Sutter Avenue subway station in Brownsville.
New York City is a case study of how imperialist violence abroad and state violence domestically are two sides of the same coin. The unfortunate stories of Derrell Mickles and Jordan Neely capture the ways that the state carries out the ongoing war on the African/Black working class.
On May 1, 2023, Jordan Neely walked onto the F train at the Second Avenue subway stop in Manhattan and never walked out. Daniel Penny, a former Marine from West Islip in suburban Suffolk County, executed Jordan Neely in a full subway car while passengers watched. They were forced to witness Penny keep Neely in a chokehold for about six minutes — even after he had gone completely motionless.
Neely, a known subway performer and Michael Jackson impersonator, was homeless and battled a number of mental health conditions. That day on the train, he began to cry out in anger and anguish and instead of receiving help or services, he was murdered.
He was murdered for being too poor, too ill, too loud. Penny and his lawyers claimed Neely was "insanely threatening" to the passengers and that he, in turn, was trying to keep them “safe”. Neely’s very presence upset Penny to the point of a murderous rage because Neely was an African/Black man showing discontent — his rage for his lot in life, for the fact that he was hungry, tired, and didn’t have a consistent place to lay his head.
Neely lived his life in the richest city in the world — the home of Wall Street. The place to be for the bourgeoisie. The city that epitomizes the American dream.
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!
But that’s not true for most New Yorkers, is it? The working-class folks — the ones who run your neighborhood corner stores, the construction workers, the janitor who cleans the fancy C-Suite offices, or the nonprofit worker making $30,000 a year to provide services to the community. How about the gig worker who jumps from job to job to scrape together enough to keep a roof over their head or the families on public assistance who have to stretch that last bit on their EBT card to buy food for the rest of the month?
What about the people who can't afford the ever-rising cost of an MTA MetroCard?
Just a little more than a month before Penny is set to stand trial for manslaughter, despite evidence that it was indeed a cold-blooded murder, another public execution occurred in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Derrell Mickles walked into the Sutter Avenue subway station on September 15, 2024, hopped a turnstile, and headed toward the L train platform. Two NYPD officers, who have become more present over the years as the city continually adds more cops to the subways, saw Mickles and started to follow. They chased him up the stairs until they reached the platform. He stepped onto the train as it arrived, and they went after him. He held a blade in his hands, most of the time behind his back or pointed away from the police. They gave him commands to put it down and then fired their tasers. Mickles ran away and they followed, pointing their guns at him. They chased him out of the car and surrounded him, one on each side. He finally stopped as they demanded and put his hands at his side, his back to the train car.
That's when they unload nine shots into an open train platform, shooting Mickles and two bystanders.
One of the bystanders was shot in the leg and currently cannot walk. The other bystander was shot in the head and now suffers from brain damage. The two officers fired so wildly that one of them was also shot in a case of “friendly” fire. To them, Mickles was too defiant, too resistant to their illegitimate authority. He was a threat and had to be put down for their “safety” while putting everyone on that platform in danger.
These are the unfortunate tales of two poor and working-class African/Black people brutalized in New York City by agents of this violent imperialist state with a callous disregard for what they consider “collateral damage.”
One execution was committed by a recent veteran of the most vile, vicious, and vast military wing of the biggest and wealthiest empire in history. The fist of colonialism and imperialism around the world, the military either directly occupies nations or indirectly works to destabilize them, allowing U.S. political and corporate forces to extract natural resources, exploit labor from the global south, and maintain global hegemony.
The other murder was committed by the military that occupies our communities — the NYPD. Seventy-seven precincts souped up with the latest dystopian sci-fi technology, like robot dogs, drones, armored trucks, facial recognition, cellphone surveillance devices, Domain Awareness System, X-ray vans, AI scanners, and more through mechanisms like the 1033 program and exchange with Israel.
With approximately 800 U.S. military bases around the world and the increasing proliferation of domestic bases and state-of-the-art outposts, widely referred to as “Cop Cities”, you can draw no other conclusion than that the U.S. is not only waging war internationally but also domestically against us.
War on the poor and working-class abroad who suffer from the inhumane neoliberal and imperialist policies enforced on their countries. War on the African/Black, Brown, and working-class people here in the U.S. who toil away to generate more capital for the ruling elite who privatize and defund our communities while funding more and more police. And never forget the ongoing war against the Indigenous people(s) of this region and the entire occupied land upon which these monstrosities are built.
In NYC, the seat of American wealth and a bellwether for the global economy, the capitalist class inflicts the kind of exploitation that requires a heavy hand to maintain. Political leadership, such as recently indicted New York City cop mayor Eric Adams or democrat Representative Ritchie Torres, AIPAC’s favorite zionist, are waging this battle against the people on their behalf.
That $11 billion budget the NYPD works with every year allows the governor, the mayor, and the other powers that be to hold the entire city under siege. They continually add more police to the streets and subway to keep the people under control and surveillance. Just this year, democrat Governor Hochul and democrat Mayor Eric Adams worked together to add 1,000 more cops as well as the National Guard and State Troopers to further occupy the subway system. Adams also proposed an increase in the NYPD budget for the 2025 fiscal year. The city is already home to a police force larger than the majority of the world’s militaries and is now receiving its own “Cop City” in Queens.
They get the public to consent to these inflated budgets by using the media to fearmonger about a crime wave and generate a hysteria about “safety.”
In truth, their goal is to protect capital. That is where their concern about “safety” lies. The police spend most of their efforts on the subway targeting fare evaders. The MTA claims fare evasion is responsible for millions of dollars in losses every year. The police tell the public that fare evasion is linked to other crimes in the subway, a claim they used to justify the chase and shooting of Mickles.
Brownsville, a primarily African/Black community that rubs up against the highly surveilled East New York neighborhood, has the highest poverty rate in the entire city. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) transit system is a primary way working-class people travel. Prior to the COVID pandemic in 2019, the subway alone saw an annual ridership of over 1.6 billion. The ridership for MTA buses was over 120 million. Anyone who has lived in the New York City metropolitan area during the last several years would have seen how rapidly the cost of a single ride fare has increased and the hardship it has caused for riders. The anger and concern are palpable every time another increase is announced. Currently, the price sits at $2.90, with another hike on the way.
$2.90 may seem like such a small price, but for the poor and working class in NYC, it can mean scraping the last bits of change from your bag or testing all the metro cards left on the station floor, just to see if any have a little something on them. The strain of the increasing fare makes transportation more cost-prohibitive.
But the capitalists running the city don’t care if you don’t have three dollars.
People shouldn’t have to pay anything for the transit system - public transit is a necessity for New York City. And it should be unacceptable for so much of the city's resources to go into funding the imperialist violence inflicted on communities here and abroad.
In a just society, this would be so. But we don’t live in a just society where the wealth, welfare, and infrastructure are evenly distributed, and people don't have to dance in the subways to survive. We don’t live in a society that prioritizes the protection of its people, rather than conducting regular public lynchings. We don’t live in a society that chooses to preserve a life over $2.90.
We can build that society though. It will not be easy but we can create a world that values life rather than condemns people to a meager existence. We can organize to stop the war on our people at home and abroad. It is possible and we can begin today.
New York City belongs to the people. It should be controlled by the people.
Imani Nile is the assistant to BAR's Executive Editor and a proud member of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) NYC/NJ and the BAP Communications Coordinator. She works in movement communications and media.
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