The Free Press
Last September, a shooting occurred in a subway station in Brooklyn. The shooters were members of the NYPD. They were there that afternoon policing a subway system that in 2024 saw 561 felonious assaults and 10 murders, the most in over 25 years.
Here’s what happened:
Derrell Mickles, a 37-year-old man with multiple past arrests, had entered the Sutter Avenue station without paying. Police told him to leave. Upon his exit, police noticed he had a knife with an exposed blade. Nine minutes later, Mickles returned to the station, again without paying, and was confronted by officers Alex Wong and Edmund Mays, who demanded, 38 times in under two minutes, that he drop the knife. After Mickles argued, threatened the officers, demanded to be killed, plucked out Taser prongs, and then charged at the officers, Wong and Mays shot him.
The bullets incapacitated Mickles, but they also injured two innocent bystanders as well as Officer Mays. No one was killed.
That night, about 100 anti-police activists surrounded the local Brownsville police precinct to protest the shootings. On X, a protester claimed they were “taking the streets in response to NYPD committing a mass shooting in the subway recently over fare evasion.” Demonstrators jumped subway turnstiles en masse to make the point that fare evasion is never a justification for being shot.
Mayor Eric Adams offered a different explanation: “He was not shot for fare evasion,” Adams said. “He was shot because he had a knife, and he went after the police officers after repeatedly asking him to put down the knife.” The NYPD swiftly released body-camera video that backed up Adams.
It didn’t matter. The media quickly bought into the activists’ narrative, and they weren’t about to let it go: The shooting was a matter of excessive police force arrayed against someone trying to evade a $2.90 fare.
No publication was more guilty of this bias than The New York Times.
The Times has run seven stories about this case. Not a single one included the word knife in the headline. The day after the incident, The Times headline read: “Critics Question NYPD Shootings After Fare Evasion Stop in Subway.” Even days after release of the body cam footage, The Times chose to characterize its story this way: “NYPD’s Release of Subway Shooting Video Footage Doesn’t Quell Anger.”
Of course, a big reason why the anger wasn’t quelled was precisely because of The Times’ ongoing insistence that it was a story about a fare evader who happened to have a knife, rather than about an aggressive knife-wielder who happened to be evading a fare.
A few weeks ago, the paper offered a major look back at the shooting. The Times interviewed witnesses, reviewed extensive body cam and CCTV footage, and invested resources. It took six months. And once more, it misled readers. The headline: “One Hopped Turnstile, 9 Police Bullets, 4 People Shot. Does It Add Up?”
Then there was WNYC, New York’s NPR affiliate, where I started my career and worked for eight years. Its coverage wasn’t any better. Among other things, it reported that Mickles would not be charged for weapon possession because it was legal to carry the knife he had. They cited an unnamed source and interviewed City Council member Tiffany Cabán, a proponent of defunding the police, who claimed it was legal to carry a knife on the subway.
This is demonstrably false. It is illegal for anyone to carry a knife in the subway; in fact, it’s illegal to carry a knife longer than four inches anywhere in the city. Not surprisingly, Mickles was charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
As with most policing stories WNYC does, the coverage doesn’t ask, “What were the trade-offs and choices in this interaction?” but rather, “What did the police do wrong?” This bias was amplified to a national audience when an NPR host, interviewing the WNYC reporter about the shooting, said, “Wow. I mean, I just have to say that this does seem like quite an outsized outcome for a person who didn’t pay a $2.90 subway fare.”
Activist groups will always try to portray police shootings as de facto injustices. Sometimes they are. But, at the risk of stating what’s simultaneously obvious and increasingly rare, it is up to major newspapers and press outlets to portray stories about policing accurately. There is a lot at stake.
Our society nearly broke apart over issues of policing, with some cities burning over a combination of righteous anger and indifferent riot control. Other cities unraveled because incidents were reported inaccurately.
Consider this as well: In September, when Derrell Mickles twice entered the Sutter Avenue station, the subway system had just experienced its eighth murder. By the end of the year there would be two more, including the immolation of a homeless woman. These shocking crimes, alongside the mundanely corrosive problem of fare evasions, inspired a public cry for more policing. Surveys show that only 49 percent of subway riders feel safe during the day, down from 81 percent in 2017. At night, only 22 percent feel safe, down from 46 percent in 2017.
Even if the police’s interaction with Mickles were only about fare evasion, not an exposed blade, it’s undeniable that enforcement serves a public good and addresses public demand: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimates it loses $800 million annually to turnstile jumpers.
Police confront potentially dangerous people in all kinds of settings, many of them unexpected. Once that happens, whether in the subway, whether the person is holding a knife or a gun, they have no choice but to disarm them since those people represent a threat.
“I’m not dropping nothing,” Mickles said when the police asked him to drop his knife. “I’m going to make you kill me. Shoot me.” What were they supposed to do?
As a New Yorker, my family and I rely on the subway. My teenage sons take it to school every day and often ride it at night. Statistics show that the subway is not completely crime-ridden, but the nature of crime has shifted from theft to assault.
Of course we all want to be good people and good citizens. And when you hear stories of innocent bystanders being shot—in one case, having to undergo brain surgery—over a turnstile jumper, what reasonable person wouldn’t be somewhat appalled? We want to make the right moral judgments, but to do so, we need the media to help us make sense of what really happened.
Yet there was virtually no chance for a conscientious New Yorker to get an accurate story about the Derrell Mickles incident if their media diet consisted of The New York Times, public radio, and their aligned social media feeds and affiliates. I’m not claiming this was perfect policing—something clearly went wrong when officers were in each other’s line of fire and bystanders caught stray bullets. But I despair that the inherent bias of the legacy media is such that we’ll never get accurate reporting on important issues or fundamental questions like whether the police did their jobs appropriately.
Public safety isn’t an abstraction. It’s the fundamental responsibility of government, and in this case the government acted reasonably. When a man brandishes a weapon, refuses dozens of commands to drop it, tells officers to shoot him, advances despite Tasers, and declares his intention to make police kill him—the story cannot honestly be reduced to “One Hopped Turnstile, 9 Police Bullets, 4 People Shot. Does It Add Up?”
When this is the quality of coverage, especially among outlets that pride themselves on being of the highest journalistic standards, how can the public accurately assess what happened, how can citizens cast informed votes, and how can New Yorkers come to informed conclusions?
They can’t.
Mike Pesca is the host of the daily podcast The Gist.
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