Can’t one feel badly for a homeless person, a mentally ill person, whom one comes across in a public park? Of course one can. And when that person is black, it immediately dredges up the litany of reasons why the situation for black people might be very different than a white person, particularly if you’re inclined to make stereotypical assumptions about black people based upon these generic reasons. But what if that person strikes you and kills your dog in the uber-progressive white enclave of Park Slope, Brooklyn?

On Aug. 3, Jessica Chrustic, 40, a professional beekeeper, 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.

They called 911, but the man was gone before the police arrived. A week later, the dog, Moose, died of its injuries and the presumptively homeless (or unhoused) mentally ill (or neurodivergent) black (or BIPOC) man (or who knows since no one asked for his pronouns) remained at large. Chrustic turned to Nextdoor to talk about her experience and disappointment that the person had not been caught by the police.

At first, she received the support one would expect to be shown to a woman whose dog was killed. But then a new wave washed in.

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.

Is it complicated? Anything is if you make it so.

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.

Somehow, Chrustic became the bad guy for calling the cops and pursuing her complaint by enlisting her neighbors to find the person who killed her dog. The irony, of course, was that there was no known information to suggest whether he was homeless and why he was behaving the way he was, including his unprovoked attack on Chrustic and Moose. But there were two known facts. He attacked her without cause and he killed her dog. What did the unduly passionate of Park Slope feel should be done about it?

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.

Raise money? To do what? Get him clothing, food, an apartment, a job, mental health care? Do they simplistically presume that’s the fix, that given some compassionate support, he would magically morph into an upstanding citizen and stop hitting women and dogs with a club?

Another neighbor with a history of social justice involvement thought it was time to form a neighborhood watch group, and called for a  neighborhood meeting. Want to guess how that went?

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.” As an enticement, he created a logo and printed 10 T-shirts.

There was a nod toward Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels with the mention of possible berets, but this wasn’t his only faux pas.

Mr. Nammack’s name for the new group: Park Slope Panthers.

He did not see the backlash coming.

Panthers? Where was that name used before?

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.

One disruptor told the group they didn’t need more “cops” in the Park. Another offered even deeper insight.

[O]ne 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.

While the watch group never formed, and there were no more meetings, the unduly passionate had one more message for Nammack.

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.

The dog is dead. Chrustic is a racist villain and Nammock is a cop and the unhoused, neurodivergent BIPOC person of unknown gender has yet to be found, so they turned to their city council rep, Shahana Hanif.

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.”

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. “When it comes to this individual, they’re clearly a present danger to others and most likely themselves, and figuring out how we can safely de-escalate that situation without putting anyone else in danger is complicated.”

There are the obvious reactions. How would they feel if this happened to them? How will they feel if the next victim struck and killed is a child? But what of Chrustic? Is she not allowed to walk her dog in the park without someone killing it? And if someone does kill it, even if it’s a putatively oppressed person, should nothing be done? That’s a recipe for a lot of urine-sprayed compassionate people with dead dogs.