Subway Shooting Suspect Frank James Arrested

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Pictures

“That’s now not the guy,” a source informed Rocco Parascandola when showed a photo of a younger man rumored to be the shooter who opened fire in a Brooklyn subway car this week, leaving at the least 30 folks injured.

The case of mistaken identity used to be only one piece of misinformation flying around newsrooms and police departments during the frantic 29-hour seek for Frank James, who was once sooner or later discovered on an East Village block and arrested with out incident. The sixty two-12 months-previous has given that been charged with finishing up a terrorist assault on a mass transit gadget.

Parascandola, my visitor on The Interview podcast this week, is the police bureau chief for the New York Daily Information. The veteran reporter has been covering town for decades, first for the New York Submit, and now for its rival. For the reason that 2009 he’s served as police bureau chief, protecting crime and felony justice from the shack inside NYPD headquarters downtown.

I used to work underneath Parascandola once I was once beginning out as a night reporter overlaying crime in the city for the Day by day News. The paper has fallen on hard occasions in contemporary years, however proved its would possibly this week with breaking news protection of the subway shooting, a mindless attack that struck town in its heart: a subway car filled with commuters traveling towards Long island through the quiet local of Sundown Park.

Whereas police nabbed James on Wednesday, Parascandola mentioned a reason for the attack nonetheless eludes them.

“Now the big query is the cause,” he stated. “What what’s behind all this? Quite a lot of movies are in the market and simply obtainable to the viewing public. He’s spoken with anger about quite a few different concerns. However it’s not in reality clear why he acted out on Tuesday morning, why he acted out in Brooklyn, why he acted out at that subway station, and why he acted out length.”

Parascandola noted that James posted in depth movies online wherein he embarked on racist rants — but nothing that has defined why he performed the shooting.

“He’s kind of all over,” Parascandola mentioned. “In most cases when the causes in such an attack are clear — once they’re articulated via police, by means of prosecutors — it’s since the particular person has spoken principally about that, and has no longer been in all places the map. This man very a lot is in every single place the map together with his anger.”

The attack brought fresh attention to crime in New York City, which has been a stylish topic of coverage for nationwide retailers like Fox Information.

“Obviously, we’re no longer anywhere close to the level we have been at on the peak of the crack era in the late 80s and early 90s,” Parascandola stated.

Town has steadily gotten safer on the grounds that then, except the occasional blip upwards. That said, Parascandola argued we’re a ways enough removed from the crime peaks of the crack era that it’s extra helpful to match present crime charges to those in 2019.

“The actual fact of the topic is, on the finish of 2019 this was once nonetheless a remarkably protected city, with numbers nonetheless hitting file lows in numerous categories.”

“2020 changed all that,” he said, citing the pandemic, a bottlenecked courtroom machine, and bail reform as possible elements contributing to the upward push in crime.

“Regardless of the lead to could also be, New York now in 2022, there is, in quite a few pockets of the town, a sense of disorder and a way that violence can occur anyplace,” he said.

I wanted to talk to Parascandola now not best in regards to the manhunt and what the attack manner for town, but additionally how reporting on crime has modified in New York, particularly at the Day-to-day Information.

“The #1 staple of crime protection, of police coverage, is at all times going to be the crime of the day,” Parascandola said.

However as crime rates dropped in the last few a long time, “it allowed reporters the time, particularly on the papers where most likely we didn’t have the instruments, to dig down deeper on one of the concerns.”

“Even ahead of the police reform movement that got here out of the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, there was once a greater emphasis by using quite a lot of newspapers, ours incorporated, on concerns corresponding to police transparency and police misconduct information, which for years had been shrouded in secrecy,” Parascandola said. “These are all concerns that we had been in a position to pay larger consideration to because we actually had extra time to do it, because instead of five or six murders a day and 10-12 shootings a day to choose from, there were instances where possibly it used to be a homicide a day, perhaps there wasn’t a homicide for a few days.”

What’s more, the web has made for a extra pressing information production time table.

“The web has changed the whole thing,” he stated. “Very hardly ever are exclusives held unless the paper tomorrow. The sensation is, get it up there because [otherwise] any person’s going beat you to it.”

One factor hasn’t changed: the contention between the Put up and the Day by day News is alive and well.

“We don’t leave a scene or a house except the Put up does, and vice versa,” he stated.

Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Learn more coverage of The Interview on Mediaite.

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