oh, great idea. we should run on this

When my daughter was a little over a year old, we were walking down the street in broad daylight (she was strapped to my chest and facing outward) when we heard a man about twenty feet away shout “I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!”

Although we were the only other people on that street, the guy hadn’t seen us yet, so this threat likely wasn’t directed at us. He was likely completely untethered from reality, screaming at some imagined apparition. But it seemed reasonable to want to get away from him. And luckily, because we were walking down the street, we could go in a different direction. Don’t get me wrong—my heart was racing. I was terrified we would run into him again and I wound up walking about five blocks outside of my route. I’m still not happy we had to experience this, but at least we had an easy safe option to escape.

But if we had been on a subway, we would have had no easy choice. We could have waited for the train to stop and then switched cars—but what if he saw us leave and took that as a message, prompting the threat to move from “vaguely directed at my delusions” to “at the next person who triggers me?” What if we couldn’t get to the door in time? What if he followed us? What if he escalated before the train stopped?

We could have stayed, too. I’ve been told many times that people who are uncomfortable with this type of behavior need to just stay put, don’t make noise, and “avoid eye contact.” After all, asking someone to turn down their music could get you stabbed. You just need to keep your head down and you’ll be fine. That’s apparently all it takes, right? Except for Iryna Zarutska, who quietly sat down in front of a visibly deranged, pacing man on the bus, only to be stabbed to death shortly after. Or the young woman in the Chicago subway who was randomly lit on fire by a severely mentally ill subway rider? Or Michelle Go, the woman who was pushed in front of a subway to her death in New York City by a total stranger?

None of these women provoked the men who killed them. But avoiding eye contact didn’t help. People’s (especially women’s and parents’) discomfort with erratically-behaving people on public transit isn’t just about being Karens and wimps who can’t tolerate visible poverty. It’s about the fact that a guy shouting “I’m going to fucking kill you” might actually mean it.

Since 2009, assaults on public transit in New York City have tripled. And while not all homeless people with mental illness are violent (in fact, only a minority are, and they are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators) the unfortunate fact is that of the top 10% people arrested for violent crimes on NYC subways, 80% suffered from mental illness. Almost all are men. Subway assaults also often involve strangers. When the attack is sexual, the victim is almost always a woman—and New York City alone accounts for around 4,000 sex crimes on public transit every year. These cases are likely underreported and limited to more severe crimes. Many women experience flashing, sexual harassment, groping, and public masturbation, and then never report it, assuming nothing would come of the report. (And honestly? They’re correct.)

You might think this line of thinking—that we have a problem with severe mental illness and disorder on public transit, and it’s normal for women to be frightened—is obvious, but it’s not. I wrote about the safety of public transit about a year ago, especially as it related to children, after several mothers were lambasted by New York City’s self-appointed Tough Guys for being too wimpy to “handle” disorder on public transit.

The strawman goes like this: any woman who is uncomfortable with a man behaving erratically on the subway (screaming, ranting, punching the wall, jacking off, whatever) is just a privileged Karen who wants the fascist government to round up all the homeless people and throw them in a ditch. Invariably, the defenders of this type of behavior will just insist that our only concern is with homeless people “existing” and maybe smelling bad, not actively threatening to rape, kill or harm people (often women.) We are supposed to happily bring our young children on public transit and subject them to live drug use, masturbation and defecation. A woman terrified of this behavior is definitely not in any real danger. She just feels like she’s in danger. Unlike the people who had to listen to a man with Tourette’s uncontrollably shout racial slurs at the BAFTAs—they were actually in danger. Or something like that.

The real answer is that all of these people were in danger because they were rawdogging the air in a quadruple pandemic…but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.

Okay, seriously though. For this conversation to make any sense, we have to be honest about the fact that there are different types of homeless people you might encounter on public transit. I am only speaking about one type when I say that there is “legitimate danger.”

