Back in May 2020, The Establishment was so ravenous for an incident of white racism to melt down over in the hopes that it would bring down Donald Trump that the morning after George Floyd’s death, the biggest story in the country was that a dog-walking white woman, a Karen, in Central Park had called 911 to report a black man who had accosted her and made a vaguely threatening remark about what he would do to her off-leash dog. She was immediately denounced by the nation and had her career ruined.
Park Slope is a really nice neighborhood in Brooklyn, popular among, say, women who work in publishing and their husbands who work on Wall Street or who also work in publishing but have trust funds. It adjoins Prospect Park, a lovely Robber Baron–era design by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. From the New York Times’ local news section.
After a sudden confrontation that left a golden retriever dead, neighbors came together online to support the owner of the dog. But then things changed.
By John Leland
Oct. 7, 2022
Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white;
The man is Black while his human victim is white. You can tell who is more important just from the capitalization.
the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.
In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?
Here’s what happened in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when real-life residents faced this situation.
On Aug. 3, Jessica Chrustic, 40, a professional beekeeper
I presume her job has something to do with the hipster boom in Brooklyn a decade ago for locally sourced foods, a silly but pleasant Stuff White People Like fad back before the Great Awokening devoured everything.
, was walking her dog in Prospect Park a little after 6 a.m. when she saw a man rifling through the garbage outside the Picnic House. She had seen the man before — tall, with dreadlocks wrapped in a turban, carrying a long staff and often muttering to himself or cursing — and she usually kept her distance. But this morning there was no room to avoid him.
According to Ms. Chrustic, he started yelling about immigrants taking over the park, then grabbed a bottle of what she later concluded was urine and sloshed it at her and her dog. She tried to run away, but Moose, her 80-pound golden retriever mix, was straining toward the man, trying to protect her.
The man started swinging the stick, she said. One blow hit her, not seriously. Another connected solidly with the dog’s snout. Mary Rowland, 56, a hospital manager who was walking her dog nearby, said she heard the crack of wood on bone and came running toward them, screaming at the man to get away.
… Ms. Chrustic was physically unhurt, but she was shaken. How could this happen in a park where she had never felt unsafe, even walking her dog late at night?
… After emergency surgery, Moose died.
… Weeks passed, and the man who attacked the dog was still at large. People on Nextdoor, working from Ms. Chrustic’s description, posted that they had seen him in one part of the park or another. Ms. Chrustic, who used to visit the park four times a day, now found it too traumatic to enter unless necessary.
She was especially frustrated that the man, who was well known to people in the park, had not been arrested. “You have a person who is walking around the park who is violent and needs to be removed,” she said. “He’s known by the community. It’s disheartening.”
It was a random incident that might once have been discussed by a group of dog owners. But now it had a forum for a much wider community, with arguments about policing, vigilantism, homelessness, mental health care and progressive obstinacy all feeding into a conversation that evolved beyond the crime that set it off.
“It’s complicated,” said S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University. “It’s a conflict of values, between wanting security and social justice. Everybody has a responsibility in some ways.
“There are a bunch of issues here, a bunch of threats,” he added. “We can deal with them in a compassionate way, or a not compassionate way.”
… In Nextdoor forums for communities all over the country, this included suspected crime and sightings of “suspicious” characters, leading early critics to say that what the platform really propagated was white fear. After complaints about racial profiling in 2016, the company instituted diversity training for its operations staff and new protocols for posts about crime and safety. But even in 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized it as an outlet for privileged white people to vent criminal fantasies about their Black and brown neighbors. She tweeted, “@Nextdoor needs to publicly deal w/ their Karen problem.”
A Karen is a white woman so racist she’d prefer not to be attacked by a Black man.
… But gradually, other voices emerged. A vocal minority asked why Park Slope residents, mostly white, were calling for the police to take down a man who appeared to be homeless and emotionally disturbed. …
Martin Lofsnes, 52, a dancer and choreographer who moved out of the neighborhood in 2020, came across the conversation while trying to sell some stuff and was appalled by the vitriol directed at an impoverished man, and by what he called “this vigilante attitude.”
He urged people on the thread to put their emotions aside and consider “400 yrs of systematic racism which has prevented black people from building generational wealth through homeownership resulting in the extreme disparity we see today.” Arresting the man, he wrote, would solve none of that.
With all the affluence in Park Slope, he posted, maybe critics should raise money to help the man, not throw him to the lethal jail system, from which he would most likely emerge more dangerous, or not emerge at all. …
“It’s easy to say that you’re for prison reform and you’re a liberal, until it happens to you,” Mr. Lofsnes said in an interview. “When it happens to you, you have to deal with it. You have to take a step back, even in that heated situation where her dog died, and say, ‘What does this do in the larger scheme of things?’”
To Ms. Chrustic and many on Nextdoor, the issue was simple: A man who killed a dog and attacked its owner was a risk to everyone. She asked people who saw the man to call 911 and to send her photographs so she could confirm that it was really him.
… “I don’t care that it’s being divisive, and that people don’t want to see this guy die in Rikers Island,” Ms. Haddad added. “I’m a New York liberal. I am absolutely for people getting the help they need. But this person is attacking people and killing dogs. He’s targeting women and dogs. He’s violent. He should not be in the park. He should be locked up and paying for his actions.”…
Kristian Nammack, 59, who works in sustainable financing, read the Moose posts on Nextdoor and grew frustrated that nothing seemed to be happening. So he decided to do something about it. He invited people on Nextdoor and Meetup to form a neighborhood watch group to “take our neighborhood back.”…
Then there was the group’s name, which was an immediate flash point: a white financial services guy using the Panther name to take action against a Black man. At the group’s first and only meeting, the scattering of potential volunteers was met by a group of four people, all white, who showed up to disrupt the proceedings. …
To the delight of people who enjoy making fun of Park Slope liberals, one of the disrupters, a woman calling herself Sky, said, “Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,” according to Common Sense.
A few days after the meeting, someone spray-painted the sidewalk outside Mr. Nammack’s apartment: “Don’t Be a Cop, Kris.” It rattled him. “Even being gay, I don’t know that I’ve ever been the target of hate,” he said. “I felt that I was the target of hate.” He decided he did not have the time or energy to continue the group.
On Nextdoor, people seemed to be dug into their positions. Many bundled the lack of an arrest with the rise of other crimes in the neighborhood. Serious crimes in the 78th Precinct, which includes Park Slope, are up 50 percent from two years ago, though well below the highs of the early 1990s.
In other good news, combat deaths on the plains of Eastern Europe are down 97% since the Battle of Kursk-Orel.
… Both Ms. Chrustic and Mr. Nammack separately appealed to their representative on the City Council, Shahana Hanif, for help, but they came away feeling her staff members were more concerned with the safety of the man — whom they presumed to be homeless and mentally ill — than with the threat he might pose to others.
Mr. Nammack said he was told: “‘We don’t want the police involved in this.’” He said, “They didn’t seem concerned that there was a public safety threat with this man at large, and that he needs to be dealt with. The bigger concern was keeping this man out of Rikers, and let’s not do anything.”
Under New York law, depending on the level of cruelty, killing a dog can be a misdemeanor or a felony, carrying a prison sentence of up to two years. Michael Whitesides, a spokesperson for Ms. Hanif, called the situation complicated. “We don’t believe that the N.Y.P.D. is the vehicle to bring safety to our community,” Mx. Whitesides said.
John Leland, a Metro reporter, joined The Times in 2000. His most recent book is “Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons From a Year Among the Oldest Old,” based on a Times series. @johnleland
It would all be so much simpler if the attacker were a white man in a red baseball cap.
