Mercy for the Guilty, Cruelty for the Innocent in New York’s Subway System

The latest slaying in the New York City subway highlights yet again how most violent crime is preventable.

On Thursday, “ex-Broadway dancer” Rhamell Burke allegedly shoved 76-year-old retired high school teacher Ross Falzone down the steps at New York City’s 18th Street subway station.

Emergency personnel took Falzone to the hospital, but he later died from a traumatic brain injury.

The terrible incident was caught on camera.

I have to say, if you are on the New York subway with a former dancer you might want to get off at the next station.

Those who knew Falzone are understandably in a state of disbelief at what happened. His next-door-neighbor said that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing.”

What makes this story even more outrageous is that Burke had already demonstrated that he could do something violent. In fact, he had been picked up by police just hours before he allegedly pushed the 76-year-old teacher down the stairs.

According to ABC 7 Eyewitness News, “officers encountered [Burke] acting erratically outside the 17th Precinct stationhouse on East 51st Street at around 3:30 p.m.”

The officers who picked Burke up said he plucked a stick out of the trash and held it up as he approached them. After detaining him, police took Burke to Bellevue Hospital. There he spent a few hours being evaluated in the psychiatric ward.

Incredibly, the hospital released this obviously dangerous man just a few hours later.

An anonymous “high-ranking NYPD cop” reportedly told the New York Post that this sort of release “happens all the time.”

“We brought him in at 3:30 p.m. and he was released just before 5 p.m.,” the officer said, according to the Post. “Meanwhile, if you or I walked into Bellevue for a headache, it would take 8 hours just to be seen. NYPD uses its involuntary removal powers all the time. And they just get right out with an Advil.”

As you might suspect, these incidents were far from Burke’s first and second rodeo in the legal system. The New York Post reported that he’d been arrested four times in four months.

He was busted three times in February—on Feb. 2 for allegedly assaulting a Port Authority police officer, again on Feb. 14 for burglary, and on Feb. 25 for resisting arrest,” the New York Post reported. “The perp was then hauled in again on April 2 for allegedly assaulting a stranger. He was later granted supervised release at arraignment.”

America doesn’t have a crime problem; it has a repeat crime problem. Most crimes, violent and otherwise, are committed by repeat offenders in this country.

Burke’s April 2 incident delivers another lesson about why crime is unacceptably high in our cities.

This isn’t just about bad policy and rogue judges; it’s about a specific mentality that leads to a broken justice system.

In April, Burke allegedly attacked a 23-year-old woman and her friend in the subway after he first aggressively tried to engage them in conversation then pursued them.

The New York Post reported that Burke “stalked them closely and allegedly yanked her by the back of her head in an attempt to slam her to the ground and booted her friend in the back.”

The two were fortunate that the train came to a stop where they took their chance to escape at the West 4th Street-Washington Square Station in Greenwich Village. Burke apparently kept pursuing them until they found some police officers who arrested him.

But instead of helping law enforcement keep this man off the subway and streets, the woman decided not to cooperate with prosecutors. It’s a decision she said she regrets.

“Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail, but, you know, at some point, if you are a criminal, you’re a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary guy,” she said.

This almost perfectly encapsulates how mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, as Adam Smith once put it.  

This is social justice in action.

A woman decided to be an “anti-racist” rather than pursue justice against a violent criminal who was clearly a danger to people of all races. And you have a justice system prevented from keeping repeat offenders locked away, or mentally unwell people committed to institutions.

The result is that an innocent man has had his life randomly snuffed out. If justice had been carried out sooner an innocent man would be alive and a villain would have been stopped from committing evil.

It’s a lesson delivered again and again, but too often unheeded.