Compassion and permissiveness are not the same

"The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska" describes what happened, but also why it shouldn't have happened:

Until the...security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today. ....

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist. ....

In shying away from what is politically inconvenient, ugly, or otherwise uncomfortable, we not only cede the conversation to racist idiots, but relinquish with it all hopes of a better future. The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep.

Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed. ....

...[T]he tragedy is not just how badly this country failed to protect Iryna Zarutska from someone like Decarlos Brown Jr.—or to save Decarlos Brown Jr. from becoming the monster who killed her. It’s that we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same. In doing so, we have lost sight of the fact that a country founded on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is also founded on the promise that when you come here, you will be not just free but safe. The tragedy is that a woman who fled the terror and disorder of war for a better life in a peaceful America instead ended up, unknown to her, in an America where we have tacitly abandoned certain public spaces to the most disordered and depraved among us because enforcing the law feels mean and makes us uncomfortable. .... (more, perhaps behind a paywall)

Kat Rosenfield, "The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska," The Free Press, Sept. 8, 2025.