The images are hard to watch: A young woman, Iryna Zarutska—a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee—is sitting in her seat on the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail, engrossed in her phone as she is riding home after work. A black male, Decarlos Brown, sits behind her and he suddenly stands up and quickly stabs her with a large pocketknife.
A few minutes later, she is dead, having bled out in the rail car, another young black male trying to comfort her and stop the bleeding with his shirt. Her killer mutters something about getting “the white girl” and steps off the train at the next stop, only to be quickly arrested.
There are numerous angles to this story, and they cut across nearly every debated social issue in this country from race to lenient judges to safety on public transportation. (At least this case doesn’t involve gun control, since the killer used a knife.) It turns out Brown had been arrested 14 times and had recently been released without bail after an arrest, despite concerns from Brown’s attorney who suggested to the judge that his client be given a mental examination.
Race certainly enters the picture as the judge in question, Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, is black and agreed to release Brown if he would sign a statement promising to appear at his next court date, which he did. The mayor of Charlotte, Vi Lyles, also is black and, in the immediate aftermath of the killing, barely mentioned the victim but poured out most of her sympathy for the alleged killer, claiming that the “system failed” Brown and that more law enforcement would be ineffective, stating, “We will never arrest our way out [of] issues such as homelessness and mental health.”
To make things worse, the black advocacy organization, Black Lives Matter, had an inflammatory post on its website that hinted the killing was justified, given past injustices against black people. In short, it is not outlandish to say that this case was a prime example of anarcho-tyranny, in which government refuses to enforce its laws to protect its citizens and then turns the governing apparatus against people who are law-abiding. However, black people themselves can point to being on the other end of anarcho-tyranny when law enforcement officials and the courts refused to protect them or even charge whites who openly murdered blacks, much less convict them, the Emmett Till case in Mississippi being one of the most publicized examples (and there are many others). In other words, there has been plenty of governmental wrongdoing to go around, and it has happened for a long time, weakening trust in the institutions of law enforcement and justice.
There is plenty of evidence that the response to crime from municipal governments run by progressives is inadequate and often outright delusional. Commenting on the Charlotte killing in Quillette, Jukka Savolainen writes that identity politics plays a large role in how progressives respond to these kinds of incidents:
People are murdered every day in America, but not every murder is treated as newsworthy. Some are amplified into morality plays about “systemic racism” while others are dismissed as isolated tragedies, and this discrepancy generally follows an identitarian script dictated by a perverse view of social justice. When George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer in 2020, his face appeared on murals from Berlin to Nairobi. Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown also became household names following their deaths at the hands of American law enforcement. But Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver—both of whom were white victims of lethal police force—remain largely unknown in the public imagination. The difference is not the brutality of the incidents, but the racial frame within which they are reported.
He continues:
The Zarutska murder also fits a depressingly familiar pattern of preventable urban violence, particularly after the death of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. The “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots that engulfed American cities in the summer of 2020 left an extremely destructive political legacy: demoralized police departments, slashed budgets, the election of prosecutors who de-emphasized basic law enforcement, and a broader climate of impunity. The results soon became apparent: a historic spike in crime, including homicide, shoplifting, and menacing behavior on public transportation. Even as crime rates have begun to decline from their 2020–21 peak, low-level disorder persists—open drug use, fare evasion, and a pervasive sense that the authorities have lost control of public spaces.
The Charlotte video captured that climate in miniature. As Kat Rosenfield has argued, “we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same.” In practice, the taboo against insisting on order and decency has meant abandoning shared spaces—trains, platforms, sidewalks—to the most disturbed and dangerous people among us. The Daniel Penny saga, meanwhile, taught bystanders a cruel lesson: if you intervene, you may be punished, so the safest course is to do nothing.
Dangers from Crime Are Intensified in Government-Owned Spaces
Rosenfield’s “shared spaces” really are government-owned places like parks, public transportation such as trains, subways, and buses, or are created when governments attempt to impose progressive non-enforcement policies on private businesses such as retail stores when it comes to shoplifting. The former often involves life-threatening situations like stabbings or shootings, not to mention armed robbery and menacing by young people who know others are afraid of them.
Large-scale shoplifting deteriorates the quality of life in a community, as widespread retail theft is not a “victimless” crime, despite what progressives might claim. Likewise, when a random encounter in an urban government space like a commuter train can turn deadly, the ramifications are enormous for a society. Yet, thanks to a combination of progressive ideology and the indifference that accompanies government entities when it comes to carrying out responsibilities, it is unlikely that we will see anything done to deal significantly with these problems, especially given the fact that most large US cities are governed by left-leaning progressives who believe that law enforcement of any kind is inherently racist.
The last time that public transportation in New York City was considered relatively safe for its ridership was during the mayoral terms of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and their administrations were under constant fire from progressives for aggressive policing, especially in the subways. Progressives especially objected to police arresting people for “turnstile hopping” instead of paying fares:
Whether police should intervene when individuals break what are perceived to be minor rules — like hopping the turnstile, smoking in the subway, and playing music from a speaker in a public place — has been an ongoing debate for as long as I’ve been alive. Progressive police critics helped drive a movement to de-emphasize public order enforcement which culminated with prosecutors and politicians adopting non-enforcement policies and decriminalizing such offenses.
Yet, many, if not most, people who engage in criminal behavior in the public transportation entities are fare jumpers, including Decarlos Brown. Because progressives believe that fare jumping is linked more to poverty than social deviance (they call arresting jumpers as “criminalizing poverty”), they object to any enforcement of fares. In fact, Zohran Mamdani—who almost certainly will win New York City’s mayoral race in November—wants to eliminate city bus fares and would do it with the subways if they were not run by New York’s state government. Thus, one can imagine that, in a Mamdani administration, fare jumping will become even more common—and, likewise, public transportation and public spaces will become even more unsafe.
This is not a call to bring back the stop-and-frisk actions by police that caused a lot of social discord, especially among black New Yorkers that seemed to be the ones stopped the most. Moreover, writers on this page have not backed off being critical of police behavior and have pointed out that police have no legal obligation to protect people. Nonetheless, when this kind of indifference by the authorities combined with progressive ideology that is highly tolerant of social deviance and accepts at least some criminal violence, it becomes open season on law-abiding people who find themselves in public transportation venues or other government-owned spaces.
Conclusion
In the past few decades, progressives have come to dominate large city governments, and they have openly practiced their ideology, especially when it comes to protecting people from violent crime. Progressives believe that since all police are fundamentally racist, then it logically follows that police protection is a form of white privilege, and, therefore, illegitimate.
This situation is not going to change any time soon. Progressive Democrats dominate municipal politics and, given the electoral climate in cities like Chicago and New York, both of which have highly-progressive governments, one can surmise that vulnerable people will continue to be victims of predatory, violent behavior by people who have no reason to fear the authorities and will not face condemnation from the political classes.
