The System Killed Jordan Neely

Daniel Penny was merely the randomly-chosen mechanism of a death created by the failures of managerial bureaucracy.

There’s a real-life martial arts story that has been on my mind a lot the past week. It comes from Terry Dobson, who was one of the first Westerners to study aikido in Japan, in the early 1960s.

Dobson was a direct student of aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba, and he wrote that as a young budoka, after a few years of rigorous training he “felt both tough and holy” and “wanted an absolutely legitimate opportunity whereby [he] might save the innocent by destroying the guilty.”

I think every martial artist — or at least every male martial artist who started training before the age of thirty or so — recognizes this feeling. To want to be the chivalrous hero, coming to the defense of the innocent, is not in itself a bad thing. It’s certainly better than being the oppressor, or a coward who lets oppression go unchecked.

But it is an unbalanced desire, the interest of the Warrior without input from other mature masculine archetypes.

One day Dobson was on a train outside Tokyo when a drunken man, filthy and rude, came aboard the train and started harassing and assaulting people, even punching a mother holding her baby and knocking her down. At last, Dobson thought, an opportunity to be that hero. He was just starting to lure the drunk into attacking him when an elderly man got the drunk’s attention, and started talking to him. Dobson writes:

“What’cha been drinkin’?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with interest. “I been drinkin’ sake,” the laborer bellowed back, “and it’s none of your business!” Flecks of spittle spattered the old man.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” the old man said, “absolutely wonderful! You see, I love sake too. Every night, me and my wife (she’s 76, you know), we warm up a little bottle of sake and take it out into the garden, and we sit on an old wooden bench. We watch the sun go down, and we look to see how our persimmon tree is doing. My great-grandfather planted that tree, and we worry about whether it will recover from those ice storms we had last winter. Our tree has done better than I expected though, especially when you consider the poor quality of the soil. It is gratifying to watch when we take our sake and go out to enjoy the evening – even when it rains!” He looked up at the laborer, eyes twinkling.

As he struggled to follow the old man’s conversation the drunk’s face began to soften. His fists slowly unclenched. “Yeah,” he said, “I love persimmons too…” His voice trailed off.

“Yes,” said the old man, smiling. “And I’m sure you have a wonderful wife.”

“No,” replied the laborer. “My wife died.” Very gently, swaying with the motion of the train, the big man began to sob. “I don’t got no wife, I don’t got no home, I don’t got no job. I’m so ashamed of myself.” Tears rolled down his cheeks; a spasm of despair rippled through his body.

Now it was my turn. Standing there in my well-scrubbed youthful innocence, my “make this world safe for democracy” righteousness, I suddenly felt dirtier than he was.

Then the train arrived at my stop. As the doors opened, I heard the old man cluck sympathetically. “My, my,” he said. “That is a difficult predicament, indeed. Sit down here and tell me about it.”

I turned my head for one last look. The laborer was sprawled on the seat, his head in the old man’s lap. The old man was softly stroking the filthy, matted hair.

As the train pulled away, I sat down on a bench. What I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with kind words. I had just seen aikido tried in combat, and the essence of it was love.

The old man in this story is a great master, balancing the courage of the Warrior with the creativity of the Trickster and the love, compassion, and knowledge of the Lover and the Healer. His solution to the drunk’s violence is what we should all aim for.

But, if we have a skeptical inclination or have ever dealt with people with substance abuse problems, we might ask if the drunk actually reformed after this or if he was back punching people on the train the next week.

And we might ask what would have happened if the old man had not been there, and Dobson had acted with his incomplete solution — but the only one available to ordinary folks in the absence of a true sage who could talk the aggressor down — and used physical force to stop the drunk.

How should we have judged him then?

Of course this story has been on my mind because of the subway train death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man with obvious mental health challenges and a history of violence, who was killed by Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny. After Neely made a physical and verbal outburst whose precise nature remains unclear, Penny, with the help of two other men, attempted to restrain Neely for the police using a neck restraint which at some point — either by accident, negligence, or recklessness — turned into a fatal chokehold.

Neely had a history of violence including fracturing the skull of a 67-year-old woman, threatening to kill a subway booth agent, and the attempted kidnapping of a seven-year-old girl.

