization

it was the very irrational nature of the act

that was so unsettling

and it's just important if you can't acknowledge that

that doesn't matter how many services or programs you're going to have

so I wanted to bring in now a political element to this

which is that Eric Adams won the primary

by basically trying to buck this trend of

decarceration defunding the police

kind of coming out of these like very liberal ideas

so my first question is has he been effective at this point

I mean maybe just talk a little bit about you know

his political hurdle because it does seem that

the voters in New York sent a very clear message

that they would like to see the law enforced

but on the other hand it seems that there's a lot of kind of

I don't know institutional impediments to it

you know this is something that I've been talking about for quite a while

and I think while Mayor Adams has a lot of good ideas

and while I think those good ideas explain

his emergence as a political figure in the election

he really is up against three very powerful institutions

in terms of his ability to actually act on the program

that he was elected for articulating

and that is local DAs, the city council, and Albany

you know there have been structural policy changes

that have been implemented over the last several years

in New York State at the state level

there's very little that Mayor Adams can do

to mitigate the impact of those changes without action from Albany

and Albany has proven itself not just you know incapable

but unwilling to undo some of those changes or rethink them

and in fact has used you know whatever political capital exists

to kind of further that program

I mean just today a deal was announced on clean slate

which basically will seal the criminal records

of people who go a certain amount of time without re-offending

now wherever you stand on that legislation

you know I don't think that anyone would sort of quibble

with the characteristic that the Clean Slate Act

further lowers the transaction cost of committing a crime

and the question becomes it's like you know at a time

in which crime is so elevated

why is this where the resources are being expended

you know you can say the same thing about the city council

and yes Mayor Adams was elected

but so was Alvin Bragg in that same in that same cycle

and when prosecutors are not going to follow through

on the actions of the one institution

that the mayor has some sway over and that's the NYPD

again you know whatever impact the mayor is going to be able to have

is minimal and that matters for the city's perception

of citizens because you know yeah okay you know

27 people have been killed on the subway since 2020

but I think people are implicitly aware of the fact

that that's a 15 year total's worth of homicides

in just three in less than three years

you know it took a long time to get to 27

subway homicides prior to 2020

the other thing is is that those homicides are occurring

against a backdrop of increasing assaults

increasing sexual assaults increasing robberies

increasing instances of public urination

and public masturbation and public defecation

all happening on the subways

by the way at a time in which ridership is going down

and is still what you know 70% of pre-pandemic levels

so you've got significantly lower ridership

significantly more crime and disorder

that's not a good mix when the city's citizens begin to feel like

their sort of political response is not having an effect

recently Mayor Adams responded to Neely's death by saying

the circumstances surrounding his death are still being investigated

and while we have no control over that process

one thing we can control is how our city responds to this tragedy

one thing we can say for sure Jordan Neely did not deserve to die

and all of us must work together to do more

for our brothers and sisters struggling with serious mental illness

I want to state up front that there were many people

who tried to help Jordan get the support he needed

but the tragic reality of severe mental illness

is that some who suffer from it are at times unaware of their own need for care

there's an immediate need to address those who are clearly in need of treatment

we already have the authority to do so and we must use it

under New York state law our mobile crisis clinicians can bring people having a mental

health crisis to a hospital for medical evaluation

and the physicians at that hospital find that the person has a mental illness

and is dangerous to themselves or others

they have the authority to admit that person and retain them for treatment

even if the person does not agree to it

my question is maybe I can now go back to Jonathan just for a little bit

is Mayor Adams being punglose here is he just kind of like whistling past the graveyard

is this like all a bunch of BS that we have the authorities already

and we're going to do this new policy and really start doing this

and if so why did it take so long for a mayor to recognize that such authorities exist

and that we should take care of dangerous people like this

well I think that he should be given credit even for saying what he has now said

which got enormous amount of heat and one criticism that I think is cynical

but understandable is that people then brought to the hospital as he's now

mandating can be done don't get kept so they enter the revolving door

and that's true they shouldn't have to do that

but as Rafael was saying some of this is a state matter we lost a thousand beds

for psychiatric patients to covid because someone decided it was like elective knee surgery

to require hospitalization for severe illness but more than that

only the state can get those beds back and I don't think we've gotten them all back

and so already and I guess the argument would be you have to start somewhere

and so and another problem Rafael mentioned all the levels that he's up against

one of the largest reasons for deinstitutionalization is the fact that if you're in a state

long-term care psychiatric facility you don't get Medicaid reimbursement

so that's why states just began to release everybody

and that's a bureaucratic error that has been in existence and everybody understands

that it's a disastrous engine for preventing people from getting the care they need

so he has at least said we have the authority now I think he has a fantastic advisor Brian Stetten

who used to be a policy in charge of like I think policy at the treatment advocacy center

