NYPD cops stand around and check their cellphones at the Union Square subway station on May 6, 2020. | Source: Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty
To recap, an apparently deranged gunman who detonated smoke bombs before indiscriminately opening fire on a subway train at the height of rush hour at a busy station was able to escape while wearing bright orange clothing and eluded capture for more than a day until a tipster alerted the cops.
Yet the NYPD was readily taking credit for capturing Frank James, the alleged Brooklyn subway shooter who injured nearly two dozen people when he pulled out a gun on the N train on Tuesday morning and shot 10 people before fleeing and remaining at large until Wednesday afternoon.
That’s why a growing number of memes mocking and ridiculing the NYPD in subways have been hitting social media in the day since James launched his attack at a train station in Brooklyn that was seemingly absent of any police presence during the attack. Nor was there any police officer reported to be on the train in question despite new Mayor Eric Adams assigning a “record” number of transit cops to patrol trains and stations as citywide crime surged.
One single sentence written by the New York Times about police responding to Tuesday’s shooting sums up the NYPD’s role in apprehending James: “A uniformed officer approached, said his radio was not working and asked passengers to call 911.”
That further explains why it shouldn’t really be a surprise that it wasn’t actually the NYPD that caught James, for all intents and purposes; it was Zack Tahhan, a man who works in a bodega — a convenience store of sorts, for the uninitiated — and recognized the 62-year-old prime suspect before taking the initiative to contact law enforcement, which had been scrambling ever since it became clear they were absolutely clueless where James was.
As it turned out, James was actually only about seven miles away in the East Village of Manhattan as the NYPD played catch-up and retroactively beefed up its supposedly already beefed up patrol of New York City’s subway stations, albeit one day too late. It was only then that the NYPD was able to apprehend James, who didn’t put up any fight while he was being taken into custody.
How James got from Brooklyn to Manhattan was not immediately clear. But judging from what happened this week, it’s not far-fetched to believe he simply got on another subway train and went into the city.
All while going completely undetected by the NYPD…
The entire episode further builds the case for defunding the police, seeing as how the NYPD has a budget this year of more than $5 billion and was unable to use any of it to either thwart James’ attack or find him during a massive manhunt.
Considering how there are so many reports of NYPD transit cops being hypervigilant when it comes to selling food in the subway or fare evasion, critics of the police took to social media to share memes mocking New York’s Finest and questioning the need for them.
Keep reading to find a sample of how social media is reacting with ridicule to the NYPD’s role in “capturing” Frank James.
Memes Mock NYPD Subway Cops After Brooklyn Shooting was originally published on newsone.com
