The footage is horrific. A plainly dressed young white woman walks onto a train in Charlotte, USA and sits in front of a hooded black man. The man slowly withdraws a knife and — once the footage has ended — stabs the woman to death without the slightest provocation.
Why has the footage gone viral internationally? Well, it’s morbid and sensational. I don’t much like the fact that violent deaths are such a hit online but they always will be. There’s a reason people used to visit “BestGore.com” and it wasn’t to catch up with the works of the author of Lincoln and Myra Breckenridge.
The context adds an especially tragic note. The victim, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, was a Ukrainian refugee who had fled war only to find herself falling victim to pointless violence in her adoptive homeland. It also adds an enraging note. The suspect, 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., is a prolific criminal who should have been behind bars. He had 14 prior arrests, including for armed robbery and assaulting a female family member.
Still — why are people online so furious that the mainstream media has not been reporting on the case? This even includes British people. There are 60+ murders a day in the US. Why should this murder be headline news, in America never mind across the world?
What people are implying — without, perhaps, always being brave enough to say it — is that the murder of Iryna Zarutska is part of a pattern — of a pattern of insane killers roaming the streets and of a pattern of criminality in which African-American people are far likelier than people of other backgrounds to commit homicides.
Both of these patterns are undeniable. We can debate how to explain them, or what should be done about them, but they undeniably exist. Still — I don’t much like people attempting to insinuate them into the public discourse with reference to one horrific case. When we consider societal trends, we should look at the data as a whole. Single cases prove nothing by themselves, and can make people irrationally outraged and fearful. Plus, it feels invasive to watch someone’s final moments recurring again and again on social media.
Yet when I hear self-styled progressives complain about the deluge of crime footage on “X”, I can’t help casting my mind back to Twitter in 2020. How many people were cautioning scepticism when it came to drawing radical conclusions from one appalling incident? Granted: one could make a fair argument that a police officer killing someone unjustifiably should be bigger news than a random lunatic killing someone unjustifiably. But there were minimal attempts to explain why it was such big news. The idea that there was a rampant pattern of police killings of unarmed black men was a fiction.
The fact is that self-styled progressives loved context-less footage when it encouraged conclusions that they liked. Videos of middle-aged women being aggressively emotional in public places — some of them being undeniable rotters and some of them being totally misrepresented — were proof of an epidemic of “Karens”. Writers for The Guardian and other left-wing outlets droned on at length about the scourge of hysterical hockey moms without any attempt at systematic analysis.
People who outright manufactured trends in the supposed halcyon days of Twitter should be more introspective now
Then there were the Covington schoolboys — the smiling teenagers who were dishonestly accused of harassing an old Native American man and showered with vehement abuse until context emerged to acquit them. “Social justice warriors”, as we used to call them in the bygone days of a few years ago, were desperate for a vivid example of privileged white men being rich, white and male with “punchable faces”.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. I wouldn’t want my death — or the death of a loved one — to become a meme if I was murdered — especially if some of the people talking about it had blatantly opportunistic motives.
Still, people who outright manufactured trends in the supposed halcyon days of Twitter should be more introspective now. Gawking at hideous crime footage is not the best way to come to terms with societal patterns, but the people doing it now are at least confronting actual patterns — patterns which are often neglected or obscured. If you fail to address something honestly and objectively, don’t be surprised if people address it disingenuously and excitedly.
