Good morning:
On the evening of August 22nd, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska finished her shift at a North Carolina pizza place and headed home. She sat down inside a Charlotte light-rail train car only to be randomly, shockingly, and repeatedly stabbed by the man sitting in the row behind her. After her initial shock, she crumbled to the floor and bled to death. News of Decarlos Brown Jr.’s alleged slaughtering of the young woman was suppressed by local officials for days. Because the murder was captured on video, social media users forced the incident into the national news.
At 34 years old, Brown had been arrested at least 14 times for crimes ranging from assault and firearms possession to felony robbery and larceny. Brown was free on cashless bail at the time of Zarutska's murder. He faces a local charge of first-degree murder and a federal charge of committing an act causing a death on a mass transportation system.
Our public transit systems are not safe, senior fellow Nicole Gelinas writes in City Journal. The surge in national transit crime, especially in unprovoked violence, that began in 2020 has not abated. In an interview on the Clay and Buck podcast, fellow Heather Mac Donald warned that when we allow drug addicted, mentally ill criminals to remain on the street, government officials are betraying the law-abiding in favor of the anti-social and dysfunctional.
On X, public safety expert and MI fellow Rafael A. Mangual summarized public policy responses to deal with repeat offenders like Brown, including sentencing enhancements and expansion of the state’s capacity to house the seriously mentally ill in long-term inpatient facilities.
Even as our scholars were still responding to the Charlotte light-rail murder, news broke Wednesday afternoon that political commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while hosting a campus event at Utah Valley University. In recent months, Kirk had warned of what he called the spread of “assassination culture.” Kirk, who was a tremendously influential figure on the right among young people, passed away Wednesday at the age of 31.
Elsewhere in this newsletter, MI scholars respond to the dismal new findings about student performance released this week by the Nation’s Report Card. Average student scores declined from 2019 to 2014 for American eighth-graders in science and twelfth-graders in mathematics and reading.
In the Wall Street Journal, senior fellow Roland Fryer draws on his experience studying and testing racial achievement gaps among students and calls on educators and lawmakers to adopt proven pedagogical reforms. And adjunct fellow Wai Wah Chin condemns the NYC Department of Education’s mission statement as obsessed with DEI ideology at the expense of reading, writing, and arithmetic, in the New York Post.
Finally, senior fellow Stephen Eide published a report this week on the state of psychiatric care in New York State and City. He finds that the picture is more promising than it was in the late 2010s. Although Gov. Kathy Hochul acted to stabilize New York’s psychiatric hospital bed supply, challenges lie ahead due to the changing politics of mental health and state financial limitations. Continue reading for all these insights and more. Kelsey Bloom Editorial Director |
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Systems Under Strain: Deinstitutionalization in New York State and City (2025 Update) By Stephen Eide | Manhattan Institute
A new Manhattan Institute report by senior fellow Stephen Eide examines the impact of New York's decade-long mental health "Transformation Plan," revealing how the shift from state hospitals to community care has strained city services.
Under Gov. Cuomo, New York eliminated over 700 state psychiatric hospital beds. Gov. Hochul has since reversed course, adding back 300 beds and marking the first net gain in decades—effectively ending deinstitutionalization in the state.
The consequences of deinstitutionalization have been costly for New York City. Mental health shelters doubled from 21 to 42 facilities between 2014–2025, and cost $300 million annually. Shelters house more seriously mentally ill individuals than jails and psychiatric hospitals combined—over 7,000 people compared to 1,600 in jails and 4,100 in hospital beds.
Eide recommends continuing bed capacity expansion, focusing on outcomes rather than service volume, and ensuring state government takes greater responsibility for serious mental illness rather than shifting costs to the city. |
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NYC Public Schools Are Focused on Ideology — and Failing Kids By Wai Wah Chin | New York Post
“It’s back-to-school time in New York City, but the Department of Education isn’t ready. ... Let’s instead examine what the DOE thinks it should be doing: its Vision and Mission statement. ...
“In the nearly 300 words of Vision and Mission, not once do the words or variants of the words ‘arithmetic,’ ‘reading,’ ‘writing,’ ‘math’ or ‘science’ appear, except when the word ‘read’ appears in ‘Read the chancellor’s letter.’ Instead, ideology dominates, saturating Vision and Mission and its linked subsidiary pages with well-known code words for critical-race theory. ... If that’s what the DOE wants its schools to do — recruit little kids into CRT’s bitter, paranoid battleground to enact oppressor-oppressed conflicts everywhere and beat the kids into learned helplessness — then no wonder it gets failing report cards for academics.”
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The Economics of Education Reform
By Roland G. Fryer, Jr. | The Wall Street Journal
“This fall, millions of children are walking into schools that still bear the scars of Covid—and of our abandonment of real reform. Average math scores are lower than they were two decades ago. Reading scores have flat-lined. Black and Hispanic students lost the most ground. The nation is facing the largest educational crisis in a generation.
“And that isn’t even the real tragedy. The tragedy is that we already know what works. High-dosage tutoring, extended learning time, relentless use of data and feedback, and refusing to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations—these aren’t theories. They’re proven. They worked in Houston. They worked in Denver. They can work anywhere, if we have leaders with the courage to act. Kids don’t get a do-over on their school years. If we squander another decade, the damage will be permanent.”
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Here’s What Would Happen If We Seized All the Wealth from America’s 800 Billionaires
By Jessica Riedl | Reason
“Neither political party is suicidal enough to tell middle-class voters that their taxes and benefits must also contribute heavily to reining in runaway deficits. So we comfort ourselves with the wishful thinking that millionaires and billionaires can take the entire burden off our hands. But beyond the empty rhetoric, you will never see a specific, fully scored proposal to eliminate most of the long-term deficit by taxing the rich—because mathematically, it's just not possible.”
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A Fatal Ride: Violence on Public Transit
By City Journal
“Charles Fain Lehman: Subway cars, light rail cars, public travel of all kinds is sort of a, it’s a tightly confined public space. And so if something goes wrong, then you have no way to exit. You are trapped there for the duration of the car ride where somebody is being aggressive, somebody is being violent, somebody is being unhinged. That’s extraordinarily salient and people will make a lot of decisions to try to avoid that.” |
Four Seconds on a Charlotte Train By Nicole Gelinas | City Journal
“The video of Decarlos Brown, Jr., slaughtering 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train on the night of August 22nd is sickening in many ways, but one aspect of the horror was how mundanely it unfolded. ... Zarutska had no chance of fighting back, and that would have been true if she were a man as well. What you also learn from watching this video is that you cannot depend on supposed safety in numbers to help you in an attack. The attack may happen too quickly for anyone to stop it, and the people around you may themselves be too confused, scared, or unsure of what to do to act instantly, even if doing so can save you. ...
“The real answer to the question of whether transit violence is ‘low’ is to see the video of a mute Iryna Zarutska watching herself start to bleed out. It is obviously not low enough. If we can prevent this horror—and we know that we can because we used to—shouldn’t we? If, as much media coverage seems to suggest, only Republicans care about transit violence, then some Democrats who watch the video will become Republicans. |
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“The government now owns a substantial equity stake in one company, (Intel), in a competitive market, and will attempt to anoint it as a winner. Government contracts will inevitably be diverted to Intel over its peers, and its compettitors will face new legal and regulatory threats that Intel suddenly finds itself immune from.” |
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Photo Credits: adamkaz/E+/Getty Images; Noah Berger/AP Photo; Anadolu/Getty Images; Wong Yu Liang/Getty Images; Catherine McQueen/Getty Images; Probal Rashid/LightRocket/Getty Images |
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