The New York Shooting That Defined an Era

“Death Wish” was the dark New York story of its era—an anti-“Annie Hall” for the armed and aggrieved. An architect sees his wife killed and his daughter raped by muggers and responds by embarking on a vigilante shooting spree. It’s a strangely existential movie, one that conjures the city and misrepresents it at the same time: its subway is pristine compared with the real thing, with no graffiti inside or out, and the killings are, implicitly, both celebrated and condemned. Although the film became a template for white revenge fantasies, its street thugs are assembled with almost comic care to avoid racial bias. On the subway, Bronson shoots white men; two Black men whom he kills appear in a station corridor. (Brian Garfield, the author of the novel on which the film was based, was appalled by the way it was received; his book was meant to show how easily people become brutalized, not to celebrate the brutalization.)

That “Death Wish” had already supplied a script for a shooting a decade later suggests that Goetz’s act was hardly a product of the newly Reaganite Zeitgeist. Long before the eighties, this idea—that an ordinary New Yorker, pushed past endurance by street crime, might turn vigilante—lay within the bounds of the civic imagination. Subway vigilantism existed as a vivid possibility long before there was ever a subway vigilante. The fantasy reflected a wider, populist response to the genuine urban upheavals of the sixties and seventies—the steep rise in violent crime that reshaped American cities and, with them, American politics, often pitting the old ethnic Catholic neighborhoods, Irish and Italian above all, against newly arrived Black communities.

The panic about street and subway crime had already changed big-city politics: Philadelphia elected the far-right police commissioner Frank Rizzo as mayor in 1971, presaging Al D’Amato’s own belligerent anti-crime campaigns to secure and retain his seat in the Senate. The TV character Archie Bunker—a compendium of cranky New York working-class attitudes that would one day be identified as Trumpian—was a seventies icon. It would be difficult to argue that, had Jimmy Carter been reëlected and the Reagan era not arrived, the Goetz shooting would not have happened, or would have happened in some fundamentally different key. Presidential epochs tilt an era; they do not determine it. The deeper currents of urban life had been running for decades. That December, the subway was moving along channels that had been bored much earlier.

As the Goetz case unfolded, it took on a Sidney Lumet, “Dog Day Afternoon” style of dark-comic energy. Goetz had been readily identified shortly after the shooting, and the detectives on the case, in a moment of guileless procedure, simply left notes on his apartment door and his mailbox asking him to call, which, as one officer later acknowledged, “wasn’t a great piece of detective work.” Goetz, by then in New England, kept phoning a startled neighbor on Fourteenth Street for help: a woman he had encountered mostly in passing in the lobby, and who had been Janis Joplin’s publicist until the singer’s death. Hoping to keep Goetz from panicking when he returned, she removed the detectives’ notes—an illegal act, if a well-meant one.

Goetz, on his homecoming, was treated by many as a hero. His support was not as neatly racially coded as later memory sometimes assumes. In surveys, almost half of Hispanic New Yorkers backed him, as the popularity of the Latino-dominated Guardian Angels might have predicted, but so did forty-five per cent of African Americans. Professional opinion was divided. Seasoned old-fashioned ethnic liberals like Sydney Schanberg, in the Times—who had seen more than enough real danger in the killing fields of Cambodia—and Jimmy Breslin, in the Daily News, asked the right questions, condemning the shooting as a slide toward anarchy, and, not incidentally, toward open season on Black youths. But William F. Buckley, Jr., now fondly recalled as a kind of benign Tory, likened the event, bizarrely, to the American massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, arguing that the subway shooting, too, had taken place in a kind of fog of war, and was therefore inevitable and excusable. Howard Stern, then a rising shock jock on terrestrial radio, went all in, calling for Goetz to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. On the other side, the Reverend Al Sharpton, a corpulent, demagogic presence, took up the victims’ cause, and was seen by some as a radical, and by almost everyone as an opportunist.