My pal Carl, who has attracted a very substantial following on the ex-twitters by being brutally fair and reasonable, has made surviving the ordinary routine of life in New York City into a running joke.

After the recent subway tragedy of a woman being set on fire, following the acquittal of Daniel Penny, many have asserted that New York has become a hellscape of violence and lawlessness. It’s not true. Indeed, New York is remarkably safe as cities go, and far safer than it was a generation ago. The murder rate is stunningly low. That’s the data, no matter what the images show.

But then, last night, a man, Kamel Hawkins, pushed a random subway rider in front of a train. feeding yet again the fear that New York is unsafe, a city of lawlessness.

JUST IN: 23-year-old Kamel Hawkins charged with attempted murder after pushing a random man in front of a moving train in Manhattan.

The incident happened at the 18th Street station this afternoon.

Police say the 45-year-old victim is expected to survive and only suffered a… pic.twitter.com/sDMYidQXwB

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 1, 2025

The fear returns, and feeds the sense that there is an epidemic of crime, of violence, of lawlessness, permeating a city of 8 million based on a handful of random violent crimes. Even though we know from the statistics this isn’t so, the fear is real and can’t be denied with a chart or graph. There is a reason, I contend, that explains this seemingly inexplicable gap between reality and perception. The crimes that are spotlighted, with good reason, are crimes of a very different nature than the crimes that charts and graphs are meant to reflect.

For the most part, crimes are understandable. People need money, so they knock off a bodega or snatch a purse. People want drugs, so they buy them and sell them. People get angry with someone for being disrespectful. This doesn’t excuse crime, or make it acceptable despite the formulations of human nature designed to explain away such acts in order to shift the responsibility from individual criminals to society, but this does make crime understandable. And if crime is understandable, at least we can wrap our heads around why it happens and, perhaps, ways to deal with it.

But some rando pushing some guy he doesn’t know in front of a subway train? Some rando setting a woman on the subway on fire? These acts make no sense. They have no financial aim. They reflect no uncontrolled addiction. There is nothing between criminal and victim to give rise to any reason for the hard shove that nearly took a man’s life and will almost certainly prove ruinous to his and his family’s life.

When there is no reason, it’s a crime that could happen at any time to anyone for no reason. It’s the ambiguity of inexplicable violence that shifts the act from a crime we can tolerate within the parameters of ordinary, expected crime to abject fear.

Consider analogizing random crime to a gambler who loses a hand and watches as the pot is taken by another player. It’s a loss he can accept, part of the deal of playing the game. But if the other player just reached in and grabbed the pot without winning the hand, the gambler would be outraged and leap across the table to stop this thief. The gambler has lost no more money either way, but can tolerate the loss when it’s part of the game because we understand the rules by which the game functions. Yes, the analogy is flawed, but to the extent it applies, it serves its purpose.

We similarly understand the rules by which people function, that even though it may be absolutely wrong to commit crimes, we understand that they will happen for certain reasons and can take precautions to protect ourselves against victimhood. We realize that people want money, want drugs, want sex, want revenge. What we can’t quite understand is why some rando on a subway platform would push a guy he doesn’t know. And because we can’t, its significance is magnified, as is our fear.

Of course, we also know there are mentally ill people out there, just as there are addicts, the greedy and those who can’t control their emotions. Why then do we not figure into the feeling of safety or lack thereof the reality that there are people walking the streets who will act on their mental illness and engage in what seems to normies to be random acts of violence? Would we be paralyzed with fear if we incorporated the reality that no one, no matter how cautious, can be certain that they won’t be the next subway rider to be burned to death or pushed in front of an oncoming train?