The first type is someone who just wants to be in a warm location. Maybe the shelters were full. Maybe they want to beg for money. This is an uncomfortable situation for other riders, and ideally rules against fare evasion would be enforced the way they are in basically every European country, but this type of person isn’t dangerous. They are lucid. They aren’t bothering anyone. They might ask for money and say “God bless you,” which might make you feel guilty and weird, but they aren’t screaming. A person like this would probably benefit from housing, a shower, and a job. If your children witness someone like this, it’s a teachable moment about poverty and gratitude, not a crisis.

The second type is someone who is still probably harmless, but can’t really take care of themselves either. This person might be in a fentanyl slump. They need medical attention. They might need some kind of drug rehabilitation or mental health services. They might do drugs in public, although they won’t harm anyone. But still, some behavior is “not murderous” and still intolerable. If you wouldn’t let your four-year-old watch Trainspotting, you shouldn’t have to tolerate them being subjected to the live-action version.

Then, there’s the third type, and this is really the main type of person about which I’m writing. These are people who actually are dangerous, or at the very least, you have good reason to believe they will be. They are agitated, angry and erratic. They are pacing back and forth, sometimes punching the air or the walls, shouting things at random, and sometimes shouting threats. If you’ve seen someone like this, you absolutely know what I’m talking about. Yes, there’s a chance this is just a person “having a crisis,” but you actually don’t know. They could kill someone. They have killed people. And they often harm themselves. These are people who need to be institutionalized and medicated, often involuntarily. They cannot take care of themselves. It may not be “humane,” but it’s a hell of a lot better than letting them rot on the streets.

It’s one thing to say that because you’ve never personally witnessed a murder on a subway that anyone who was screaming and flailing around clearly posed no threat. Anecdotally, I have witnessed a man threaten to kill a stranger, although I don’t think he was going to do it (The stranger’s crime? Giving him money, but not enough). I have witnessed another man punch multiple strangers on a subway. I have never witnessed a murder. But…what if they just didn’t kill anyone that minute? Every time a stranger subway murder happened, it was likely perpetrated by someone who terrified countless other riders before, who all dutifully “avoided eye contact” or changed trains. And most of those people probably reassured themselves that the person screaming on the train was never dangerous, but they were better safe than sorry.

A subway is not exactly a white-gloves experience, nor does it need to be, but there is no good reason that subways should be far cleaner and far safer in basically every European country, and borderline unusable if you have children in the US. This is my rule: behavior that would get a Spirit Airlines plane diverted to Louisville should not be allowed on subways, at least if you expect that anyone other than Tough Guys and Maoist LARPers will use them. Oh yeah, and working class families who have no other transportation options…but who cares about them, right?

I do not take my kids on public transit within the US. Young children cannot “just avoid eye contact.” Young children will see someone freaking out, and perhaps start freaking out themselves, which will draw attention to the family. Young children will point and say, “That man is crazy.” If we must “avoid eye contact” to avoid being murdered, that’s a great argument for “subways are unsafe for children.”

So what needs to be done? This is fairly obvious, but along with a strong social safety net, we need to start involuntarily committing people. Not everyone with a history of mental illness, but homeless people who are utterly incapable of caring for themselves, who usually have a long history of 911 calls, arrests and often criminal convictions.

It’s a shame that the horrific killing of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukranian refugee, immediately became a right-wing culture war thing (I saw repeated memes of her juxtaposed with AI Charlie Kirk, for example). This tragic case should have been an apolitical example for why our country needs both a strong social safety net and an equally strong system of involuntary mental health treatment and effective law enforcement. If someone is so severely mentally ill that they are untethered from reality—mentally ill enough to assume a stranger on a bus is putting secret frequencies into their heads—why are we trusting them to voluntarily seek mental health services? Why are we assuming it’s “humane” to let them starve and wander the streets, totally divorced from reality, until someone dies? Why was a severely mentally ill man with fourteen prior arrests still out and about?

