Victims of random street attacks face an outdated police system

Earlier this year, I wrote about a friend who was attacked and thrown to the ground one September afternoon as she walked to Brooklyn’s Borough Hall to go to the post office. She was on the phone with her mother when a man whose erratic behavior she had noticed from afar pushed her into the street, leaving her with bruises, a chipped tooth, and a fear that was new to her after decades in New York.

At the time, the attack did not seem to be part of a sinister trend, but the incident would become a precursor to many more cases of women being randomly beaten in the middle of the day on the streets of New York.

At the end of April, Joseph Kenny, the city’s chief of criminal investigations, reported that 50 women in the lower half of Manhattan alone had been victims of this kind of gratuitous brutality since the beginning of the year. A few days before this announcement, a nine-year-old girl standing with her mother was punched in the face by a man at Grand Central Station.

The incidents became known primarily through TikTok videos posted by some of the victims immediately after the attacks — vivid descriptions of young women with bruised faces and black eyes, raising questions about how seriously police are taking these cases as acts of violent misogyny. Then, just this week, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged a man — a 40-year-old fringe political candidate named Skiboky Stora — with hate crimes “for attacking, stalking and harassing strangers in a series of misogynistic, whitephobic and anti-Semitic incidents.” He was a social media influencer whose video describing what happened so unexpectedly one morning in Chelsea has been viewed tens of millions of times.

Since smartphones with cameras have become ubiquitous, technology has played an increasingly important role in modern law enforcement, both as a means of stoking national outrage over otherwise unrecognized injustices and as a way of addressing the more mundane challenges of solving crimes. In my friend Laura’s case, the attack had been recorded by a security camera, and she had also managed to get a very clear close-up of him—head to toe—with her phone. What fascinated me was what her situation revealed about the legal system’s latent and quasi-romantic belief in the power of human perception over the more conclusive determinations provided by digital images.

A constituency line-up is no longer like the familiar scenes from crime series. Five weeks after her attack, Laura, a successful artist in her fifties (who asked me not to use her full name because her case is ongoing), received a series of photographs selected by an algorithm. Faced with a “line-up” of portrait photos, she was unable to identify her attacker with any certainty. This bothered her, she told me, precisely because she was a painter in the realist tradition who prided herself on her keen eye for physical detail. Any other features she might have noticed about her attacker, such as his posture or the way he held his hands, became meaningless.

Laura’s mistake resulted in police failing to arrest her attacker. When a witness – a private school security guard who had seen her attacker immediately after the attack – was brought in for a lineup, he also misidentified him. But rather than questioning the effectiveness of a system that produced images of people from the neck up who looked so frighteningly similar that they baffled two people whose jobs required a high degree of visual acuity, the case essentially fell apart.

After my column about the strange handling of the attack was published, Laura received a call from an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn who was hoping to find a solution. The man who attacked her had previously been charged with assault. He had failed to appear in court and had subsequently obtained a warrant that led to his arrest in May. While in custody for failure to appear, he was shown the photo Laura had taken of him after the attack. He was asked if he recognized the man in the photo. He recognized him. Only because he had identified himself could the case proceed.

Laura’s attacker has been held at Rikers ever since. Neither she nor the prosecutors she has been in contact with think that’s ideal. The man had been living in a homeless shelter, officials said, and was mentally unstable. Had he been charged with aggravated assault last fall based on the photographic evidence, he would have had a good chance of being placed in a diversion program, where he could have received the help he probably needs months ago.

This was a case where someone who posed a danger to others (and possibly to himself) remained on the streets not out of respect for progressive criminal justice policies, but rather because of his stubborn adherence to seemingly opaque protocols, despite clearer evidence and the fact that victims’ identification of suspects is notoriously unreliable.

In light of these recent assault cases — cases that Chief Kenny said often involve men struggling with mental illness — the question of whether the defendant is charged with assault is becoming increasingly important. The second count is obviously more serious and carries the risk of harsher punishment. Working on a felony charge against a mentally ill person may not seem particularly reform-oriented, but since assault cases are tried in state Supreme Court rather than criminal court, the defendant is much more likely to end up in a mental health program than in prison. Another confusing aspect of the system is that some are left to hope for the “worst.”