Nicole Gelinas joins Brian Anderson to discuss the pattern of random acts of violence in New York City and what can be done to stop them.
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Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson. I’m the editor of City Journal, and joining me on today’s show is Nicole Gelinas, who has been on this podcast many times. She’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a long-time contributing editor at City Journal and is now a contributing opinion editor at the New York Times. She writes about urban economic issues, transportation, finance. Her recent book, I should say, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets From The Car, just won the 2025 Gotham Book Prize. Today though, we’re going to be discussing a far grimmer topic, the deadly shooting on July 28th at 345 Park Avenue in New York City. Nicole just wrote about this for City Journal, a piece called “A Threatened City.” Nicole, thanks very much for joining us.
Nicole Gelinas: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for having me back on.
Brian Anderson: This recent story that you wrote on the attack described a broader trend of random acts of violence that have targeted New York City. One thinks of the Luigi Mangione shooting late last year and other recent incidents. As you point out, the shooter in this case, Shane Tamura, who was 27, did not have any connection to New York City. He had no local arrest record, and he drove all the way from Nevada where he had a history of mental health issues. Now, New York City has several methods of preventing violence such as targeting radical terrorist organizations, catching low level offenders before they escalate to larger crimes. All of these approaches which have helped keep New York City relatively safe, none of them would seem applicable here. So the first question I have is, are some random acts of violence just unavoidable in a free society?
Nicole Gelinas: Yes, and Brian, we have had, New York has been a magnet for these types of ideological attacks, some attackers within ideology outside of mental illness, and some attackers including Shane Tamara, whose ideology seems colored with mental illness. And this has been an issue for New York City forever. Perhaps a new iteration of this comes from this anti-capitalist ideology. As you mentioned, Luigi Mangione came to New York City last December with the sole purpose of assassinating, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, and now this new attacker, Shane Tamura also came to New York City, no previous ties to the city with the sole purpose of attacking the NFL. His statements said, and there’s no corroboration of this, in fact, it can’t be corroborated because they can’t tell if you have this type of brain injury until an autopsy is performed. But he claimed that he had suffered a high school football injury to his brain.
So both targeting high profile institutions with a nexus in New York City, and if you kind of widen the definition of this, I mean, we had the subway shooting in 2022 were thankfully nobody was killed, but 10 people were injured in a mass shooting. That attacker also, Frank James, had no adult ties to New York City, drove here for the sole purpose of attacking us. So I think you’re right, hard to prevent these things because if you look at how New York prevents crimes, it’s often through stopping people from committing smaller crimes before they escalate to larger crimes. And also incapacitating people hopefully, who have had a long history of mental health problems within New York City. Very hard obviously to do that if the person has no ties to New York City.
Brian Anderson: One of the most disturbing aspects of this mass shooting was the, I don’t think there’s another word to describe it, ghoulish reaction from many online commentators who celebrated the death of one of the victims. Wesley LePatner, she was a 43-year-old mother of two. She was a Yale grad, a rising star in finance. She was a senior managing director and global head of Blackstone’s Core Plus real estate portfolio. She just happened to be in the way of Tamura’s rampage. But online you had a lot of people and including some like a Penguin Books editor basically saying this was great that she got killed. Anyone associated with the financial industry is in fact fair game. So it gets to this kind of rising anti-capitalist trend you’re seeing on the left, and the response recalls the support Luigi Mangione received after he allegedly murdered a healthcare executive, Brian Thompson last year in the city. So I wonder, just to step back a bit, are we seeing something new here, a kind of strain of anti-capitalism that not only motivates political violence but justifies it among a broader group of people?
Nicole Gelinas: Yes, and Wesley’s daughter just eulogized her last week in saying that her mother was her rock. So obviously very successful in the corporate world, but also leaves behind a mourning family, and I think it’s not new. I mean, if we can go back to the attack on JP Morgan more than a hundred years ago, committed by anti-capitalist anarchists in New York City down on Wall Street, but it certainly seems to be revived in the past few years. The Mangione assassination obviously got a lot of attention, including not the kind of attention we would hope that it would get in that he’s become kind of a rockstar amid this certain cult, anti-capitalist contingent where people actually show up to his pretrial hearings to support him.
And although this was not quite that, it was similar and that you have someone, again, another difference here is this attacker seems partly driven by mental illness. Doesn’t seem to be the case in the Mangione case, but certainly targeting a corporate entity, the NFL, with headquarters in New York City. So I think in the corporate world, CEOs, boards, executive teams, high profile nonprofit teams need to be more cognizant that this is a changed atmosphere in terms of security that at one time you had these CEOs and the executive teams riding the subway every day, and I think it would be very difficult to justify that to the board right now. So this is harming part of what makes a city work and that you cannot make a city into a gated community. There’s almost only so much security you can provide for people in a hotel conference arena, even protected in a car if people know who’s in that car. So it’s something that we do have to look at preventing, including steps New York City can take.
