Two Wrongs

ON DECEMBER 22. 1984, an electronics expect named Bernhard Goetz became a hero by pulling out a gun and shooting four teenagers who, he told the conductor of the IRI subway train on which he was riding, tried to rip him off. Then he went to New Hampshire.

The approval of the average frustrated New York City subway rider was palpable. The tabloids gleefully compared the "subway sigilante" to the Charles Bronson character in the movie "Death Wish," and set about gauging the level of public support, which was extremely high Police hotlines set up to collect eyewitness information proved virtually worthless; they were clogged with congratulations and others to pay for the legal defense of the gunman, whose advocates included civil rights leader Roy Innis.

If the violence had confirmed every suspicion non New Yorkers held about New York as Sin City, the public reaction thoroughly dispelled the accompanying image of New York as Liberal Haven. New York Gov. Mario M. Cyomo and New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch left compelled to warn the citizenry that the state and city administrations by no means condoned taking the law into one's own hands. The citizenry appeared to take exception to this, giving Goetz a warm welcome and offers of financial assistance when he was extradited from New Hampshire, where he had surrendered to police several days after the incident.

Last Friday, a 23-member grand jury indicted Goetz on four charges--all related to weapons possession. The New York Post went wild: "BERNIE COEIZ." He certainly did the indictment included nothing about attempted, nothing about attempted murder, despite the fact that one of Goetz's victims remains in a coma and is paralyzed from the waist down.

CALLING WHAT GOETZ did illegal possession of a handgun sends a message exactly counter to Cuomo's and Koch's warnings immediately after the crime. He committed an act that could have led to the death of his aggressors, and was not indicted for it--an action that gives some credence to the charges of public racism levied almost immediately after the shooting.

The most vocal critic has been New York Daily New columnist Jimmy Breslin, who charges that had the teenagers been white and Goetz Black, rather than the other way around, the public would have taken a completely different view of the situation. But Goetz's predilections aside, the likelihood of two dozen randomly chosen Manhattan residents all being racists is slim at best--more likely, those 23 grand jurors are subway riders.

The New York-phobic contingent that has been vindicated by the actions of the past five weeks is correct in thinking that Goetz's actions proved what they had suspected all along--anything terrible can happen on the subway, and probably will.

Bernhard Goetz, who was mugged on the train in 1981, was a regular subway rider even after that assault. Surely he, like all other regular subway riders, has seen just about every imaginable thing, and some that have led to the phrase "only in New York" becoming a cliche, like the man who rode the IND with a Burmese python wrapped around his neek. One of those things is kids with sharpened screwdrivers in their jackets asking you for money to play video games. But in Bernhard Goetz, something finally snapped, and he told four Black teenagers that he had five dollars for each of them, and pulled out his gun and shot them.

THE CLICHES have come thick and fast, but there are two that crop up inexorably when the subject comes up. There is the idea of the definition of democracy being the right to swing one's arm only so far as the tip of someone else's nose, but bit is difficult to apply. The four teenagers had no right to be riding the rails looking for unsuspecting owners of five dollars, but were no more or less entitled to do that than Goetz was to shoot them.

All five of them are victims not just of one another but of the climate of violence that prevails below the streets of New York Goetz's victims, in addition, are the products of a system that has left them knowing few other was to make a living than jimmying open video games and mugging other people on the subway.

The other truism that has been applied in this ethical equation two wrongs don't make is an indictment, for attempted murder and a trial of Bernhard Goetz that is a fair as possible in a city where-violence is accepted even applauded, and possession of a handgun is illegal but shooting four other people, apparently is not.