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Earlier this year, I wrote about a friend who was attacked and thrown to the ground on a September afternoon, while she was walking toward Borough Hall in Brooklyn to go to the post office. She was on the phone with her mother when a man, whose erratic behavior she had noticed in the distance, pushed her into the street, leaving her with bruises, a chipped tooth and fear new to her after decades of living in New York.
At the time, it did not seem as though the assault might be part of a dark emerging trend. But the incident would presage many others — instances in which women in New York were randomly punched on the street in the middle of the day.
At the end of April, Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives for the city’s Police Department, reported that 50 women had suffered this sort of unprovoked brutality since the beginning of the year in the lower half of Manhattan alone. A few days before the announcement, a 9-year-old girl standing with her mother was punched in the face by a man at Grand Central Station.
The incidents came to public attention largely via TikTok videos that some of the victims posted right after they were attacked — vivid accounts from young women with bruised faces and black eyes, which led to questions about how seriously the police were pursuing these cases as acts of violent misogyny. Then, just this week, the Manhattan district attorney’s office indicted a man — a 40-year-old fringe political candidate named Skiboky Stora — on hate crime charges “for assaulting, stalking and harassing strangers in a series of anti-female, anti-white and antisemitic incidents.” He had been arrested in March two days after he was accused of punching a 23-year-old woman, a social media influencer whose video describing what had happened so unexpectedly one morning in Chelsea has been viewed tens of millions of times.
Ever since smartphones with cameras became ubiquitous, technology has come to play an increasingly crucial role in modern law enforcement both as a means of fomenting national outrage over otherwise obscured injustices and tackling the more mundane challenges of solving crimes. In the case of my friend, Laura, the attack had been recorded on a security camera, and she had also managed to take a very clear close-up of him — head to toe — with her phone. What intrigued me was what her situation revealed about the legal system’s latent and quasi-romantic faith in the power of human perception over the more conclusive determinations supplied by digital imaging.
A precinct lineup today is nothing like the familiar scene in police procedurals. Five weeks after her attack, Laura, a successful artist in her 50s (who asked that I not use her full name because her case is ongoing), was given a set of photographs selected by an algorithm. Faced with a “lineup” of headshots, she was unable to identify her assailant with any confidence. This bothered her, she told me, precisely because she was a painter in the realist tradition who prided herself on an adept eye for physical detail. Any other characteristic she might have registered about her attacker, like his carriage or the way he held his hands, became meaningless.
Laura’s mistake meant the police did not take her assailant into custody. When a witness — a private-school security guard who had seen her assailant immediately following the attack — was brought in to look at a lineup, he too misidentified him. But rather than questioning the efficiency of a system that delivered images of people solely from the neck up, who looked so alarmingly alike they stumped two people whose work demanded a high level of visual acuity, the case essentially fell away.
After my column about the strange handling of the attack was published, Laura received a call from an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn who hoped to find some resolution. The man who had attacked her had previously been charged with misdemeanor assault. He had skipped a court date and as a result had been issued a bench warrant, which led to his arrest in May. In custody for missing his appearance, he was shown the picture that Laura had taken of him after the attack. He was asked if he recognized the man in the photo. He did. Only because he identified himself could the case proceed.
Laura’s assailant has been detained at Rikers ever since. It is an outcome that neither she nor the prosecutors she has been in contact with see as ideal. The man had been living in a homeless shelter, officials said, and he struggled with mental instability. Had he been charged with felony assault on the grounds of the photographic evidence last fall, he would have had a good chance of being remanded to a diversion program, where he could have been given the help he presumably needs, months ago.
Here was a case in which someone dangerous to others (and potentially to himself) was kept on the streets not out of deference to progressive criminal justice politics but rather because of a stubborn insistence on what seem like benighted protocols in the face of stronger evidence and the reality that victims’ identification of suspects is notoriously unreliable.
As these recent assault cases go forward — cases in which, Chief Kenny, has said often involve men struggling with mental illness — the question of whether the accused is charged with misdemeanor versus felony assault becomes quite significant. The second charge is obviously more serious, coming with the risk of more severe punishment. Working to bring a felony charge against a mentally ill person might not seem in the vein of reform, but because felony assault cases are brought in State Supreme Court rather than criminal court, they allow for the far greater possibility of landing the accused in a mental health program over prison. So in another baffling aspect to the system, some are left to hope for the “worst.”
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