Subway shooting suspect Frank R. James, 62, is led away...

Subway shooting suspect Frank R. James, 62, is led away from a police station in Manhattan on Wednesday,  Credit: AP/Seth Wenig

The Brooklyn subway shooting that shook New York City on Tuesday and left 29 people hospitalized with gunshot wounds, smoke inhalation from smoke grenades, and other injuries has inevitably sparked conversation about rising violent crime and the backlash against liberal criminal justice reforms. The crime problem is very real — as is the frustration with it — and progressive ideas about policing and the justice system are often naive and unworkable. But the shooting, in which 62-year-old Frank Robert James is now in custody as the suspect, does not fit neatly into current debates about crime, law enforcement and other issues. If anything, it’s a reminder that real-life situations are usually far more complex than political polemics.

While New York City Mayor Eric Adams reacted to the shooting by promising to increase police presence on the subway, critics pointed out that he had already added 1,000 officers to subway patrols and that it hadn’t helped. Even with the most proactive policing, you can’t have a cop on every subway car. This doesn’t mean that having more police is the wrong answer to crime; it’s just the wrong answer to this particular shooting.

The revelation that James, currently a resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had nine prior arrests in New York and three in New Jersey could be held up as an indictment of the push to reduce incarceration — if those arrests were recent. But they all happened in the 1990s (except for one in New Jersey in 2007), an era of notoriously tough-on-crime policies nationwide and of Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor in New York. None of the arrests ended in felony convictions.

Since James, who is Black, made YouTube videos revealing an obsession with race and hatred toward white people, some Twitter posters on the right have sought to link him to the radical left (and accused the mainstream media of downplaying his anti-white animus). But in fact, while James’ rants sometimes channeled Black nationalism, they are too confused and contradictory to be pegged to any consistent view. He railed viciously against Black women, suggesting they should be forcibly sterilized, and sometimes against all Black Americans (as well as Jews and Hispanics). In one video, he even suggested he wouldn’t blame white Americans for exterminating minorities.

Some of James’s most virulent comments targeted Mayor Adams and his initiatives against subway crime. (Is it possible that he was, in some deranged way, trying to attack those initiatives?) But his anger was also directed at mental health professionals who, he claimed, were supposed to help him yet made him worse. He mentioned a “crisis of mental health” in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. So far, there is no detailed information on his psychiatric history.

Should James have been institutionalized? Should his videos, often filled with violent rhetoric, have been flagged as a danger sign — or is that a slippery slope toward locking up people with abhorrent ideas?

One could also make access to guns the issue. But even if stricter prohibitions could have kept James from having a gun, he could have inflicted devastating damage in other ways: His bag contained a can of gasoline.

Faced with a horrifying incident such as the Brooklyn subway shooting spree, it is tempting to look for signs of societal or political failure. But short of a totalitarian surveillance state, some explosions of violence and madness cannot be prevented.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, are her own.

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