Good cities can't exist without public order

I was about to write about the train murder in North Carolina, but the assassination of Charlie Kirk pushed it out of the news. For those who don’t know, here’s the story:

Gruesome video shows a man stabbing a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte light rail train…The unprovoked attack — which is being investigated by the FBI — happened shortly before 10 p.m. August 22…

The victim, Iryna Zarutska, fled Ukraine in 2022 with her mother, sister, and brother to escape the war with Russia…

The suspect, Decarlos Brown, 34, was…charged with first-degree murder. Homeless at the time of the stabbing…Brown has a lengthy criminal history, including convictions for armed robbery, felony larceny and breaking and entering. Family members told CNN he has a history of mental health struggles…He spent more than five years behind bars for robbery with a dangerous weapon, state records show. North Carolina state records list 14 cases for Brown, other than those related to the killing. They stem back to 2011 and include arrests for minor offenses like speeding and shoplifting. It is unclear how many of them were prosecuted[.]

A more detailed (and more gruesome) account can be found here.

About two weeks after the murder occurred, it exploded into the public consciousness. The FBI declared an investigation, and President Trump posted a montage of the victim on social media.

This being America in the 2020s, a lot of people insisted on viewing the case in racial terms. Right-wing accounts decried black crime rates, and Fox News showed statistics about interracial violence. This was unhelpful. Although the killing was probably a hate crime — the perpetrator repeatedly says “I got that white girl” in the video — it was also the act of a lone schizophrenic who claims that the victim was reading his mind. Blaming a whole racial group for the actions of a lone psycho killer makes no sense.¹ As Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual write, this is really a story about how our broken justice system releases repeat offenders and criminally insane individuals back into society again and again, rather than a story about race relations.

On the flip side, some progressive commentators seemed more worried about racist reactions to the crime, or about the fate of the perpetrator, than about the gruesome murder itself. CNN’s Brian Stelter fretted about “pro-Trump activists” making political hay out of the murder, while Van Jones expressed sympathy for the killer, declaring that “The man who stabbed Iryna Zarutska was hurting…hurt people hurt people.” This was also unhelpful. Just as minority groups shouldn’t be blamed when someone from that group commits a crime, the perpetrators shouldn’t be given special protections or consideration because of their race.

Meanwhile, some cynical commentators (including myself) simply noted that it was nice to see MAGA types expressing sympathy for an immigrant refugee, and for a Ukrainian. It would be nice if they could extend the sympathy they felt for Iryna Zarutska to the many thousands of young Ukrainian women who are being raped and murdered by the invading Russian army.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about the racial politics of this particular murder. But the urban politics are much more interesting. In the wake of the killing, a number of people argued that incidents like this are why America doesn’t have good public transit:

These people are overstating their case, but when you get right down to it, they do have a point. America’s chronically high levels of violence and public disorder are one reason — certainly not the only reason, but one reason — that it’s so politically difficult to build dense housing and transit in this country.

For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.

But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century.

A fair amount of research around the world shows that fear of violent crime keeps a lot of people from using public transit. Urbanists can shout all they like about how driving is far more dangerous than taking the train or bus, but telling people what not to be afraid of has a very poor track record as a method of persuasion. Air travel and terrorism are both examples where dangers that are out of people’s control are scarier than dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents. We devote huge societal resources to minimizing the risks of plane crashes and terrorist attacks, and if we want more Americans to embrace life in dense cities, we’re going to have to do the same with the risk of crime on public transit.

The slaying of Iryna Zarutska was a sensational incident, but not an isolated one. Back in 2018, three people were stabbed to death on the Bay Area’s BART train within a span of five days. There was a mass shooting on an NYC train in 2022. That same year, an Asian woman was