who's a deeply humane person and who understands that the kind of compassion

that will be enduring and valuable is the kind that recognizes the nature of these illnesses

but I would love to know if the program that Jordan Neely was in that when instead of going

to prison he went into a treatment program that required him to stay on his medication avoid drugs

and be clean for 15 months to which he agreed you know Andy Newman who does I think very good

reporting for the Times about all of these things printed the exchange with the judge you

have a wonderful opportunity here but then my question would be how is he simply allowed to

leave and that may actually be something that can be fixed intensive case manager who has the

authority to make sure you're taking the medication to which you pledged in order to stay in the

program and it seems to me even assisted outpatient treatment is actually a form of commitment

and even though many people say it's toothless because it kind of is because they can't forcibly

medicate you or commit you even if you but they can facilitate the process but all of these tools

will only be good if they're used so I would love someone to report on how you could just leave

but I do think that what the mayor is doing that's different is basically saying that being severely

ill is really a reason for going to the hospital and you know we we turned violence into the only

symptom that qualifies you for hospital care which is an extraordinary thing because it doesn't need

to be an isn't an actual symptom of mental illness most of the time so talk about stigma

everyone now only thinks in terms of violence as a justification but then the question is also

if you medicate someone and maybe that's what happened when he went to Bellevue for five days

you seem better and that's truly an Orwellian situation what are the protocols for making

sure that someone will comply can you require someone to be an assisted outpatient treatment

before they're released if they're there and you know these are very specific nitty gritty things

and I actually do I promise you that Brian Stetten knows about them and I'm sure the mayor does

too how much they can be implemented I don't know and I would just add because of what I was

saying before like treating the whole thing like a pandemic the budget was so huge for mental illness

you know Thrive New York was like a quarter of a billion dollars a year and it was for to improve

its mandate was to improve the mental health of all New Yorkers and I think a contribution people

can make is to make a distinction it's a wonderful goal but mental health is not the same and these

are programs that will require yet more money for a fewer smaller group of people who may not even

yeah can I can I just say I mean the resources are there the Department of Social Services

budget for fiscal year 2022 was 13.7 billion dollars right we went from spending 1.5 billion

dollars with a B on homeless services in 2014 to 3.5 in 2021 it's about how we're allocating

those resources and I think Jonathan's exactly right to say that there is obviously and clearly a

subpopulation of of people who are suffering from really serious mental illness who need

more of those resources allocated to them. We're still in the aftermath of the George Floyd summer

where protest and riots in American cities turned into policy demands especially in big cities

in 2020 former governor Andrew Cuomo he told the protesters at one point you won you accomplished

your goal and we've seen you know a little bit of a walk back from you know the height of the

defund the police but it still is a little bit of like a miasma over our big cities particularly

our big blue cities and so I guess this is a question for you cat you know because you talk

a little bit about the idea in your recent unheard piece that you know if you demand vigilance then

you get vigilantes are we still in that George Floyd moment and do we have to maybe address

you know that we over corrected in 2020 and that part of the problem here is just getting back to

a more realistic view of how to do policing in general. Right so I mean one of the things about

this obviously is that when you defund the police literally this is the kind of scenario that results

if people think that they cannot count upon law enforcement to be present and to be proactive

in moments like this it makes them that much more likely to take matters into their own hands

that is if they are the kind of person who's inclined to take matters into their own hands

which is maybe something that is kind of worth just landing on briefly in this conversation that

what happened to Jordan Neely wasn't just because of Jordan Neely's history and Jordan Neely's

history within the system and the system's history of you know failing or failing to serve or whatever

Jordan Neely none of this would have happened if he hadn't also happened to be on a train

with somebody who had the skill and the inclination to try to I mean either de-escalate the situation

or escalate it depending on you know your perspective on things I guess but you know

Daniel Penny stepped in where you know on another subway car maybe nobody would have

so I think that that's an important thing to mention as we're discussing this you know

it is true that when you make people feel as though it's kind of up to them to be the police

because the police no longer exist in their previous capacity you do end up with something like this

but when I said that in my piece what I was really talking about was what happens when you

inculcate this lack of trust within a society one of the kind of tenets on the progressive left

and this was very prevalent during the Me Too movement but not exclusively during that

was this notion that if you are uncomfortable that represents something significant it represents

something threatening it means a violation is in progress and it means that something intolerable

is happening you know we had in the context of say you know an awkward guy in your workplace or

somebody doing a microaggression to you in a classroom you can't tolerate that because you

know it's just a precursor to all kinds of more and terrible things and so that's a threat that

must be neutralized and what is basically being described there the kind of animating principle

behind that is this notion that the person next to you is an unknowable threat that they have the

capacity to do you harm that they probably want to do you harm and that you need to be

constantly vigilant you need to be on guard to ensure that harm doesn't befall you and when you

