\n Photo: Curbed; Photos: Getty Images (John Pedin\/NY Daily News Archive, Mel Finkelstein\/NY Daily News Archive, Bettmann Archive, Dan Cronin\/NY Daily News Archive)<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The sharpened screwdrivers, memorable and imaginary, tell a lot of the story. Three days before Christmas 1984, Bernhard Goetz, a 37-year-old electrical engineer living on 14th Street, got on a downtown 2 train. A couple of years earlier, he\u2019d been mugged, and he\u2019d subsequently gotten himself an unlicensed pistol, which he carried, concealed, that day on the subway. Four teenagers were in the same car, headed to a video arcade to jimmy open the coin boxes, which is why two of them had screwdrivers zippered up in their coat pockets. They were, witnesses said, rowdy, aggressive, intrusive. One of them asked Goetz for $5, and the story (not to mention the subsequent trial) turned on whether it was a panhandling request with a little edge or an attempted robbery by threat of force. There were about twenty other passengers in the car, so the latter seems unlikely, but this was 1984, the city was in its peak violent-crime years, muggings of all kinds were rampant, and people lived behind triple deadbolts at home and in a state of high alert when they went out. A lot of New Yorkers were on edge, and Goetz was an edgy character to begin with.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t give them the $5. Instead Goetz pulled out his gun and shot them, including one of the four who (although the defense lawyers later argued otherwise) was sitting apart from the others and had not confronted him. Four guys, five shots, the last one fired after Goetz sneered, \u201cYou don\u2019t look so bad, here\u2019s another.\u201d None of the four was killed; Darrell Cabey, the 18-year-old he\u2019d shot at twice, was paralyzed and mentally incapacitated. The \u201csharpened screwdrivers\u201d entered the tabloids almost immediately and never left, cited as evidence of the young men\u2019s potential for menace. In fact, they hadn\u2019t been brandished, Goetz didn\u2019t know the men were carrying them, and they hadn\u2019t been sharpened at all. What they were guilty of, that day at least, was looking like young toughs, noisy and demanding and above all Black.<\/p>\n Two books, just out in a head-to-head release, present anew the story of the Goetz shooting. Five Bullets<\/em><\/a> is by Elliot Williams, a CNN legal analyst and a former prosecutor; Fear and Fury<\/em><\/a> is by Heather Ann Thompson, a historian whose previous book about the Attica uprising<\/a> won the Pulitzer Prize. Both lean heavily on recapping Goetz\u2019s long and winding trial, and both agree that it exposed the widening, hardening division that now dominates our politics. It was a classic fringe case, the kind of news story that uncorks endless opinionizing on talk radio and at dinner tables \u2014 was Goetz defending himself? Was he looking for a fight? Did they get what was coming to them? Did he shoot mostly because they were Black? Who was the real victim here? <\/em>\u2014 and support for Goetz varied among socioeconomic and ethnic groups but was middling with most. A poll a couple of months after the shooting found that 57 percent of New Yorkers thought he was acting in the right, and when a Post<\/em> reporter interviewed him in his local coffee shop, people paused for autographs. Support for him didn\u2019t break entirely in the expected political ways: The Village Voice,<\/em> startlingly, ran a story by Pete Hamill in support of Goetz<\/a>. (\u201cThere were really five victims.\u201d) By contrast, Jimmy Breslin of the Daily News,<\/em> a paper that was otherwise starting to tilt rightward, wrote, \u201cThe bottom line\u2026 is that people are rejoicing over a 19-year-old kid who will be in a wheelchair for a lifetime. I\u2019m sorry, include me out.\u201d<\/p>\n Public opinion shifted somewhat \u2014 but only somewhat \u2014 as Goetz\u2019s racial attitudes came out. He was white and affluent, and it soon came out that he had freely used the n-word in the past. He also said in a taped confession that he had shot the first of the young men not out of fear but in retribution, after he saw \u201cthe smile on his face\u201d and \u201cthe shine in his eyes.\u201d He was clear: \u201cI wanted to kill those guys. I wanted to maim those guys \u2026 If I had more bullets I would have shot them all again and again.\u201d Newsday\u2019<\/em>s Les Payne, among many others, observed that if the shooter had been a Black man and his teenage victims white, the public response would almost surely have been different.<\/p>\n The trial was a madly raucous media event, requiring many weeks and a sequestered jury. It seems hard to fathom today, but Goetz was convicted only for carrying an unlicensed handgun and sentenced to eight months, with acquittals for attempted murder and the rest of the charges. Most of the key moments in the trial had swung toward the defense. One of the shooting victims, James Ramseur, had been subsequently arrested for a violent crime, and when the prosecutors put him on the stand\u2014a risky move\u2014he handled the questioning badly, shutting down and turning hostile, leaving the impression that he was a rough and unmanageable character. A live-action re-enactment aboard an actual subway car, some of which may have ben of questionable accuracy, presented the image of a man surrounded in close quarters by thugs, unable to escape as he was hounded. (The defense had recruited four of Curtis Sliwa\u2019s Guardian Angels, all Black, all buff and tough-looking, for the staging.) Twist, zip, wriggle, and Goetz\u2019s lawyers found just enough legal slack in the word \u201creasonable\u201d\u2014as in, was it reasonable<\/em> for him to respond out of fear\u2014to compel the jury to acquit.<\/p>\n \n Darrell Cabey leaving Bronx County Courthouse with his attorneys Later on, Cabey\u2014who is reportedly still alive, though not well\u2014won a civil judgment of $43 million from Goetz, who declared bankruptcy and never gave him a cent.