by Andrew Keh
New York Times
July 30, 2025
A small part of the nation’s largest city has drawn people bent on killing to draw attention to their causes. The man who shot four people at a Park Avenue office tower was the latest.
Midtown Manhattan contains multitudes. It is a thrumming center of global commerce, proudly avoided by many locals. It is the mecca of American tourism, a maze of world-famous landmarks routinely swarmed by visitors.
… “In Midtown, and in most of Manhattan, your chances of being harmed personally by crime are quite low,” said Jeffrey A. Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The people most at risk are in the disadvantaged, economically excluded neighborhoods.”
… Mr. Butts said the case bore a resemblance to that of Luigi Mangione, charged with murder in the assassination of the health insurance executive, a crime that was caught on video and led to a manhunt that became a television sensation.
“Both cases, we have someone engaging in wanton deadly violence against people associated with the business, corporate and the economic engines of the country,” Mr. Butts said.
“It’s a very, very low frequency crime,” Mr. Butts added, but such crimes have a way of establishing a stranglehold on a city’s collective attention span. And for a city like New York, they raise a troubling question: How to stop them?
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