The trial of Daniel Penny, accused of killing a homeless man, Jordan Neely, reveals issues that go far beyond Penny’s guilt or innocence. They remember Senator Daniel Moynihan’s essay 1993’s “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which he grappled with the problems of crime and social disintegration that had become increasingly prevalent in urban America in recent decades.
According to Moynihan, society was always willing to tolerate a certain level of crime, provided it could be controlled and kept at that level. A community’s tolerance of crime, or deviant behavior, was measured by the apparatus it set up to achieve this control, including the police, courts, and prisons. What society would tolerate was a function of public policy.
However, a situation may arise where the level of crime exceeds the resources of the system. Under those circumstances, Moynihan wrote, a community would be faced with a choice: it could “afford” the number of offenders in its midst and increase the law enforcement apparatus needed to keep them under control, or it could simply ‘can choose not to notice it’. behavior that would otherwise be monitored, frowned upon, or even punished.”
As an example of the latter, Moynihan pointed to New York’s approach to the mentally ill and, by extension, the homeless. In 1955, the number of psychiatric patients in New York State alone exceeded 90,000 (about ten times as many as today), exceeding the capacity to house them.
Five years later, as part of a commission created by President Kennedy to address the problem, Moynihan recommended the release of most patients, coupled with funding for two thousand community mental health centers to assist in the patient’s return to society. Needless to say, the patients were virtually all released, but only a fraction of these centers were ever funded, let alone built.
The result was inevitable. Failing to provide the necessary structure to treat the mentally ill, New York chose as a policy to “fail to notice” the resulting behavioral consequences. Homelessness was neither controlled nor frowned upon.
With the trial of Mr. Penny, Moynihan’s thesis has reached a particular flashpoint, playing out in plain sight in a New York City courtroom. According to pre-trial testimonyShortly before he was killed, Neely paced the subway, coming within inches of passengers.
As he did this, he shouted, “Someone is going to die today,” “I want to hurt people.” More recently, during the trial, a witness testified that Neely raised his fists and shouted that if he didn’t get food and water, “he was going to lay hands on people,” and that “he was going to attack,” and another quoted Neely said, “I’ll kill a motherfucker.”
What is striking about the Penny case is not whether he is innocent or guilty, on which I offer no opinion, but how many commentators have suggested that Neely’s behavior was unremarkable and merely part of the daily fabric of life in New York City. For example, a writer for the New York Times argued that Neely “just made people uncomfortable.”
Another Times writer, Elizabeth Spiers, mocked the idea that anyone could be afraid in such a situation. tweet: “I have been safe on the subway for 23 years and my child has never been threatened by a half-naked lunatic, but these imaginary monsters in your head can be tackled with therapy.”
More importantly, these sentiments have moved from the op-ed pages to the Penny process itself. Prosecutor Dafna Yoran expressly recognized how unremarkable it is for New Yorkers to confront individuals like Jordan Neely, one suggests reportthat Neely’s “erratic behavior is something New Yorkers can witness on a daily basis.” She added: “As New Yorkers, we train ourselves not to be involved. To not make eye contact. To pretend that people like Jordan Neely aren’t there.”
Although intended as a rebuke, Yoran’s argument was an inadvertent admission that Moynihan’s thesis still holds up thirty years later. She merely replaced “Choose not to notice” with “pretend it’s not there,” while chastising New Yorkers for adopting as private policy what the city had long ago adopted as public policy.
Tuesday’s elections suggest that the country as a whole is losing patience with policies like these. Even California showed a shift in sentiment when it overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, which largely reversed the decriminalization of shoplifting. It makes you wonder if New Yorkers will ever lose their patience.