In the New York subway chokehold death, we must wait for the facts

Can Americans for once wait for the actual facts? There are clear and dangerous signs of how the influence of social media and the tendency to see everything through an unbending ideological prism is hurting our access to, and understanding of, the truth. It’s a pernicious problem, profoundly dangerous to our shared democracy and our mutual respect for the rule of law, and a matter about which far too few on the left, or the right, are speaking out.

Exhibit A here is the May 1 death of Jordan Neely, the 30-year-old man who perished on a New York subway car following an altercation with a 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran named Daniel Penny. Very few of the facts in this case are not in dispute, but it is clear that Neely died that day after he was placed in chokehold by Penny, a trained combat professional who happened to be riding in the same train car as Neely.

No one, be they rich or poor, housed nor unhoused, white or Black, sober or under the influence of drugs, should walk onto a public train and exit either dying or dead as a consequence of an interaction that occurred there. Anytime that happens, something has gone terribly wrong.

But what actually happened? Did Neely harass or threaten the passengers on that train to the extent that aggressive, immediate action was justified? How much did Neely’s prior state contribute to the loss of his life? What was the intent of the young man who instigated the chokehold?

Was his response a reasonable action of self-protection or was this a violent, retaliatory act deserving of jail time? Was this a terrible accident or yet another example of Americans under stress reacting in callous, dangerous fashion? What part did drugs play? Was race relevant or incidental?

We could go on and on with questions. The answer is that nobody fully yet knows, and it will take a long time to gather and assess the evidence. That’s why a mature democracy has investigations, forensic analyses, data specialists, prosecutors, defense attorneys and public court proceedings. The problem now is that people, including irresponsible politicians, think they know and yet fail to see how much their own ideological positions are tainting how they look at the evidence.

They often watch video of the incident on social media while failing to understand how easily video can be harnessed in service of a particular point of view. Early video clips appeared to present Penny as an aggressor who thought he was in a war zone. Later clips that did the rounds though, assuming all were genuine, appeared to show him putting Neely in a recovery position and being praised by his fellow passengers.

Then there are the competing accounts of Neely’s biography, some of which painted a picture of a benign and troubled Michael Jackson impersonator who had merely fallen on hard times. Others took the opposite tack, noting his numerous arrests and suggesting that some of Neely’s prior threats aimed at fellow humans had been serious and violent. Depending on the source of what you read, you’d end up with entirely different impressions.

Some argued that incursions on passengers by ranting and invasive fellow riders are now out of control and can often end in violence, sometimes requiring defensive action from those being accosted. Others argued that such things are overblown or even that they are a work of an imagination stewed in white supremacy. Roxanne Gay succinctly summarized that argument in The New York Times: “Increasingly, it is not safe to be in public, to be human, to be fallible,” she wrote.

Americans, of course, now have vastly, even stunningly, different views on the role of personal responsibility. Gay and many others on the left downplayed Neely’s actions, deeming them mere human fallibility born of inequity. It only took hours for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to tweet “Jordan Neely was murdered,” setting the uber-narrative for her supporters. Even the police disclosure of Neely’s prior arrests was a cause for outrage and deemed by some as an attempt at vilification.

On the right, though, this very same man was portrayed as an aggressor with 42 arrests and an open warrant for assault who must carry the lion’s share of responsibility for what occurred May 1.

These issues also course through the ever-growing list of of mass shootings, given the varying level of attention given to shooters, and to victims, based on their race, gender or even their faith.

There can be no question that people look for narratives based on preexisting views, and yet many will go to the wall denying they are doing so.

How on earth do Americans sort through all this?

We offer our admiration for people like New York Mayor Eric Adams, who suspended his judgment pending fuller understanding. And we plead that people become more educated about their own biases and prejudgments and the self-serving way in which social media inflames and profits from those very biases, often to the detriment of the truth.

We need to remove as many assault weapons as possible from society as a matter of urgency. We need to get a better handle on what a newly permissive drug policy has done to some of our most vulnerable people. We need to pay better attention to the palpable mental health crisis enveloping our cities.

And we need to wait until we really know what has happened before we inflame whomever else happens to be on our own side.