Bombas Spokesperson (11:25)
Before we get into what commentators on the left and right are saying, we want to note a point of agreement. Writers and lawmakers on both sides express horror at the attack and sympathy for the victim. Now on to what the left is saying. The left is alarmed by Zyrutska's killing, but disputes that Democratic policies are to blame. Some reject the notion that the attack was motivated by racial animus. Others call on lawmakers to invest more in mental health services. In the Charlotte Observer, Paige Masten wrote, trump is making the Charlotte light rail killing a partisan issue. It's not that simple. Of course, there is a legitimate discussion to be had about public safety in Charlotte and legitimate questions about the failures that might have allowed this incident to occur. Safety is an issue that has dogged the city for some time, and it's one that leaders can't afford to ignore. Mayor V. Lyles announced in a statement Monday that the city is taking action to increase transit safety, including increasing fare enforcement and police patrols. Masten said that's a start, but it's unfortunate that it took such intense politicization of this tragedy to get Lyles and Katz to finally act on one facet of it. But this isn't a Democrat versus Republican issue, and it's wrong to treat it as one. While the focus is often on crime in blue cities and blue states, it's an issue in red cities and red states as well. In fact, data shows that homicide rates tend to be highest in blue cities located in red states, suggesting that neither party is solely to blame. In fact, red states tend to have higher homicide rates than blue states, in part due to higher rates of gun homicides, masten wrote. That's something Trump and Republicans don't tend to acknowledge. Using a tragedy like this to advance a particular political narrative or promote one candidate over another is distasteful and divisive. On Newsnight with Abby Phillip on cnn, Van Jones argued the right is race mongering. In response to the murder note this is a transcription of Jones's comments on the television show. What happened to that young woman was horrible, and it's everybody's nightmare. You're in any public space or subway and something bad happens to you or somebody you care about. So it does strike a chord, jones said. We don't know why that man did what he did. And for Charlie Kirk and other conservatives to say we know he did it because she's white when there's no evidence of that is just pure race mongering, hate mongering. It's wrong. Kirk says that if something like that had happened the other way, there would be sweeping changes imposed on society. Well, where is the George Floyd Policing Act? It didn't pass even when you had a white police officer murder a black man live on television. The whole world saw there was no sweeping changes. In fact, not one law was passed at the federal level, jones said. What happened was horrible, but it becomes an opportunity for people to jump on bandwagons. And then for somebody like Charlie Kirk, he should be ashamed of himself. No one mentioned the word race, white, black or anything except him. What people mentioned is the horror of what happened to this young woman. In her substack, Andrea Burkhart said criminalizing mental illness is getting us killed. Retribution sells, rehabilitation doesn't like every other state in the nation, North Carolina has a severe shortage of psychiatric beds. Mental health treatment and crisis intervention are not funding priorities for legislatures, burkhart wrote. I've seen a lot of criticism of woke and leftist policies as contributing to Ms. Sirutska's horrendous demise. But Republicans control North Carolina's legislature and have not taken the opportunity to provide the mental health system and the resources it needs to fulfill its function. President Trump recently supported reopening insane asylums in an interview. The thing is, there's no legal impediment to rebuilding a robust mental health system. What stands in the way of more and better psychiatric resources is nothing more than political will. But legislators are far more skilled at deflecting their own responsibility for public safety failures onto others than doing the hard work of actually addressing public safety failures, burkhart said. And around we go, promoting more of the same retributive policies that have led us to imprison more people than China, despite having less than a quarter of the population and an ostensibly freer society. In the meantime, Mr. Brown will almost certainly be pursuing the most foreseeable insanity defense ever. Now, here's what the right is. The right sees the stabbing as symptomatic of lenient policies toward crime from Democratic leaders. Some call for stricter laws to keep repeat offenders off the streets. Others say the left's internal politics prevent it from reckoning with this issue. In the Charlotte Observer, Andrew Dunn argued the attack should jolt Charlotte awake. No murder is acceptable, but some shock the conscience more than others. Random killings of young people in places where they should have had every expectation of safety leave us shaken in a way others do not, dunn wrote. Three days after the stabbing, the Charlotte Police Department published a graphic bragging about the real picture of crime in our city, claiming that homicides and armed robberies were down 30% from last year. That may be true, or it may not be, but Irina Zyritska's murder makes a mockery of the comfort we try to take in statistics. Too often, Charlotte's leaders have talked about crime as if it's a perception problem. Uptown business groups launch PR campaigns, news slogans and billboard ads to assure people it's safe. They talk about vibrancy and image about whether visitors feel comfortable. But this is not a marketing issue. It's a human one, dunn said. That culture of permissiveness has to end. Riders should know every person on that train has paid to be there. CMPD and CATS must post a visible security presence on platforms and trains. And judges must stop releasing violent offenders back into the community on little more than a promise. In Fox News, Representative Mark Harris, a Republican from North Carolina, said Aryna Zyrutska fled Ukraine for safety, but Democrats soft on crime policies failed her. This was not a random act. It was a preventable tragedy, a failure of our system to protect the vulnerable. America failed Zyrutska, and we must ensure it does not fail others like her, harris wrote. This incident reflects a broader crisis unfolding across our nation where soft on crime policies allow dangerous criminals to evade accountability. Charlotte Mayor V. Lyles has claimed, we will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health. End quote. I disagree. Though addressing root causes is important, we cannot ignore the immediate need to protect our communities by ensuring repeat offenders face consequences. The left's approach of prioritizing leniency for offenders over justice for victims has left too many, like arena, vulnerable. In Democrat led cities from Charlotte to Chicago, we see a troubling pattern of downplaying lawlessness while overlooking the pain of those who suffer, harris said. To address this crisis, we need a balanced approach, immediate, robust law enforcement to remove dangerous offenders from our streets and long term investments to tackle the root causes of crime. It also means reforming bail systems to ensure violent repeat offenders are not easily released to harm innocent people like Zyritska. In the Free Press, Kat Rosenfield wrote about the taboo that killed Irina Zyritska. Until the security footage from that night was released, the story flew oddly under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it's now become a flashpoint in online discourse about crime, disorder and public safety in American cities today, Rosenfield said. For conservatives, this incident seems like a slam dunked indictment of the progressive attitudes toward policing and criminal justice that emerged in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. But while this vicious crime plausibly represents the policy chickens of 2020 coming home to roost, that only halfway explains why the story has so captured the public imagination. The greater issue is a cultural one, a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavioral and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don't exist, rosenfeld wrote. In shying away from what is politically inconvenient, ugly or otherwise uncomfortable, we not only cede the conversation to racist idiots, but relinquish with it all hopes of a better future. The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep. All right, that is it for what the left and right are saying. I'll send it back over to Isaac for his take.
