Opinion: The Killing Of Jordan Neely And Why Police Should Also Be Held To Account

The trial of Daniel Penny–the white, former Marine who killed Jordan Neely, and whose military training taught him just how to do it, began today. Led by Editorial Director, Bruce C.T, Wright, NewsOne has been closely following the story from the very beginning. And from the beginning, there have been a number of troubling questions. My own have centered on the choices made by the police who initally responded to the call for help the day Jordan Neely died. 

In brief, on May 1, 2023, Daniel Penny killed 30-year-old Jordan Neely. The two had been riding one of New York’s F-train subway lines. Neely, a gifted and loved dancer and Michael Jackson impersonator who struggled with a mental health disorder, was also a survivor of brutal domestic violence. When he was just 14 years old, Jordan’s mother was strangled to death by her abuser, stuffed into a suitcase and dumped along the highway.

While Penny is finally being held to account for killing Jordan, there are others who are not. There were two other people who allegedly helped Penny as he killed the young Black man. They’ve yet to be named or arrested. Why not?

But neither has anyone in the NYPD. And why not? Their actions that day are a matter of record.

This week in October, and specifically on Oct. 22, has long been internationally recognized as the day and period that people across the globe take a united stand against police violence. What happened to Jordan Neely should be registered as one of those vulgarities.

Because even as it’s true that the police did not administer the chokehold, their actions once on the scene may have made the difference between this case being charged as second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide or the attempt to execute those actions. 

Victim Blaming From The Start

When officers arrived and found Jordan incapacitated but still breathing, Penny readily told them he’d choked Jordan. 

In a stunning response to Penny’s admission, the officers administered Narcan, a life-saving drug–but for people who have overdosed on an opioid. 

Full disclosure: I spent years working with a team of people dedicated to ensuring access to Narcan, including its use by law enforcement. Narcan saves lives, period. I have nothing negative to say about it.

On the other hand, how can we not question the bizarre choice by police officers to use Narcan as the primary method used to support the dying victim? From the killer’s own mouth, Jordan had been strangled, causing him to lie near death upon the officers’ arrival, not the known use of an opioid. Armed with that information, police still chose to waste precious minutes that should have been used doing a breathing assessment when they found Jordan still alive, although barely.

Recently retired New York City physician, Dr. Barbara Zeller, a long-serving and board-certified internist who took their medical degree from Columbia University College Of Physicians And Surgeons in1971, said had she been called to the scene, knowing the young man had been choked, the appropriate first response should have been “to undertake a breathing and airway assessment, and check the patient’s cardiac status.”

“In a case in which a person has been harmed in this way, the immediate action must be to support and sustain their breathing,” Zeller said to me today, while also noting that Narcan would not have hurt Jordan, but neither would it have helped. 

There are unclear reports about the use of CPR on May 1, 2023 as Jordan Neely lay dying. We don’t know when it was employed nor how vigorously. Reports only claim it was used. But given the impact of Narcan taking typically two to five minutes to show up, it seems fair to assume that whatever CPR was done, was done too late.

It also seems fair to question — despite being told otherwise, and despite a freelance reporter being at the scene with a video of what happened, along with other witnesses — why in the world their response was to assume, with zero evidence, that Jordan had overdosed on an opioid.

But with a killer’s confession and videotape to prove it, they still willingly chose to act as though Jordan – not the killer – had been the architect of his own harm.

Full Justice For Jordan

Police do not always have to pull the trigger or administer the chokehold to cause — or help cause — a person’s death. Their own bigotry allowed them to view the Black victim as the villain, and the white killer who said he was exactly that, as the savior.

It allowed them to not arrest the killer until public protest (and the recording) demanded they do so. It took more than a week for them to act, despite knowing what happened in less than five minutes.

And it contributed to the long line of police-supported vigilante violence by white people against Blacks. Law enforcement’s historical tacit support of white vigilante violence, coupled with its contribution to public victim-blaming, has created a climate that, for all intents and purposes, has deputized white people who want to kill Black people. 

“It’s a climate that puts Black people who are struggling with mental illness, who are impoverished and unhoused, at an ever increased risk,” offered renowned activist, Monifa Bandele this afternoon. Bandele was a child growing up in New York City in 1984 when the vigilante violence of another white man, Bernhard Goetz, horrified and outraged the Black community.

Jordan Neely was an artist and a young man who had struggled with his mental health since his mother’s murder. He was known to the city’s outreach workers whose mission is to help protect the human beings who comprise New York’s unhoused and often unwell population. The city had him on a Top 50 list of those in most urgent need of assistance.

But as he had been in life, so too in death was Jordan Neely denied the assistance he needed.

At no point should that go unanswered.

SEE ALSO:

Video Footage Of Daniel Penny Interview Played During Pre-Trial Hearing For The Death Of Jordan Neely

‘Daniel Penny Killed A Man’: Jordan Neely’s Family Rips Not Guilty Plea For Subway Chokehold Homicide