Bank of America Executive Killed in Times Square Stabbing
Erin Piacenti was one of two people stabbed by an attacker who was fatally shot by police in one of the most heavily policed locations in the United States.
A Bank of America executive, Erin Piacenti, was killed in New York after a woman stabbed two people in Times Square. The attacker was fatally shot by police at the scene.
The location is part of the story
Times Square is among the most intensively policed public spaces in the United States, with a permanent uniformed presence, extensive camera coverage and enormous daily footfall. An attack there registers differently from one elsewhere — not because the loss is greater, but because the location is the one most often held up as evidence that visible policing prevents this kind of violence.
The police response was immediate, which is what the deployment is designed to produce. It did not prevent a death.
The pattern such attacks fit
Sudden assaults by a lone attacker on strangers in public space are statistically rare and disproportionately consequential. They resist the standard levers of crime policy:
- They are not deterred by policing presence, which assumes an actor weighing consequences.
- They frequently involve untreated serious mental illness, placing them at the intersection of criminal justice and a health system.
- They generate public fear out of proportion to their frequency, because the victims are chosen at random.
The debate that follows
New York has argued for years over the same question in the wake of such incidents: whether the answer lies in more policing, in involuntary commitment powers, or in the outpatient mental health capacity that would identify and treat people before a crisis reaches a public street.
The city has cycled through emphasis on each. The incidents have continued at their low but persistent rate, which suggests none of the approaches has yet addressed the mechanism.
What is not yet known
Investigators have not released a full account of the attacker's history or any established motive. Those details matter for the policy argument that will follow — and they matter rather less to the family of a woman who was walking through Times Square.