What Jordan Neely’s Death Tells Us About Mental Illness and Vigilantism
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Hi, I'm Eli Lake, host of the ReEducation 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 chokehold, 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. Eyewitnesses 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. We want justice for black people!

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 and raving. 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.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. To dive into these questions, we have three terrific guests.

Raphael Mengual 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 fiancée.

Kat, Raphael, Jonathan, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thank you. Thank you. Now, I wanted to start in 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

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, you know, 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

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

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. He was 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 5 to 15 minutes later, Neely was dead. Those are 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 Pressley, 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 movement.

by many of our leaders. Meanwhile, Elon Musk liked a tweet that called Neely a worthless individual. And Vivek Ramaswamy, 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 a

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 uh 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 rafael 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. You know, 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 we're really sending mixed messages here. Do we want...

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. When you 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, it's like 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 assent 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's 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 community,

That are, you know, you could argue ticking time bombs that are dangerous to the rest of us. And yet they're also human beings. And they, I mean, what kind of equality do they deserve 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. Yeah. 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. And for the most part, you know,

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 like,

Yeah.

is absolutely impossible. And you can see this in several of the stories that Raphael mentioned of people stepping in to 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 too.

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 nearly. 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

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...

Right.

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. 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. I guess it's an alleged attempt at 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 the facility 13 days after the start of the program. His last interaction with law enforcement was on April 9th, 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 that 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, right?

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.

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

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 like,

You know, sometimes the critique about the system continuing to let people back out onto 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

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 system,

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 in 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, you know, 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 the

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 Bastille 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 was,

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

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 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 treatment.

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 fiancée, they spoke of it as an inevitable tragedy. And it's only an inevitable tragedy if the means of intervention are unlawful.

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 an 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, you know, in January 2022, a woman named Michelle Goh 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 anymore.

Elizabeth Spears, a New York Times op-ed writer, 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. Okay. But let me continue. Yeah.

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 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. Right.

So that element of it is obviously very frustrating to witness. And I think it sows a lot of division in 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 people

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? Yeah.

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

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 of 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 agree with that, too. 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 exist.

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 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'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, uh,

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 deinstitutionalization. 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 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.

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 reoffending.

Now, wherever you stand on that legislation, I don't think that anyone would sort of quibble with the characteristic that the Clean Slate Act further lowers the transaction costs of committing a crime. And the question becomes, it's like, at a time in which crime is so elevated, why is this where the resources are being expended? You can say the same thing about the city council.

And yes, Mayor Adams was elected, but so was Alvin Bragg 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, 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're

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 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 if 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. I mean, is Mayor Adams being panglose 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 Raphael was saying, some of this is a state matter. We lost 1,000 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 another problem, Raphael 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 Stetton, who used to be a policy in charge of, 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 was 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've pledged in order to stay in the program. And it seems to me even assisted outpatient treatment is actually a form of commitment. And it's

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 turned violence into the only symptom that qualifies you for hospital care, which is an extraordinary thing because it doesn't need to be and 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 in 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 believe, I promise you that Brian Stetton 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 smaller group of people who may not even vote. Can I just say, I mean, the resources are there. The Department of Social Services budget for fiscal year 2022 was $13.7 billion.

We went from spending $1.5 billion 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 is exactly right to say that there is obviously and clearly a subpopulation 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 protests 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, Kat, 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 overcorrected 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

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,

Right.

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 established,

going on a kind of a societal level, you do end up with situations like this. You know, sometimes it takes the form 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, that seems like it might be dangerous. 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, at least of 2022, that over a half a million people in this country were homeless. Right.

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 political leaders start taking maybe to address this crisis? And I want to start with you, Raphael. I mean, it's a big question. I think that 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 people urinating in public. You just can't have people shooting up in parks and playgrounds. That has to be stamped out. But I think with respect to the crisis involving the street homeless who are severely mentally ill and often exacerbating that illness with 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 coercive 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 choose not to comply with their medication protocols. And so that's really, I think, where the rubber's going to meet the road.

Jonathan, 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, what would you like to see them begin to do in trying to address this problem? Well, I...

I'm overwhelmed by its proportions and 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 it need not mean people often, again, in that Manichean way, say, well, you're just going to build asylums and lock them away. The original dream of community mental health care is real.

Supported housing is very important. Housing that is affordable, that includes services. But it is there only of value if you recognize the needs of the people who are in them and the needs of some of those people may be to have medication mandated. And those things are really important, especially because what Kat 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 Neely 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 are very modest and that are understood.

And I think that's really important. And I also think what Raphael 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 when Jane Jacobs 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 a pretty basic one. It doesn't solve the problem, but it is at least a small beginning to me, my mind. Kat, 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 the availability of these drugs and the public spaces problem that Raphael was talking about.

So 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, which is joining in this mad rush immediately after an incident like this to either deify 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

People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, 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. We need 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. Raphael, Kat, Jonathan, thank you so much. This has been Honestly, and I'm Eli Lake.