In the usual flood of stupid speculation immediately after the mass shooting on the subway Monday morning, then again after the police identified a “person of interest” on Monday evening, people from both ends of the political spectrum converged in agreement with self-described “fucking mental patient” Frank James.
That would be the same James suspected of committing the attempted subway massacre, and who earlier raved in YouTube videos about how 9/11 was “the most beautiful,” white people are genocidal, Black people like him are “cattle,” and homosexual people are “sick fucking predators.” But James, like a number of politicians on both the left and the right, also insists that there’s no way New York City Mayor Eric Adams can police his way to public safety.
“He can’t stop no fucking crime in no subways,” James, who Adams named on Tuesday morning as a “suspect in the shooting,” said in February about the subway safety plan the mayor had just rolled out. “He ain’t stopping shit,” given all the entry and exit points in the system.
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“With this program in place, with all these police, I’d still get off. I know I could get off because they can’t be everywhere,” James laughed. “Those who go on to commit crimes, like shooting? That means you have to have police in every station, and that’s not possible.”
Indeed, James allegedly escaped after the shooting, when it seemed that everything that could go wrong did for the NYPD. At least one officer in the station that the train had pulled into just after the shooting couldn’t get their radio to work underground, and had to tell people to call 911. A “malfunction” in the camera system meant there was no footage of James for the authorities to pull.
Responding to the shooting and the technology failures that may have helped James escape before he was arrested on Wednesday, the mayor called for more tech to maintain public safety, although he seemed to be making it up as he went about exactly what he had in mind.
But while Adams is at least talking about restoring public safety and holding himself accountable for it, all too many lawmakers here and nationally seem to agree with the suspected shooter’s view that government authorities are incapable of protecting citizens and maintaining order.
“[S]hooter was known to the FBI who committed mass shooting in terrorist attack on NY subway day after Biden’s gun control speech,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who added that the “FBI is too busy with plots like setting up guys in Michigan and tracking down MAGA grandma’s they set up on J6.”
She also rhetorically asked, “With New York’s strict gun control laws, how many innocent people were carrying a gun when the bad guy with a gun broke the existing laws and started shooting people?” Then, she answered, “Gun control laws only create victims bc bad guys don’t care about laws.”
Somewhere in that mush is the core argument of a new breed of post law-and-order “Rittenhouse Republicans,” as my brother Jake has called them, who see the state as fundamentally untrustworthy (so it’s not just the “swamp,” but the whole thing) and the police as just thuggish agents of the state, so that people simply need to be armed at all times, including on the trains, to protect themselves from “bad guys.”
What could go wrong?
New York City may find out soon, as the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority is poised to demolish the city’s gun licensing laws in a decision later this year that could bring open or even concealed carry rights here—which in turn would make it all but impossible for the NYPD to even try and find illegal guns.
Meantime, a lot of local lawmakers seem to share James and Greene’s idea that there’s really nothing police can or should do about guns in New York City, where the number of shootings has more than doubled since 2019.
The City Council member and state Assembly member representing the district where the shooting happened, Alexa Avilés and Marcela Mitaynes, put out a lengthy joint statement that began by saying, “We are grateful to our first responders,” before declaring that “what our community needs now is reassurance that… our pain will not be used as a scapegoat for policies that won’t keep us safer. We know that more police presence on trains or in neighborhoods would not have prevented this.”
They concluded by calling for “dramatic investments in violence prevention and international programs, full employment and guaranteed housing moving forward—before more people get hurt.”
Or, as the New York City chapter of the DSA put it, “The solution to a violent society is a peaceful society, and peace requires material security.”
Good luck in the meantime, everyone!
While Greene is just sloganeering, the city pols are responding to a long-term dynamic in New York City in which the answer to every question—starting with “Why are things getting worse?” or “Why are things getting better?”—always seems to be more money and latitude for police. But that tendency to automatically enlarge the police, and make them the answer to every social problem, has produced an equally unthinking mantra on the left that views policing as always and everywhere illegitimate—the answer to no problem, not even mass shootings.
In both parties, ascendant lawmakers are converging around the idea that the police are fundamentally dangerous, and that the state monopoly on violence is a mistake.
With the center giving out, the idea on the far left is that the state has to fix root causes, and the police can’t do anything about crime in the meantime except ruin people’s lives. And on the far right, it’s that people need to protect themselves rather than outsource that job to the armed functionaries of a corrupt state.
But the takeout is perversely similar. It’s what the crazy man in these videos has been saying.
