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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I mean, there is another option - take simple steps to anonymize yourself before intervening, and if things go wrong flee the scene. A motivated modern police force can absolutely catch you if they decide to pursue the case, but they have a lot of similarly sad cases on their plates. A single extra "mentally ill vagrant dies in a scuffle he likely started, suspect disappears" isn't going to attract undue law-enforcement resources, and it's going to be suppressed in the media rather than being shouted on the street corners. "Blue-voting city fails its most vulnerable, again" isn't a narrative that pays the bills like "Outgroup member murders innocent in broad daylight", and the boys in blue have even less motivation to track you down in the absence of public outcry.

The downsides I can think of are that if you do get caught you'll be punished more severely, and that certain anonymizing tactics might make you seem like the aggressor and be on the wrong side of further bystander intervention. For the former, I'm not familiar enough with US/NYC law to know how badly, but since it seems probable that Penny is going to jail for a long time, a few more years doesn't seem like a good tradeoff against something like a 90% chance of a clean getaway. For the latter - well, this seems to come up rarely enough that two separate people in a train car being willing to get their hands dirty seems unlikely, and a brawl between unrelated belligerents is less likely to inspire heroics than one-sided harassment.

Any time someone dies they're going to be looking for you. There's a lot of minor crime in New York but not a lot of killing, relatively speaking.

That can work for something like a fistfight. Maybe even if the vagrant is in the hospital but isn't terribly injured. Bodies always have drawn law enforcement attention.

I mean, there is another option - take simple steps to anonymize yourself before intervening, and if things go wrong flee the scene.

Not possible using a train/subway system due to CCTV. Even if you went into some toilets and did a full change of clothing and masked up, they would back trace your movements when analyzing footage and probably be able to figure out who you were (height/build). This is in a homicide case anyway where cops are diligent about their investigations. Simple assault and maybe they wouldn't bother.

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