A few shuffle in their seats. Some look up for a brief, wary glance. Most back away. Not a single person intervenes to stop him.
This was the scene in the moments immediately after Decarlos Brown Jr. allegedly stabbed Iryna Zarutska in the neck on the Lynx Blue Line train in Charlotte, North Carolina. She looks up in terror and slumps over moments later, bleeding out. Brown calmly disembarks at the next station. Nobody in the video tries to restrain him. Nobody, it seems, comes to her rescue.
In a sense, who could blame them? We know what can happen when a bystander intervenes in these situations. If things go wrong, you could be vilified in the press, lose your job, get charged with murder. That is what happened to Daniel Penny.
The video of Zarutska’s murder and its aftermath sheds light on the spirit of the age, one in which police, prisons, and mandatory hospital treatment for those who require it were sidelined with demonizing euphemisms like “mass incarceration” that made the goal abolition rather than reform.
