Police opened fire on a subway platform in Brooklyn during a confrontation with an alleged fare-beater, striking the man cops said was armed with a knife, two straphangers caught in the fray, and one of the firing officers, NYPD officials said Sunday.
One of those two passengers hit by the cops’ bullets, a 49-year-old man, was hospitalized in critical condition after he was hit struck in the head, according to the NYPD.
The two officers who opened fire were assigned to patrol the Sutter Avenue subway stop in the 73rd precinct when they spotted a man skip the station turnstile and walk through an open gate toward the train platform, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey explained at an evening press conference from Brookdale Hospital.
Most americans believe the entire point of transit is to sort people who can afford it from people who cant.
If mass transit is affordable for all it is literally considered a threat to these pathetic people who would means test their own kids before they gave them food and shelter if it was socially acceptable.
I was in NYC recently and the amount of wealthier people who just ubered everywhere (or actually just demanded to own a car and drive themselves in the least car friendly place IN THE US) with no consideration for ever using the subway underneath their feet was pretty disgusting and appalling especially coming from somewhere without magic train tunnels underneath my feet that run 24/7…
Notice all of these narratives run essentially in parallel with a nebulous fear of the subway being stoked by Eric Adams and centrists, they provide a convenient impulse to rationalize taking the easy way out and clogging the streets with another useless car. Kind of like convincing yourself as a kid not to do a chore in the basement because the basement is scaryyyy, I mean look at this video from somebody in another basement experiencing a freak scary incident that would likely never ever happen to me!!!
I live somewhere with free bus transit in the US, and it is shocking how different it feels and yet also how many successful people around me with working cars just categorically ignore the use or possibility of using busses. The US is really really deeply fucked on this point and it makes me feel awful for the rest of the planet having to deal with our horrendous carbon footprints.
New York City has so much potential, but it is utterly ruined by rich conservative money suffocating the city in a chokehold.
I hate the US so much sigh
Ahh… I see you have met my dad, who decided only after I called him after having failed my suicide attempt to offer to take me back in after having kicked me out promptly at 18 and then only housed me for 2 months before driving me out to a random street corner and dropping me off saying he had lifted me back up enough for me to handle my own live because I was ruining his “vibe” while having a 3 bedroom house and a job that makes more than half a million a year.
A man who wouldn’t let me get a drivers license because I wasn’t allowed to touch one of his cars and needed to buy one on my own and figure out how to do it by 16 despite his first 3 cars being bought for him by his parents after he wrecked each previous one.
Americans are the worst culture. Truly fucking despicable what they think is sane. You only get to buy how you want to be treated and the threshold for the floor of basic human dignity is more than most of us can afford.
Seriously, when people say it is a distraction to blame generations and focus hatred on boomers I think it is a good reminder to keep the eye on the ball of extreme wealth inequality, but I think there is a really weird nut of truth in that generational hate in that wealthy, successful US boomers of a certain type really did completely abandon the “social contract” so to speak of passing the world on to their kids. Which wouldn’t be that weird if society was always like it, and I am sure the “upper middle class kids” of every generation has felt this way to a certain extent, but it really feels like wealthy boomers just foreclosed the future of… literally everybody and when you meet boomers like your dad or one of my parents or countless other wealthy boomers I have met it really becomes far more “comic book” evil than it is reasonable to assume with some of these sad losers. There is no reason for the cruelty, and for the severance of resources and support other than a bunch of cynical political ideologies that amounted to barely anything more than lobotimizing a father’s capacity to actually empathize with their child about basic life needs. It is like the condescending judgement of some wealthy boomer parents cancerously grew into a deep seated belief that their kids don’t belong to be in the same economic class as they do, whether those wealthy boomers will consciously acknowledge it or not. I mean… not the worst problem to have, I am just pointing out how pathetic and sad US culture really is among superficially “successful” families.
As someone from the US I wholeheartedly agree but I also want to qualify this a bit.
US culture is the worst culture given how rich it is. You might go to another culture with a HELL of a lot less money in the society/less GDP (…because it has been extracted by countries like the US but different conversation) and be able to find aspects of that culture that are way worse… but more than any other country on earth the US has been able to choose the world it wants to exist in instead of being existentially forced to accept the terms set out by more powerful countries, and holy shit what the US has done with that is not only dumb it is catastrophic.
The US is the richest country on earth, we could be treating each other like royalty, we could be saying “it is unamerican to let homeless americans starve!!” and just start giving people housing and food for free, we could do whatever the fuck we want with all of our incredible amount of power and just ignore the consequences for the rest of the world… but instead not only do we ignore the consequences of our life style on the rest of the world (again, utterly catastrophic in terms of carbon footprint, ecological impact and just plain wastefulness) we ignore the consequences of our life style on our own damn selves, our family, our kids, our parents, our neighbors and our friends.
Like yeah I know I am not saying anything original but damn I just feel like it needs to be said over and over again, the US is a very shameful place in the sense that the amount of unnecessary suffering here is quite extreme (again, not making claims about absolute suffering… not that it is ever helpful too beyond pointing out big disparities of privilege).
Hey man, suicide is no joke. I hope you found the right help to combat your thoughts and emotions. Just remember that us people here on the internet will miss you if you’re gone.
People love to point at crime numbers on the subway but ignore the percentages, like yeah there’s (making shit up , not actual numbers) 15 crimes a day but its NEW YORK CITY thats out of 50,000 rides or some shit. I did the actual math once and it was like 0.005% chance of a crime on the NYC subway, beats the hell out of auto numbers.
I live in Taipei and the subway system is amazing. There is literally no crime on the MRT system here.
So less crime is possible. The USA needs to invest into the social services like we do here to get lower crime.
Agreed, did you know the NYC subway system moves about the same order of magnitude per day as the entire continental US air travel networks does. All those planes flying back and forth between countless different airports… the subway beneath NYC moves more people.
I think this statistic both puts into context the incredible order of magnitude power of subways for mass transit, and also helps put in perspective how dangerous they really are based on scary content uploading that is happening within a single subway car… you gotta zoom your brain out to see the sea of perfectly boring subway cars transporting people to work and back every single day.
That sounds nuts but having been there I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. I think the crazy part is (living in a bible belt rural city surrounded by pro-car everything and the various internet fearmongers) how mundane it all feels even at it’s peaks. Just a bunch of fucking people getting where they’re going. I’ve never understood the allure of sitting in gridlock for over an hour over just sharing space with a bunch of other boring normal assholes for 30 minutes (or whatever.)
My best friends are very pro car and liberal in that “sure better public transit is needed but ‘I’d’ never use it it doesn’t work for me cause XYZ” sorta way. I dragged them on an amtrak to DC, and took em on the subway up to our hotel and they’re just like “…oh that was chill.” Yeah, just fuckin people getting where they’re going it’s not a bath salt zombie apocalypse down here.