He was deeply traumatized by the brutal murder of his mother by her boyfriend when he was just 14. His mental health declined; he dropped out of school, refused to take prescribed medications, and found it impossible to keep a job. For some years he made money busking as a Michael Jackson impersonator but increasingly erratic behavior eventually made even this impossible.

Of course none of these facts, neither his violent past nor the violence that had killed his mother and sent him spiraling, were known to the men who tried to apprehend him.

Exactly what preceded his death, whether the men who apprehended him acted reasonably, or negligently or recklessly, or with deliberate malice, remains a source of angry speculation. While 911 calls at the time reported that Neely was threatening people and was armed, another witness says it didn’t seem he wanted to hurt anyone, and there’s no evidence he was armed.

Filtered through culture war lenses, Penny has been seen by some as an obvious ableist white supremacist, trained to kill by an imperialist military, who lynched a mentally ill black man for merely making others uncomfortable in their privilege (and never mind that one of his accomplices appeared to be a “person of color”); to others he’s a hero, finally standing up to a dangerous habitual criminal empowered by a soft-on-crime justice system to prey on innocent citizens (and never mind Neely’s status as a crime victim himself, the son of someone killed in a horrific murder).

From the perspective of a culture war conscientious objector with a deep interest in the paradoxes of peace and self-defense, it seems to me that Penny and the other men who acted to restrain Neely certainly acted imperfectly, not even approaching the wisdom of the old man in Dobson’s story. Perhaps they acted negligently, or perhaps they acted as well as fallible ordinary men, not sages, could do in a bewildering crisis where they didn’t have all the facts to see the big picture. It’s likely the jury system will have to make that judgment, with more evidence than we have available.

But if the facts about Neely weren’t known to those on that subway car, they were known to the New York city government, which had him on a “Top 50” list of homeless people in the most urgent need of assistance and treatment. He had been taken to hospitals numerous times, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily.

And let’s repeat: he had a history of violence against others. There is a civil libertarian argument that a person cannot be compelled to receive help, that the deeply deranged have the right to choose to remain in their hell or that compulsory treatment is worse than the disease; but that falls apart once a person starts breaking the faces of innocent senior citizens, threatening to kill people, and trying to kidnap children.

People who commit such violence need to be placed under supervision. But we have a criminal justice system based on punishment and cruelty, and a mental health system geared towards the profitable treatment of the anxieties of the privileged classes; neither is appropriate for people like Neely.

Two weeks before his death, an outreach worker saw Neely in Coney Island and recorded that “He could be a harm to others or himself if left untreated.”

Yet rather than placing him in the compulsory treatment and supervision he so obviously needed, the system left him on the street, because no one could score political points by being tough on him or make a profit off of helping him re-order his disordered brain.

The system killed Jordan Neely by leaving him on the street where he was known to be a threat to others and himself, where he was doomed to eventually kill himself quickly or slowly, or be killed by someone else trying to defend against his violent behavior.

Daniel Penny, whether he acted reasonably and killed by accident or recklessly and committed manslaughter, was merely the randomly-chosen final mechanism of Neely’s death, set up by a system dedicated to cruelty and profit rather than human well-being.

References:

Balevic, Katie. “New York City keeps a “Top 50″ list of homeless people in urgent need. Jordan Neely was on the list.” Insider. 7 May 2023. https://www.insider.com/jordan-neely-daniel-penny-chokehold-killing-nyc-subway-homeless-2023-5

Cramer, Maria, Hurubie Meko and Amelia Nierenberg. “What We Know About Jordan Neely’s Killing.” New York Times. 5 May 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/nyregion/jordan-neely-chokehold-death-subway.html

Dobson, Terry. “Aikido In Action: Doing combat with the essence of love.” In Context #4: The Foundations Of Peace. Context Institute. Autumn 1983. p 35 https://www.context.org/iclib/ic04/dobson/ Originally published in PHP, published monthly by PHP Institute International, No. 32 Mori Bldg. 6th Floor, 3-4-30 Shibakoen, Minatoku, Tokyo 105, Japan.

Tracy, Thomas, Rocco Parascandola, Ellen Moynihan and Larry McShane. “Criminal charges weighed against Marine in chokehold death of Jordan Neely as NYPD and Manhattan DA confer”. New York Daily News, 4 May 2023. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-possible-charges-marine-michael-jackson-impersonator-jordan-neely-20230504-plaznkv5pjbuxaqdu2tlxpieqq-story.html