The Left's Self-Destructive Indifference Toward Law & Order

Progressives Who Won't Tackle The Issue Are Only Hurting Their Cause

Moments before the August 22 murder of Iryna Zarutska on a light rail car in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I had a client this summer who was looking to move out of her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment. She had gotten a new job, a small raise, and needed a new place. That’s a standard type of rental client in Brooklyn, but what she needed made the move hard.

She wanted an apartment with a parking spot.

Overall supply has been constrained in the Brooklyn rental market for some time now, and while her budget would allow her to afford a place with a parking spot, there were very few available. Eventually, she didn’t find what she was looking for and, since her new job was remote, she relocated to Virginia.

The reason she needed the parking spot was connected to the reason she changed jobs. A few months earlier, she had been attacked by a “mentally deranged homeless man” on the C train, who had gotten angry when she didn’t respond to some of his flirtatious comments toward her.

While she didn’t go into detail about the extent of the assault, the incident traumatized her, and the anxiety she felt getting on the train every day, knowing the guy who assaulted her was still at large, got to her. She quit her job and avoided the train. Taking Ubers everywhere had gotten expensive, and she opted to get a car. She had avoided going into Manhattan as much as possible. The experience “sucked the joy out of living in New York,” she told me.

She found a group of people on social media platforms like Reddit who expressed their similar trauma and anxiety related to incidents on public transit with homeless and mentally ill riders. That actually made her feel worse because that convinced her this was “a widespread problem.”

I thought about her after I saw the story of Iryna Zarutska’s murder on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail car last month. Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee living in Charlotte, was randomly stabbed to death on the train, allegedly by DeCarlo Brown, who had long been suffering from mental illness and was free despite having 14 previous arrests for crimes, including serving five years in prison for armed robbery. Zarutska’s murder was caught on video and became the latest cultural flashpoint for the right, who have used it to portray the political left, and black people in general, as dangerous because of left-wing groups' long activism for decarceration and defunding law enforcement. It doesn’t help that Charlotte’s Democratic Mayor, Vi Lyles, in reaction to the murder, seemed to empathize with the alleged murderer, and the judge who most recently set Brown free after he was indicted on charges of misusing the 911 system was a Democrat.