This article appears in the April 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
By Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon
Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation
By Elliot Williams
Penguin Press
New York in the 1980s was a downtrodden city with visions of upward mobility. Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was still a moist, low-rent bohemia of working-class punks and poets. Some South Bronx neighborhoods were more rubble than residence, with jobs and services stripped from a generation of Black and brown youth. Crack cocaine was incoming. Violent crime rates were at their zenith. Fiscal belt-tightening was squeezing the middle class. The people, it’s said, were sick with panic. Yet somehow, all at once, Wall Street was buzzing to life. A new class of urban professionals stampeded back from the suburbs to make bank, go jogging, and buy “gourmet” groceries. How would these forces collide in the city after decades of white flight?
An answer arrived in the figure of Bernie Goetz. A few days before Christmas of 1984, the self-employed electrical engineer stepped onto a graffitied downtown 2 train and shot four Black teenagers after one asked him for $5. Each young man was badly wounded. The floor slick with blood, Goetz slinked off cartoonishly into the subway tunnel and fled to New England, where he spent nine days before turning himself in to the police. Across New York City, politicians, the public, and the tabloid media celebrated Goetz as a hometown hero who had stood up to inner-city “thugs.”
The shooting’s lasting significance to American politics is now the subject of two recent books. In Fear and Fury, Heather Ann Thompson offers a careful narrative history of the ways that Reagan-era inequality helped produce the racial resentment that surrounded the Goetz episode. Five Bullets, by CNN commentator Elliot Williams, is a snappy, slangy work of journalism centering on the legal and social elements of the trial that culminated with the exoneration of white violence. Both make a compelling argument that this half-remembered case marked a pivotal moment of racist rage that lives on in present-day vigilantism—and in the durable rightward lurch of the Trump era. But it’s also true that Goetz was a uniquely urban phenomenon. As whites returned to Gotham, they sought to reclaim its land, housing, and public transit for themselves. The shooting was, among other things, a highly publicized and violent opening salvo in a well-known process of gentrification.
FOR ALL ITS UNPLEASANTNESS, the Goetz case is packed with curious archetypes of the urban drama. Goetz himself is what you might call a “transplant.” He grew up in rural New York and went on to work for his father in Florida as a real estate developer. In 1975, in his late twenties, he moved into a one-bedroom in the Village. After being mugged, he became obsessed with civic disorder and began illegally carrying Smith & Wesson revolvers. At a tenants’ association meeting, he opined that the only way to “clean up this street” was to “get rid of” Blacks and Latinos, using the most noxious of racial slurs. When the shooting took place, the tabloids cast him as a cool-handed Charles Bronson type. But Goetz was more the angry nerd, an evil Eddie Deezen in button-downs and the goggly eyeglasses favored by serial killers. By his own admission, he was looking for trouble when he stepped onto that fateful train car. He had been thinking of shooting the teens even before they asked for money.
Goetz’s victims—Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—were people the white city feared: young Black high school dropouts from the South Bronx, an environment rocked by the successive shock waves of the fiscal crisis, Reaganomics, and the crack epidemic. All had arrest records for minor crimes of poverty, and it’s true that they were heading downtown that day to jimmy change out of arcade machines using screwdrivers. To her great credit, Thompson portrays the teens with illuminating detail and sympathy. Cabey, for example, had moved with his family from the suburbs to the projects after his father was killed in a carjacking. He was still a “baby-faced” kid who loved video games and had only recently begun dabbling in drug use. Cabey’s injuries were also the most appalling. Although he was sitting apart from his friends and posed no conceivable threat, Goetz fired at him twice. After missing once, Goetz approached and loomed above him. “You don’t look so bad,” he said. “Here’s another.” He then shot Cabey point-blank, puncturing his lung and severing his spinal cord. Cabey was instantly paralyzed and later suffered brain damage from the ordeal.
Nevertheless, the case became a cauldron of reactionary public sentiment. Every known hustler and hobgoblin crawled out of their holes in search of the spotlight. Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels civilian patrol group, grandstanded on Goetz’s behalf. Federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani refused Rev. Al Sharpton’s demand to open a civil rights investigation. The National Rifle Association adopted Goetz as a “self-defense” poster boy. At the same time, a newly energized tabloid media stirred a brew of misinformation that made the case a referendum on Black crime. The New York Post, recently slurped up by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, lionized Goetz’s “courteous and unrattled style” while playing up his victims’ “extensive criminal records.” The Daily News falsely reported that the boys had been armed with “sharpened screwdrivers,” a claim that persists to this day. “The implication was clear,” Thompson writes. “The ostensible victims in this situation were really the villains.”
Beyond the court of public opinion, Goetz faced trial on counts of attempted homicide, aggravated assault, and illegal firearm possession. The courtroom spectacle hinged, as Williams takes pains to explain, on the question of “reasonableness”: Would society expect a person, in Goetz’s position, to respond as he did? Prosecutor Gregory Waples played jurors the video of Goetz’s confession, in which he acknowledges attempting “cold-blooded murder.” He presented witnesses to the shooting, and walked jurors through Goetz’s treatment of Cabey, the linchpin of the state’s charges. But Waples’s sober intensity was somewhat outmatched by the theatrical stunts of Barry Slotnick, a notorious mob lawyer whom Goetz retained using donations from conservative interest groups. The defense re-enacted the shooting employing menacing Guardian Angels as stand-ins for the teens and dragged jurors out of the courthouse into a model subway car for demonstrations. (Apparently a supremely annoying guy, Slotnick insisted on calling this visit a “class trip.”) A psychiatrist testified that Goetz lacked “conscious control” of his actions and was on “automatic pilot” due to fear during the incident.
