"Riders on the subway deserve to have a ride where they don’t feel threatened. And the mentally ill deserve to have the treatment and the protection..."

"... that would allow them to work out their struggles in the protected space. We can’t have a subway system that’s both a system of transportation and housing for the homeless. Those are incompatible goals."

 Said Gregory Umbach, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, quoted in "After homeless man choked on subway, NYC grapples with treatment of mentally ill" (WaPo).

The incident makes me think of Bernhard Goetz, and reading on, I see he's briefly mentioned in the article:

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

It would be good to say more about why he became a folk hero. It is, I think, evidence of how oppressed ordinary people felt about what they had been forced to endure on the subway — or felt forced to endure. Goetz represented the idea of somehow fighting for your right to be left alone in this public space. 

But the Goetz case was different. The young men he shot were simply criminals, robbers, on the subway to find victims. Neely was, it seems, mentally ill and on the subway for shelter. 

"At least a dozen cities have set homicide records this year. The scale of the killings is recapitulating the worst moments of the United States’ 20th-century urban crisis."

"And if we can’t stop it, we’ll also end up with the kind of over-the-top political response that we have spent decades regretting. That was the era when Bernhard Goetz, the 'Subway Vigilante,' became a New York folk hero for shooting a group of young men who demanded $5. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton left the presidential campaign trail to be home for the execution of a severely brain-injured convict. A few years later, as president, Clinton would help spearhead passage of the infamous 1994 crime bill, which ended up dogging both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during their presidential runs because the modern era blames it (somewhat unfairly) for mass incarceration. The younger progressives who called out Biden and Clinton tend to view the law-and-order politics of that era as pure sadism — or else as a racist, 'New Jim Crow' backlash that served to keep Black Americans separate and unequal.... Crime control is arguably a prerequisite for many items on the progressive policy agenda. Want people to support higher immigration? Reassure them that foreign gangs are not going to reassemble on American streets. Want people to move to dense, walkable urban neighborhoods where their carbon footprint will be smaller? Those neighborhoods won’t be very attractive if there are many criminals walking around, too. And of course, people are most likely to support a reformist criminal justice agenda when crime is low. If many people you know have been victimized, you tend to err on the side of keeping offenders in jail."

Writes Megan McArdle in "Street crime has distorted our politics before. If we don’t get it under control, it will do so again" (WaPo).

"Notorious subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz is going nuts over the possible eviction of his beloved three-legged squirrel... named Glinda’s Sister...."

"Goetz’s attorney, Spencer Sheehan, argues in documents filed in Housing Court that the landlord of the W. 14th St. apartment hasn’t proven that the 'alleged squirrel' actually belongs to the animal family of sciuridae, which is banned in city housing and also includes chipmunks, marmots and prairie dogs...."

The landlord had charged in May that Goetz — who gained notoriety after he shot four black men who he said tried to mug him on the subway in 1984 — turned the apartment into a hoarder’s dump packed with gross garbage, including a “habitrail” of cardboard boxes for the squirrel. Neighbors told the Daily News in May that Goetz is now known in the building as “Squirrel Man.”...

“He says he can’t find it,” Sheehan said. “You know, the alleged squirrel.”

Robert Holland, the attorney for the landlord...  “A neighbor is complaining about something screeching in the walls”....

"New York City Used To Be A Terrifying Place."

A photo essay, from last August about NYC in they pre-Giuliani years, which I ran across this afternoon as I was thinking about the electoral prospects of the left-Democrat mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio in the aftermath of Alexian Lien's motorpsycho nightmare.

Scroll down at the first link to find: "Bernhard Goetz, who shot four youths in a subway train in 1984, became a symbol for the paranoia New Yorkers felt about getting robbed or attacked."

Lien got me thinking about Goetz. Similarities and differences. Goetz had a gun and overreacted out of fear; Lien had a car and underreacted (at first). Arguably. Those are the differences.

The similarity is: A man embodies the plight of an ordinary citizen in a city gone wild. And mayors are held accountable.