More than a week after NYPD officers fired on an agitated man armed with a knife after repeatedly warning him to drop his weapon, New York’s aspiring mayors are still voicing their outrage. Their thoughts are empty and unserious. The current mayor, Eric Adams, has failed to convince the public that he’s leading decisively in this episode (as in others). But the tenor of public officials’ recent remarks reminds New Yorkers why they picked Adams three years ago—and why they may be stuck with him.
The facts of the September 15 case are as follows: on a Sunday afternoon, police observed a man, Derrell Mickles, hoist himself over a turnstile to enter a Brooklyn L train station without paying the fare. They asked him to leave, but he flashed a knife as he did so. Moments later he reentered the station, and police followed him to the platform, repeatedly ordering him to drop his knife. Mickles failed to comply, keeping one or both hands concealed as a train pulled in. As the doors opened, he led the officers aboard. They used a Taser on him twice. He exited the car, flailing wildly, still in possession of his weapon. The police chased him, surrounded him, and, just as he froze, fired off multiple bullets, wounding Mickles, two civilians aboard the train, and one fellow officer. “Mr. Mickles stumbles toward an open train car and falls in with the knife still in his hand, the footage shows,” the New York Times observes of the video.
To be sure, this episode is in need of some after-action scrutiny. Firing into a confined space where civilians are present must always be a last resort, as the injuries to two bystanders remind us. One of the bystanders, Gregory Delpeche, 49, is now in a coma after suffering a serious head wound. One obvious place for a reconsideration of protocol is whether police, in such a situation in the future, shouldn’t signal to the train conductor to pass the station by, rather than opening the doors and exposing train passengers to danger.
But providing constructive criticism is not what New York’s aspiring mayors are doing. This Monday, Comptroller Brad Lander, who has said that he will run against Adams next year, released a statement: “Last week, I called the Sutter Ave. subway station shooting bad policing. Having watched the body-cam footage, it’s even worse. The Mayor’s justification of NYPD officers shooting 4 people . . . sends a signal that New Yorkers cannot expect accountability.” Another mayoral contender, Queens state senator Jessica Ramos, opined that “opening fire over a $2.90 subway [fare] doesn’t make anybody safe.” Zohran Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman considering a run, similarly charged that “NYPD officers opened fire in a subway station yesterday after chasing someone for skipping the fare.”
None of these criticisms is backed by reality. Police did not shoot, or chase, Mickles for skipping the fare. In fact, they leniently allowed him to leave the station with no penalty the first time he came through without paying. The officers chased him the second time because he was wielding a large blade. Moreover, they wouldn’t have “chased” him if he had simply stood still, dropped his weapon, shown his hands, and otherwise complied with their clear and justified orders. What about the idea, alluded to in Lander’s criticism, that police shot Mickles while he was standing still? Yes, he was standing still, for a fraction of a second, refusing to comply with an order to drop his weapon, after having just led police on an erratic chase up subway stairs, up and down a train platform, and through a subway car. The video of Ryan Carson’s murder on a Brooklyn street nearly a year ago shows how quickly an unmoving aggressor can turn into a deadly one.
Moreover, Adams’s likely Democratic challengers refuse to acknowledge the context in which police shot Mickles: they expect police to act perfectly, but they are indirectly responsible for the impossible situation in which these officers found themselves. Mickles, 37, has a long arrest record, including for gun possession, robbery, and, three years ago, multiple burglaries. In previous encounters, police termed him “emotionally disturbed,” the New York Daily News reported. New York’s progressive criminal-justice system, the product of the policies supported by Lander and others over the past half-decade, had multiple opportunities to incapacitate Mickles before he displayed a knife on a narrow subway platform, leaving police with no good options. Shouldn’t the mayor’s challengers wonder what went wrong with the policies they support—in other words, that not incarcerating Mickles failed to deter him from the actions that led him to be shot? If he was severely mentally ill, why wasn’t New York, with its ample social-services resources, treating him? If he wasn’t mentally ill, why didn’t he face the consequences of his previous actions?
Adams’s challengers refuse to acknowledge another context: high subway crime. So far this year, nine people have lost their lives to homicide on the New York City subway system. At this rate, the city is on track to exceed the 11 murders recorded in 2022, the highest level in a quarter-century. All told, since March 2020, the subways have been the scene of 40 homicides, including two adjudicated as justified self-defense. This level is five times the consistent pre-2020 level. Assaults, too, have soared: through August, 364 people have fallen victim to felony assault on the subway, up from 236 during the comparable period in 2019.
The subways are thus far more dangerous and deadlier than they have been in most adults’ memory. There is good reason for police to “chase” someone who is palming a knife. Indeed, just days after the Mickles shooting, a “knife-wielding lunatic,” as the New York Post diagnosed him, stabbed a stranger at a Manhattan L train station after the victim accidentally bumped into him. Police arrested the suspect—and a judge, following the progressive philosophy that Lander and the mayor’s other challengers espouse, released him without bail. It will be left to police to subdue him in a future encounter.
Nor are the city’s supposed transit advocates much use in explaining to riders the circumstances surrounding this shooting. A generation ago, the advocates were obsessed with public safety on the subway, demanding more police and prosecution as murders rose into double digits during the 1980s. This time around, it’s a different tune, with Streetsblog informing readers that walking through an open gate “can now be seen as life-threatening, after the city’s war against fare evaders turned violent on Sunday.” No one minimizes the life-threatening gunshot suffered by Delpeche, but his life is neither more nor less important than the lives of the 40 victims killed on the subway in little more than four years. Streetsblog considers this one subway shooting in that period to constitute a clear and present new danger to riders, while it has had nothing to say about most of the subway murders—except when it’s minimizing them: as a Streetsblog writer snarked in 2022, “I [am] tired of hearing from people who rarely t[ake] the subway saying it was unsafe,” dismissing “the same tired narrative that . . . the system is unsafe and crime-filled.” If one police shooting constitutes a crisis, so do 40 homicides.
As for the mayor, Adams was correct in his own statement: “The NYPD’s initial review found that this shooting took place after the suspect involved brandished a dangerous weapon and put officers’ lives at risk. While the formal review continues, and out of respect for that process, I will avoid commenting any further.” But with the mayor increasingly engulfed in scandal—including the resignation of his police commissioner, the subject of a federal search, just days before the subway shooting—fewer people are interested in his judgment.
Nearly four years ago, Adams won a Democratic primary because—despite his well-known demerits, including a history of flirting with corruption and no track record of competent management—his challengers were worse on the critical issue of public safety. Nine months before another mayoral primary season begins, that train is still stuck in the station.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images