You know, it’s not easy to prevent these things, but there are some things we can do to hopefully make these things even less frequent than they are, including looking at the license plates. I mean, this person drove all the way from Nevada. We have an automatic license plate reader system set up for people coming into New York City and people driving within New York City. Using that system and hopefully building up a national database where this guy had been pulled over a few times in Nevada for driving issues, it doesn’t hurt if the police officers who are closest in their vehicle next to where this person is driving into the city, they get an alert that says, okay, this guy just drove in, never been to New York City before. He’s got 18 outstanding tickets in another state. Let’s just pull him over based on those outstanding unpaid tickets and see what’s going on and see if there’s anything visible in the car. That’s at least something. But again, if you haven’t committed a string of small crimes here or had a mental illness issue here, it is hard for New York City to stop these things, particularly with the lone actors because at least with disrupting post-9/11 plots, you had people acting together, so they were leaving a trail on the internet. If you’re just someone self-radicalizing and not communicating with anybody, it’s hard to catch you that way as well.
Brian Anderson: I guess given Tamura’s history of mental health crises and access to legally purchased firearms, what are the systemic issues in how mental health warnings translate or fail to translate into risk mitigation? For example, could laws be strengthened to address cases of sanctioned firearm ownership by people who are, as he was, clearly mentally unstable?
Nicole Gelinas: I think they could, but I think to look at it even more broadly, if you look at this attacker’s mental illness history in Nevada and in Las Vegas, it looks very similar to the mental illness history of many people within New York City who built up this years and years of history of warnings and being committed and being released in New York City and then go on to attack someone on the subway, for example. This person had a similar history in Las Vegas where the police asked for him to be committed to a mental institution in 2022, and then again in 2024. His mother who has at least partly corroborated some of these concussion issues, has said that he had serious mental illness and wasn’t getting adequate treatment. So I think this is not only a New York or Las Vegas problem, but a national problem. What do you do to incapacitate people who clearly have severe untreated mental illness and aren’t able to treat themselves? I mean, I think this is a national issue. The Trump administration, including RFK Jr., should be more focused on when the parents and relatives of some of these individuals repeatedly say they don’t have the capacity to get their relative help. Why are the state and local levels of government so often failing to keep them in a institutional setting until they’re able to live safely in the community again?
Brian Anderson: Yeah, this has been a recurring theme for City Journal for a while now. I have to agree with you 100 percent there. Yeah. I’d like to go back to this question of what the implications could be for urban life. In this piece he wrote the modern idea of office building security really originated with the 9/11 attacks. So what consequences do you see for the city in the aftermath of this event? If we could spell them out a little more, you suggest that corporate towers could even evolve into basically fortress-like structures. So do you think we’re going to see bolstered security at most high profile office buildings? You alluded to this, could increased security really damage the city’s vibrancy in a lot of ways.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, I think we will, and we are already seeing even tighter security where instead of swiping your badge after you’ve entered the building, having to swipe outside the building, I think we are also likely going to see these buildings petitioning the city governments to have some of their public park space that’s on their property, but they’ve sort of built these little public parks in exchange for building taller buildings, including the new JP Morgan Chase headquarters. I think you’ll see these corporate managers petition to have those closed off during business hours or have some gated access to those areas to make an even bigger perimeter around the building. Of course, better security helps weed out some things, but not everything. We saw in this attack there was a police officer was killed working the private detail within the lobby of this building and was ambushed and attacked. So very, very difficult to prevent an ambush that comes totally without warning. I mean, a determined attacker is just going to break the windows or waltz right by this security or vault over the barriers that they put up where you have to swipe your badge and go through the kind of turnstile. So as you said, we cannot successfully make the city into a fortress, nor should we try to do so.
Brian Anderson: I wonder if this awful event underscores the bravery of police officers in the city. There has been a significant reduction in the number of officers on the street. I wonder if this is an argument for increasing the size of the NYPD again, if we’re going to be looking at more of these kinds of incidents.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, Brian, I think there are many reasons to consider increasing the size of the NYPD, and this is one of them indeed, going from close to 41,000 uniform officers around 2000, 2001 to closer to 35,000 budgeted headcounts right now. But having the NYPD, having difficulty even getting up to 35,000 officers just because of recruitment issues, they’re really strained on many fronts. We still have elevated random violence in the subway that’s been going on for five years. It’s better than it was a couple years ago, but it’s nowhere near to the low levels. It was before 2020, and it’s only better because the police department is relying on overtime shifts to keep the subways flooded with police officers. We still have a terrorism risk and officers devoted to anti-terrorism, and now we have a greater concern among the high-profile corporate community that more of their own executive teams and even just their basic staff, people that just want to go to work and have a job and go home and not even anywhere close to the CEO are now at risk because of these Mangione-like attacks. So many things that they have to do that they didn’t have to do back in the 1980s or 1990s. Plus, you have this detail program, which if you look at officers doing overtime shifts, then doing these detail shifts, this is a lot of coverage where you really need to think about, do we need not only a bigger force, but what are more creative ways, including just higher pay to recruit people who just are not thinking about becoming a police officer right now?
Brian Anderson: New episodes are dropping every Monday and Thursday, so be sure to check it out on YouTube and subscribe. Nicole Gelinus, always great to have you on 10 Blocks. Nice to talk with you this morning.
Nicole Gelinas: Likewise, Brian, nice to talk with you as well. Thank you.
Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
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