Well, we were kind of overdue. The term “mass shooting” has slowly grown in its connotations over the years, adding a layer of meaning every time one makes the news. The term has a technical definition: an incident involving a gun in which four or more people die that is not an intended as an act of terror or connected to a terrorist organization. By that metric, the recent shooting in the New York City Subway didn’t even make the cut, but the media has decided otherwise.
Big Media is located in the Northeast, and its psychological center is New York, the city of its headquarters. The Big Apple is home to the country’s biggest newspaper media group (NY Times), its biggest business newspaper (Wall Street Journal), two biggest tabloids (NY Post, NY Daily Herald), and most prominent media startups (Vox, Buzzfeed). In other words, New York gets disproportionate coverage. Of course, of the 136 gun violence incidents in 2022 injuring four or more people (killing 146 and injuring 519 in total), the one that gets national media coverage happens in New York, despite not resulting in a single fatality.
Since the mainstream press is bound to react viscerally to this incident, make sure to keep it in context. Expect articles about “America’s surging gun violence” to be on the first two pages of every newspaper in America for the next week. This may sound true, since the media has been swept up in other stories for the past two years (COVID, Joe Biden, COVID, stimulus packages, COVID, Russia, and have I mentioned COVID?). However, in context, America has always had a gun violence problem.
America is a gun-owning country in which guns symbolize self-defense and protection like nowhere else in the world. Therefore, in the rankings of gun deaths per capita, America is just barely more deadly than Mexico, South Africa, and Panama, none of which are known for their safety. If one believes in personal anecdotes, this author’s google news search for “mass shooting” revealed 3 different events in the first 5 results. In other words, one might not hear about it often, but this kind of gun violence is unexpectedly common.
On a national level, there is probably nothing we can do. Living in a country with gun culture is like living in a country with car culture or anti-lockdown culture—there are inherent risks of being part of such a society, which we all agree to tolerate. Many Americans (myself included) view guns as a clear representation of personal protection, especially in a country with internationally slow emergency response times. Furthermore, they are baked into the national psyche and strong property-rights culture in a way that is almost impossible to disentangle. Consequently, policies aimed at reducing gun prevalence are politically impossible, no matter how much they may sound like common sense to New York Times editors who have never owned a gun. Purchase restrictions simply create untraced 3D printed “ghost guns,” and government buyback programs mostly succeed in buying “boom sticks” (the minimum legally required to qualify as a gun, usually made with plywood blocks, a simple gunpowder hammer for a firing mechanism, and a thin pipe for a barrel. They are usually made for no more than $5-10, and sold to buyback programs for >$100).
On a more local level, policy solutions abound. However, to fully address them, we must first consider the police response and the truly staggering amount of incompetence. At 8:24 AM, an unidentified gunman releases a smoke grenade into a northbound N train, filling the car with smoke before opening fire. The train was already approaching 36th Street (after a long express run; it is fortunate that the gunman didn’t start the shooting sooner). When the train stops and passengers pour out of the train car, some passengers do the instinctive thing and run into the R train across the platform. That R train then goes to the next stop (26th Street) and unloads its passengers before the service on the 4th avenue line is completely suspended.
Police scramble to figure out what happened. They try to check the cameras, but alas, the 600 cameras on the 4th Avenue line are down and not transmitting video. The sole lead was a bag left by the shooter containing fireworks, gasoline, a torch, bank cards, a gun, and the keys to a U-Haul van. The gun and bank cards are traced to Frank James, who was also found to have rented the U-Haul a few days prior, so the police put out an advisory telling new yorkers to look for him, providing pictures in the alert sent to mobile phones. Despite a citywide manhunt (and he was, somehow, still in the city), Frank James remains unfound. At 10:30am the next day, he is spotted on a bench by a teenager, Jack Griffin, on a school trip in the Lower East Side. Jack posts a picture to twitter, tagging the NYPD and calling the crime stoppers hotline 30 minutes later. The police take over two hours to respond, calling Jack back at 1:20 PM to ask where he had seen Frank James. Not even ten minutes later, Frank James himself calls the crime stoppers hotline, saying he had seen pictures of himself everywhere, understood that the police were looking for him, and said he would be near the McDonalds at First Avenue and Sixth Street. True to his word, police found him two blocks away, at St. Marks and First.
Later investigation found that the defective cameras were capturing video and storing it locally; the broken component was the transmission of video to the operating center where footage was being reviewed. The recovered footage shows that Frank James did, in fact, exit the subway at 25th Street, not 36th, meaning that he had made his escape on that R train that left after the shooting. In so doing, he completely missed the 17-block area that the police closed to try to capture him. Footage found on further review from *working* cameras found that Frank James had re-entered the subway around 45 minutes after the shooting and was simply unfound. The police still do not know where he got off the subway after that ride, and a city official stated that finding the relevant footage could take “literally weeks.”
Only a few things are known about Frank James’s actions. The first thing is that he removed his outer layers of clothing and a hat, leaving them with his bag on the N train. Since the train car was full of smoke, nobody actually saw him do this, but his clothing was found on the N train and the footage of him leaving the subway shows he did not have the same clothes as when he entered. I concede that it would have been unlikely to catch the shooter here—the police would have no idea who to look for, even if they asked everyone.
There is no reason for the video to have been inaccessible for so long. Even if the upload was broken, an inspection of the cameras and anything that might be recovered from them should have happened almost immediately upon the discovery that they were broken. However, they never should have broken in the first place—the NYPD has double the funding of the Ukrainian military; everything they own should be in ideal condition at all times.
Furthermore, the NYPD is able to use facial recognition software to find faces on its security cameras. A search for Frank James’s face should have returned his entrance onto the F train. Also, a competent face search would have returned where he got off the subway the second time. The fact that we still don’t know where that was is astonishing. Furthermore, of the thousands of cameras in New York City, none of them were able to find him even though he was just roaming the streets of New York for 29 hours (or, finding some accommodation, which would have required an ID). Even worse, they took over two hours to respond to a call reporting Frank James’s location, which one would assume takes the highest priority of any response in the whole police department. Two hours would be acceptable if you were expecting the NYPD to search their lost and found, not request the location of the most wanted man in the city.
There are reasonable questions to be asked about the police’s ability to be able to conduct a mass surveillance state. Using facial recognition on all of the thousands of cameras in NYC is probably unethical. However, this is something we have chosen—the police already have all of these systems in place. The problem is that the police, for all its funding and technology, don't use these tools, instead taking two hours to call someone back asking for a location. Instead, they only were able to find a suspect when he called the police on himself, less than two miles from the World Trade Center. The only explanation is systemic incompetence. The police are fundamentally incapable of protecting New York, even when given the tools of a surveillance state.
It isn’t difficult to imagine an alternate reality where Frank James uses a ghost gun (avoids the gun trace), leaves his bank cards and U-Haul keys in his pocket, and then leaves the police totally stumped. Getting reliable fingerprints and matching them to whatever database his fingerprints are stored in (probably PA state police’s) without knowing who they were looking for would have taken days if it were even possible. Given the high usage of the subway system, there wouldn’t be a guarantee that DNA recovered from the crime scene isn’t someone else’s.
In the meantime, Frank James could have gotten on a plane from JFK, flown to a country with no US extradition, and simply disappeared. A more competent criminal (especially in possession of faked documentation for a second identity) would have probably gotten away with the crime. Or, he could have just not turned himself in.
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