Involuntary commitment may sound “fascist” but I see no better alternative for people who truly cannot care for themselves. In fact, Zarutska’s killer’s mother desperately sought involuntary commitment for her son, and was repeatedly denied. She was not a “fascist.” She was a concerned mother who noticed her son displayed violent behavior while living with her. There had been multiple red flags about him, and the state repeatedly declined to treat him. He was even released early from prison in 2021, after committing armed robbery (this was at least his third conviction of his fourteen arrests, and almost all were violent offenses.) Perhaps being in and out of jail wasn’t the right move for someone with such severe mental health problems. But surely, being free to terrorize North Carolina until a woman was brutally murdered was worse.

Note: I thought this was obvious, but since there was some confusion, he wasn’t declined a bed at a mental health facility because nobody cared, but rather because these facilities are overcrowded and underfunded. This is, actually, Republicans’ fault, but for some reason, wanting to fund these facilities is seen as “fascist.”

I saw some leftists on Twitter say that if you care for your own children, you should imagine if the homeless person you’re scared of was your child. But evidently, those people’s mothers (if they are in the picture) often want them involuntarily committed.

If someone is mentally unfit to stand trial after killing someone, that’s an indictment on whatever system failed to involuntarily commit them before the murder happened. If someone is too incapacitated to understand a court hearing, they’re too incapacitated to live independently. And that’s basically always what occurs with stranger murders on public transit. The man who lit a young woman on fire on the Chicago CTA had (big shocker) a history of mental illness and been arrested over seventy times.

Even in light of all these incidents, some people still think that all these guys just needed a free house, and then magically they would have become lucid and sought mental health treatment. But because they can’t deny that these horrible things happened, they tell me these attacks are so rare that it’s ridiculous for me to worry about them. But the “it’s rare, so you shouldn’t worry about it” line is always conveniently exclusionary. In fact, rare but scary things that align with their political views are never too rare to worry about.

The same people told me that pit bull maulings and killings of children were overblown and it was dangerous to mention these incidents, because it could affect pit bulls’ odds of being adopted. They admitted these maulings and killings happened, but would snidely retort, “Hmm…how many of these were there?” as if the life of a dog and a child were equivalent, and we have to worry about the many dogs who die in shelters because ignorant dog-bigoted parents don’t want their children to be eaten, instead of the (admittedly, few) children who might become dog food.

They will say the same about subway attacks, even when the victim is an innocent woman or elderly person, dutifully avoiding eye contact and minding their own business. They will admit these things happened, but declare that being scared, or refusing to ride the subway, is just “fascism” because their real loyalty lies with the man screaming “I’m going to fucking kill you” and not the woman who’s about to be fucking killed.

But if you tell these people that a random white suburban mom is terrified of being gunned down by a random Nazi, they will probably validate her fear. If you say you feel “unsafe” because you find out your coworker watches Andrew Tate videos, no question asked. If you say you’re afraid to send your child to school because of Columbine-style rampage shootings, they will say this is perfectly valid, even though school shooting data is muddied with gang-related shootings and shootings between adults near schools (the real risk of being killed in a rampage-style school shooting is about 1 in 2,000,000 annually.) I say this as a mom who worries about school shootings every time I drop my older child off at school! But if you’re going to tell me that fear is valid, then so is my fear of being attacked (or someone I love being attacked) at random on public transit.

If you believe it’s “fasicsm” to involuntarily treat severely mentally ill people who are a danger to themselves and others, and that we must “abolish the nuclear family” to prevent this fascism, then people will just say, “Fine, I’m fascist.” And besides, involuntary commitment is just as communist as it is fascist. In the USSR, severely mentally ill people were involuntarily committed in brutal, underfunded and inhumane facilities. The main reason less-capitalist European countries today don’t have the problem the US has isn’t because they just give all these people free houses. It’s because they make it more difficult to get on a subway without paying. And yes, they have a stronger social safety net—which I’ve already mentioned I support.

We will not “abolish the nuclear family” so that we can enact communism. Nobody, even those who want such a thing, can truly believe this is in the realm of possibility. Republican politicians haven’t shown much interest in funding mental health services or low-cost housing, and I don’t trust them to fix the problem either. The Democrats have to make safety a priority. Rare as these events may be, they’re not tolerable, and often, there were many warning signs.

We have to do more than avoid eye contact.