Which Mf’ers? Was he specifically saying he’d kill people on the train?
I am pretty sure no one could inspect the contents of his mind to know what he really meant. In an emergency situation, many a person has been harmed by deciding that they needed to "know more" about what a threatening person is actually doing. This is why some people go so far as to shoot people who are at their front door in the middle of the night (they are terrified and have no desire to wait for police or to have a through-the-door discussion with a person; they don't even want that person to know they are inside the house).
However, when assessing threats, do you usually interview the screaming, threatening person? I know that I don't. I have a pretty good sense of when someone ought not to be screaming and threatening. Enclosed public spaces where people are basically trapped (say, an Emergency Room or a subway car), well, it is a very different situation to it being inside a private domicile (where one would call the police and report a disturbance, rather than go over and try and subdue the threatening neighbor).
Are you saying that people on trains should be expected to know what is meant when a person is incoherently shouting threats? The risk of violence has gone up, just because the person is shouting and threatening. That's how some forms of violence begin.
I think the discussion is more about whether the citizen response can be expected to fall within legal and social norms. If LE had arrived, I suppose they wouldn't have been allowed to use a choke hold and would be expected to use a taser instead.
I don't think it's legal for NY citizens, though, to carry tasers. It's technically against the law (unlike 40 other states) for citizens to carry tasers, but from what I read, LE is no longer enforcing the rule for small tasers. However, I suspect that the marine would still have gotten a citation of some kind, had he instead used a taser.
Would it have worked? No clue. People have died from taser use too (rare). But it seems to me that if it's really this scary to ride public transport, and for obvious reasons, pepper spray can't be used, citizens should have some protection if the State can't provide it. Tasers of course have the ability to harm other people than the person aimed at - they are only as good as the person aiming them.
The fact that NY had to remove 1400-1500 homeless people living within the subway system in the past six months (I think that's the time period), is alarming. They were taken to shelters (most mentally ill homeless depart shelters almost immediately and schizophrenic people who are violent almost never stay - many reasons, but shelters cannot serve both the purpose of housing potentially dangerous people AND housing people who are homeless; it's not fair to the people who simply need a shelter). That's why we have mental health services. NY needs to think about its laws.
This man, with oustanding arrest warrants, likely should have been in a jail psychiatric ward, IMO. I don't understand why he wasn't there.
IMO.