get that mindset going on a kind of a societal level you do end up with situations like this

you know sometimes it takes the form of of somebody saying well I don't trust a gay person to you

know to teach my kindergartner and sometimes it's people saying I can't share an office with somebody

who voted for Donald Trump and then it's sometimes you know I can't share a subway car with somebody

who's acting in a way that seems erratic this seems like it might be dangerous um you know

something needs to be done it's that something must be done mindset that you know can lead to

tragedy well I want to wrap up our conversation today with just looking kind of at this broader

question outside of just new york and that is we know as of january of at least of 2022 that over

a half a million people in this country were homeless california has an enormous homeless

population 170 000 people new york is now in second place with roughly 75 000 add to this

the mental health crisis that we've been discussing in this episode plus the prevalence of very potent

drugs thinking particularly of new kinds of methamphetamines and fentanyl that exacerbate

these problems and then of course legalized marijuana is another one if you have any kind of

schizophrenia it's a mess and when we look at it as sort of a national problem what are the

steps that we should be demanding that our our political leaders start taking maybe to address

this crisis and i want to start uh with you rafael i mean it's a it's a big question i i i think

that the the sort of first thing that needs to happen is that policymakers need to secure public

spaces whatever the problems are whatever the debates are about how we should approach those

problems cities can't and won't function well if public spaces are surrendered to disorder even if

you don't believe that the people creating that disorder are at fault you just can't have people

living on the subway you just can't have you know people urinating in public you just can't have

people shooting up you know in parks and playgrounds um that has to be stamped out you know but but i

think with respect to the you know the crisis involving the street homeless who are severely

mentally ill and often exacerbating that illness with you know drug consumption we need to come

to terms with the fact that there are some people who cannot take care of themselves and it is therefore

not at all compassionate to put them in a situation in which we're essentially forcing them to fail

on that front and that means accepting that it is proper for society to use the course of force

of government when appropriate to compel people into treatment centers that are secure that they

can't just walk out of that they can't you know choose not to comply with their medical medication

protocols in and so you know that that's really i think where the rubber's going to meet the road

jonathan um you've you've obviously done a lot of thinking on this your book deals with a lot of

these questions what would you like to see our political leaders national local state

how what would you like to see them begin to do in trying to address this this this problem

well i am overwhelmed by its proportions and uh all the policy difficulties but

i think that what rafael was saying about maybe trying to disaggregate the people who are homeless

because they are severely ill rather than suggesting that their behavior is the product of

their being homeless would be important for them and important for everybody else and and it need

not mean people often again in that manichean way say well we're just you're just going to build

asylums and lock them away the original dream of community mental health care is real uh supported

housing is very important housing that can that is affordable that includes services but it is

there only a value if you recognize the needs of the people who are in them and the needs of some

of those people may be uh to have medication mandated and and those things are really important

especially because what cat was saying about how you don't trust anybody also if we divide

everyone into groups and it's understood however sympathetic or antagonistic you may be that jordan

nearly was a severely ill person in a world in which there are group identities he should not be

seen as the emblematic figure because there are so many things that can be done but if they're not

done you won't fool anybody by saying we must destigmatize first a way to destigmatize is to

take steps that we really that are very modest and that are understood and i think that's really

important and i also think what rafael's says is very important about reclaiming public spaces

because otherwise there's no way of understanding who is violating a social norm and who is ill in

a threatening way and then you can't even like you know when jane jacob says we all need eyes

on the street eyes on the street are of no value if you can't even evaluate what street life is

supposed to be anymore and i don't think that's a dread imposition of some old-fashioned standard i

think it's i think it's a pretty basic one it doesn't solve the problem but it is at least

a small beginning to me my mind cat i want to give you the last word on this looking forward

what do we want to hear from our political leaders at this point on dealing with this

bigger problem not just the mental health crisis but all of it having kind of the stew with the

homeless problem as well as you know the availability of these drugs and and the public spaces problem

that rafael was talking about so i i'm very focused on what i don't want to hear and what i don't

think politicians in particular should be engaged in um which is joining in this mad rush immediately

after an incident like this to either dfi or demonize the parties involved dependent entirely on

where they slot into this kind of identitarian narrative you know which is driven by that same

power slash privilege framework that we were talking about earlier people like alexandra

ocasio-cortez and aiyana presley when they go into the public square essentially and tell millions

of people that this was a lynching or that you know this happened because you know there was a

white supremacist on the train who hates black people and hates the homeless and just you know

was out for blood that day they are not just utterly failing in their capacity as public

servants they are scaring the hell out of people and they need to stop um we need uh from the people

who are in a position to actually influence policy to influence the way that these issues

are addressed systemically we need so much better and so much more than that

rafael cat jonathan thank you so much this has been honestly and i'm ilay lake

you

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