In the end, the prosecution could not overcome the public’s fear and fury. The jurors, some of whom had previously been victims of crime, convicted Goetz on the gun charges but nothing else; he served eight months, most of it in the protected “celebrity wing” of Rikers Island. Cabey’s mother, devastated by this leniency, summed up its social meaning: “It gives a license to people who want to shoot Black youths.”
WHAT SHOULD WE MAKE, from our present vantage, of Goetz’s turn in the public eye? The shooting revealed a growing belief, Thompson and Williams agree, that poor Black citizens posed an urgent threat against which whites were entitled to fight back. That attitude has only metastasized in the Trump era, even as crime rates continue their long decline. Firearms law has all but codified that outlook: Supreme Court decisions and state-level “stand your ground” laws have made it easier to shoot first and claim self-defense later, as Goetz did—and when white people shoot Black people under such laws, it is far more likely to be ruled justifiable than in any other racial combination. Both books observe in Goetz a grim outline for a more recent catalog of acquitted vigilantes, from George Zimmerman to Kyle Rittenhouse to Daniel Penny.
For Williams, a former prosecutor, the legal niceties are paramount, then as now. He concludes that the Goetz jury’s hands were shackled. “It is possible that Goetz’s acquittal on violent crime charges was legally defensible but not just,” Williams writes, “supported by law but not morality.” Still, he’s quick to remind the reader that the arc of the case might have been different had the races of shooter and victims been reversed. Law is a societal agreement, one subject to interpretation that is shaped by crime-hyping media and the value assigned to certain lives. In this way, Five Bullets offers insight. But it lacks a full account of the powers churning behind these realities.
Thompson mounts the more ambitious argument, and her perspective is refreshingly materialist. Fear and Fury is ebulliently researched and readable (even if a bit flat in the prose, especially when stacked against the Pulitzer-winning Blood in the Water, Thompson’s taut 2016 history of the Attica prison uprising). In her telling, the Goetz episode is a vector for the dramatic political and economic makeover wrought by Ronald Reagan and continued with scant reprieve since his rule. The New Deal order was dead. Neoliberalism was ascendant. Tax cuts for the rich came with service cuts for the poor. Politicians and the media encouraged middle-class whites like Goetz to blame Black and brown citizens for the poverty and chaos that trickled down from policy. “The success of all this, of the Reagan Revolution itself, had depended upon the deliberate stoking of white racial resentment, as well as on the slow normalization and relegitimization of white vigilante fury,” Thompson writes.
Goetz may have acted in the shadow of these grand historical shifts, but the darkest mark he left was, to my eye, far more local. The shooting signaled a new mood of urban exclusion, following decades of crisis. As early as the 1970s, New York’s power elite, staring down a dwindling tax base, began scheming to attract the affluent back to the city—even as they were systematically abandoning the poor. These boosters concocted a real estate cure: tax incentives, bond financing, more liberal zoning policies. “The housing boom that these measures helped to create,” the urban planner Tom Angotti points out, “have led since the 1980s to large increases in land values and rents, the displacement of many low-income minorities, and the creation of massive homelessness.” Aggressive policing of streets and subways was stronger medicine still. Over the next decades, the strategy meant relentless criminalization of poor residents of color, as Thompson notes in her sharp discussion of this transformation. An increasingly “cleaned-up” city was a boon to developers and white in-movers, but homes and public space became scarcer for Black and brown New Yorkers.
In my personal lexicon, no ordinary city dweller is a “gentrifier,” a label rightly reserved for politicians, urban planners, and real estate despots. But the actions of everyday citizens may manifest as symptoms of a deeper urban ill. Ordinary people in the 1980s sought public safety, as ordinary people do. The Goetz fiasco, however, was an expression of something more sinister: the city’s wish to “eliminate undesirables” rather than helping them. It reinforced a radical shift in New York’s makeup, long before the city became a wasteland of sleek towers and venture-funded salad chains that stretch from central Brooklyn to the Bronx riverfront. Viewed in this light, Goetz and his supporters formed something of a vanguard for the hyper-gentrification that has intensified in recent decades.
In 1996, a civil case against Goetz vindicated Darrell Cabey. It focused closely on the shooter’s attitudes toward race, and a mostly Black and brown jury, this time seated in the Bronx, held Goetz responsible for Cabey’s debilitating injuries, ordering him to pay the family $43 million in damages. Shortly thereafter, Goetz declared bankruptcy; he has never paid the Cabeys a cent. The other teens, by then grown, received no such grace or recognition. Two succumbed to prison and addiction and have since died; one cleaned up, married, and secluded himself north of the city. The Cabey family left the Bronx for Rockland County, in a now familiar type of displacement to the suburbs.
Goetz, for his part, still haunts the Village. His status solidified as one of the city’s oddball mascots, he ran for public office throughout the 2000s on a platform having to do with vegetarianism. In 2013, he was arrested for selling weed to an undercover cop; he faced no legal consequences. You can still catch him feeding squirrels in Union Square Park, one of his lasting passions. “NYC is nothing like it was 40 years ago,” he recently wrote to The New York Times, upon the publication of two books chronicling his most loathsome deeds. “Good shopping and you don’t have to own a car.” Goetz may be a reminder of New York’s unruly past, but now he’s just another consumer-citizen enjoying a sanitized but walkable metropolis. The American city today is, in many ways, Bernie’s world.
This article appears in Apr 2026 issue.
