It’s Immoral Not To Call The Cops On Genuinely Menacing People You Encounter In Public

This isn’t just about you and your pure-as-the-driven-snow political beliefs

I feel bad for the anonymous 23-year-old woman interviewed by the New York Post earlier this week. She explained that on April 2, she and her friend were attacked and followed on the subway by a menacing man who wouldn’t leave them alone: “the crazed suspect stalked them closely and allegedly yanked her by the back of her head in an attempt to slam her to the ground and booted her friend in the back.” Thankfully, during their escape they came across some NYPD officers and the suspect was immediately arrested.

The woman and her friend eventually declined to press charges, she told the paper. “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail,” she said. That’s the quote that’s gone viral since then: I don’t want to put another black man in jail. It’s gone viral because a month later the black man in question, Rhamell Burke, pushed retired schoolteacher Ross Falzone down a flight of stairs in Chelsea, killing him.

Reporting from The New York Times and the Post paints an astonishing story. Burke had, under the name Rhamell Burke-Missouri, been a Broadway dancer before descending into profound mental illness during Covid. The timeline of last Thursday almost defies belief: On the same day, he was released from a psychiatric unit, killed Falzone, and showed up for a scheduled court appearance on another assault charge. (Though he had been identified by then, no one realized he was wanted for a new crime during the court appearance, according to the Post.)

It’s a cropped version of that quote from the anonymous Post source that’s circulating. In full, it reads, “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail, but, you know, at some point, if you are a criminal, you’re a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary guy.” The shorter version of the quote is being slightly misrepresented online, as though it proves that if she and her friend had only intervened then and there, the later killing never would have happened. But as the last line of the story notes, “Burke was hit with an assault charge for the April attack and granted supervised release at arraignment.” I’m guessing, based on her quote, that the anonymous victim feels that if she had cooperated more, his punishment would have been more severe, averting the killing of Falzone. That’s far from certain, and I don’t entirely blame her for her decision. Even if her quote indicates one particular motivation, there are all sorts of reasons to not want to cooperate fully with a prosecution.

I do think, however, that we should pause and think through which of these two options — help the police or decline to do so — is more morally fraught in a situation involving a clearly dangerous man (it’s almost always a man) threatening people in public. If you do help the police, you of course have no control over where the perp will end up, what sentence he will receive, and so on. There’s real moral uncertainty because you’re not saying “I choose to help the police and in doing so I hereby declare that the proper punishment is 90 days of inpatient treatment at a gleaming, freshly constructed facility whose rec room has nice river views.” That isn’t how it works. Neither option is close to perfect.

The incident involving this Post lady reminded me of the wave of online outrage sparked by Emma Vigeland, co-host of The Majority Report, in 2023, over comments she made on her show about the killing of Jordan Neely by Daniel Penny — another instance in which the failure to keep a dangerous, deranged man off the streets led to an unnecessary death (his, in this case):

I was hit at one point sitting on the subway by a man who was having a mental health episode. He sat next to me, and he was elbowing and kind of flailing around. He hit me in the face and in my body. It was jarring, right? The idea that I would want him to be hurt in any way — I just didn’t want to be near him in that moment because I understood something was going on here. Every one of us who has taken public transit has had this kind of situation, something similar happen — seeing someone struggling. That doesn’t mean that our fear in that instance — and I was a little scared, because I was hit —but my fear is not the primary object of what we should be focusing on right now. It’s the fact that this person is in pain. And so, like the politics of dehumanization, privileges, the bourgeois kind of concern of people’s immediate discomfort in this narrow, narrow instance, as opposed to larger humanity and life, it’s really frickin’ twisted.

Now, I’m not an impartial arbiter here because I dislike Vigeland, and no online pile on delivers the “correct” amount of scorn, but of course it’s ridiculous to treat “not wanting to get assaulted in public” as a “bourgeois kind of concern of people’s immediate discomfort.”

Vigeland’s comments here reflect a worldview that is staunchly opposed to police involvement: You should hardly ever call the police on anyone because the police are very likely to make things worse. This norm has been taken to dizzying extremes during moments of peak concern about police abuse. At one point during the summer of 2020, for example, the head of a small Twin Cities literary agency tweeted that she had called the police in response to a gas station near her getting looted. This sparked a minor uproar online that led to three of her staffers publicly resigning, because (apparently) it’s racist to call the police on looters.

But let’s stick to situations involving genuinely menacing people on the subway. Not people who seem a little off, not people slumped against a wall within a station, but people who wander around, in public, threatening others or actually hurting them, as in the case of Vigeland and the Post lady. These types are fairly rare, at least in the relatively safe parts of New York City where I spend the most time, but in my experience they have become less so since the coronavirus. (The difference between “safe-” and “unsafe”-feeling neighborhoods is also blurred a bit by the extent of our subway and bus coverage.)

My argument is that if you are assaulted or seriously menaced by someone like this and you don’t get the police involved, you’re doing something wrong — in fact, you may be wronging not only this person’s future victims but the person himself.