The Courts Are Fueling Preventable Violence

Americans living in our major cities are well aware of the crisis that continues to afflict our subway systems and public transportation. And Americans outside of the cities are aware of this as well. How could they not be considering some of the horrific stories that have broken only in the past year? Just a month ago, a woman was attacked and set alight on the Blue Line in Chicago. In the summer, Iryna Zarutska was murdered on a commuter train in the area of Charlotte, North Carolina. And then around this time last year, in December of 2024, a woman named Debrina Kawam was set on fire in the New York City subway and killed.

These sorts of attacks are happening with such regularity that we should think of them as being more or less predictable. Not that any of these three women who were attacked in the incidents I’ve just mentioned had any enemies or had any reason to suspect that their lives were in danger. They were regular commuters. And yet, their lives were either fundamentally changed or ended outright by random attacks from strangers who decided to set them on fire or plunge a knife into their necks.

Now, an ordinary commuter who goes to work every day in New York City, Washington, D.C., or any number of other places in America is obviously not going to encounter murderous violence. But there’s always the potential for this violence to break out. And if you are a regular commuter in most of America’s cities, sooner or later you will encounter insanity. You will encounter aggressive behavior. You may even encounter the threat of violence or actual violence. And when I say that it’s predictable and in some sense even routine to have these kinds of crimes, it’s because they do happen at a certain interval that we can now more or less be assured of. We can now be more or less certain that there are going to be a number of horrific murders taking place on our subways and on our commuter transit systems every year in the United States.