\u00a0The other three young men went back, to various degrees, into the woes that often drag down underclass existence: drug use, small-time crime, stints in jail. Two have since died, Ramseur by probable suicide. The third, Troy Canty, is said to be living on the straight and narrow, and keeps out of the press. Goetz, now 78, is defiant and mouthy as ever (just recently, he told off a New York Times<\/em> reporter who called him<\/a> for a comment). Forty-one years ago, he was on the front page of the Daily News<\/em> saying \u201cI\u2019m sorry, but it had to be done\u201d; the other day, he told that Times<\/em> reporter,\u00a0\u201cThe important thing is I shot the right guys.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams\u2019s book, unsurprisingly given his training, goes in hard on the lawyers\u2019 respective gambits, and he\u2019s good at giving the reader mini law-school lessons, clarifying for example the significant difference between motive and intent. He\u2019s also Black and from Brooklyn and works in TV, which likely accounts for his well-tuned antennae for the overheated madness that was the 1980s New York City news environment. In those years, a miserable and extensive roster of racially inflected deaths, from the Central Park jogger and the Exonerated Five to so many more, dominated local news programs <\/em>and the tabloids, especially Rupert Murdoch\u2019s Post<\/em>. Five Bullets<\/em> is a brisk journalistic trip through that history, and Williams doesn\u2019t shy away from calling Goetz a bigot \u2014 which he was, and judging by a phone conversation he had with the author, still is \u2014 while being comparatively restrained when it comes to opinionizing. Only here and there do you catch that he still finds the acquittal hard to justify, as most readers probably will.<\/p>\n Thompson\u2019s book aims to be bigger, more sweeping and contextual, and although it takes a while for her literary frame to widen out, she eventually succeeds. Her play-by-play of the trial goes long and drags at times, although I\u2019ll admit that I read Williams\u2019s book first and therefore was already sated with the details when they came up again. Once Thompson gets out past the verdict, though, her analytical engine starts to rev, and she picks up power and speed. Goetz\u2019s move was an early marker of so much: Reagan and the Bushes and their bootstraps-and-faith view of addressing poverty, Rudy Giuliani\u2019s get-tough mayoralty and the mass incarceration that it helped enable, Bill Clinton\u2019s welfare reform<\/a>, Washington\u2019s increasing disdain for public housing<\/a> and the people living in it, the mad pushback against even a minimally left-of-center Black president, the rise of the Tea Party and the president it begat. Two of the incident\u2019s characters, Curtis Sliwa and Goetz himself, eventually ran for mayor of New York City, the former seriously (twice) and the latter as a stunt. Surprisingly enough, that era\u2019s most ubiquitous real-estate guy<\/a> does not seem to have said much on the Goetz matter, but it\u2019s an easy guess which side he came down on. The subtitle of Thompson\u2019s book is \u201cThe Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.\u201d If the baldly stated white supremacism that now fills up my X feed is any guide, that reborn entity drank lots of raw milk and grew up with strong bones and teeth.<\/p>\n So did the National Rifle Association, which, both books note, saw an opportunity in the Goetz case and jumped on it. The onetime sportsmen\u2019s association was already moving into its political era of advocating for Second Amendment absolutism, but it tended to stand clear of cities like New York, where anti-gun Democrats ran the show. With the Goetz story the NRA saw a way in for the first time, holding a press conference in New York City to express support for Goetz. A couple of decades\u2019 worth of pressure later, the Supreme Court\u2019s Heller<\/em> decision affirmed a much broader right to gun ownership than the previous generation\u2019s NRA would have dared thought achievable.<\/p>\n But back to that word reasonable<\/em>. (Williams titles one of his chapters \u201cReasonably Reasonable Reasonableness,\u201d which makes the point nicely.)\u00a0An act like Goetz\u2019s would probably be harder to acquit today. New Yorkers, despite what Tucker Carlson and his ilk would tell you, have much less to fear on the streets and the trains. In 1984, there were about 1,450 murders a year in New York; last year, with 1.3 million more people living here, the total was 305. We also, appropriately, judge users of the n-word more harshly than we used to. (That sentence is itself evidence thereof: In 1984, most news outlets would have quoted Goetz using the word itself.)<\/p>\n These two books intend, as you might expect, to connect the Goetz case to our time, and just this past week the echoes have been deafening. We are absolutely swimming in defenses of violent retribution in the name of civil order and righteousness, not just in cities that are widely perceived as lawless but everywhere. Stand-your-ground laws, the castle doctrine, the very name of the Department of Homeland Security: All are about not just safety but feeling <\/em>safe, often by detaining or excluding or demonizing entire groups believed to be dangerous \u2014 immigrants, Black teens in a mostly white suburb, gangs that are purportedly flooding over the border. Whether a person actually was in danger is only modestly relevant; if he believed<\/em> he was, that\u2019s enough reason to kill. (Of course it also matters who, in terms of identity and race and wealth, that endangered person is.) Similar rules applied with Jordan Neely<\/a>, choked to death on a subway train in 2023 by Daniel Penny, a former Marine who said he was afraid of Neely\u2019s erratic and threatening behavior. Penny, too, was acquitted by a jury who decided his actions were reasonable. Just this month, after Ren\u00e9e Good and Alex Pretti were shot dead by federal agents, what was the administration\u2019s stance? They should have behaved; one was armed, even if he didn\u2019t brandish his gun; the shooters feared for their lives.<\/em> And another talk-radio-caller argument, after Good\u2019s killing: Was the driver looking to run the agent over with her car? If so\u2014<\/em>and here we go again\u2014I\u2019m sorry, but it had to be done.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Darrell](\"https:\/\/pyxis.nymag.com\/v1\/imgs\/85e\/94a\/9e756c3814910332c849ce175ee9d1cc74-GettyImages-97309628.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: John Pedin\/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n