The New York Post editorial board’s headline made it clear yesterday: The city had failed Jordan Neely.

It’s true. At the time of his death on Monday afternoon on a New York City subway car, Neely, 30, was an inarguably sick man. Over the years, he’d been the subject of multiple Emotionally Disturbed Person reports for which his family had tried to get him treatment, obviously to little or no avail.

All of this is tragic, but none of it is the fault of the man who took Jordan Neely’s life.

In addition to being a sick man, Neely, who is black, was also a dangerous man. He’d been threatening his fellow subway passengers at the time, and he had a warrant out for his arrest for having assaulted a 67-year-old woman. But that wasn’t his only brush with the law — far from it. Neely had been arrested dozens of times.

How does one person run up dozens of arrests and still remain on the streets? Perhaps what New York needs is a “12 strikes” rule. Or maybe a “24 strikes” rule. The city is, after all, around 90% Democrat.

As the Post’s editors argue, “In truth, Jordan Neely’s death is on the hands of progressives who want to defund the NYPD yet offer no realistic or practical plan to get the dangerously mentally ill into care.”

But, again, none of this is the fault of the 24-year-old Marine veteran who happens to be white, and who came up behind Neely and wrestled him to the ground in a sustained chokehold carotid restraint*, which ultimately caused him to lose consciousness and never regain it.

Nor is any of this reason for the malignant behavior of Democrat Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who immediately began ginning up The Mob by demonizing this heroic act of good citizenship.

“Jordan Neely was murdered,” AOC vilely tweeted. “But [because] Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected [with] passive headlines + no charges. It’s disgusting.”

We hope AOC is proud of her guilt-pronouncing rabble-rousing self. The Mob was out in force last night, with demonstrators shouting at the cops and calling for the young man’s arrest. No doubt they were also trying to turn this into another George Floyd-type incident, in which a privileged white assailant lynches a poor black man. As Fox News reports, “Several protesters clashed with officers in Manhattan, resulting in arrests Wednesday on charges ranging from graffiti to assault.”

New York’s disgraceful governor, Kathy Hochul, also weighed in with some elitist idiocy, saying that the man was simply “killed for being a passenger on the subway trains,” adding, “It became very clear that he was not going to, you know, cause harm to these other people.”

We’ve got an idea, Yerhonner: If New York City subways are so, you know, safe, and passengers like Jordan Neely are so harmless, why don’t you come on down from Albany, stake out a Manhattan satellite office, and spend a month or so commuting to work via subway?

Columnist Ben Shapiro has it right:

The consequences of such idiocy are dire, for both the general public and for people like Jordan Neely. … Commentator Toure tweeted, “It is normal to see loud, disturbing mental breakdowns on the NYC subway. I’m not defending that; I’m saying it’s a regular occurrence. What’s not normal is to murder people having loud, disturbing mental breakdowns.” But short of prophecy, how can those watching such a breakdown, complete with threats against others, know who is harmless and who isn’t? Normally such questions are outsourced to law enforcement. When law enforcement is prevented from doing its job, crime rises — and citizens are forced to engage in acts of self-defense.

As Fox News reports: “Retired NYPD Lt. John Macari blamed the tragedy on ineffective political leadership and a sense of growing lawlessness in New York City. ‘The kid who had the guy in the chokehold, he’s on the ground scared for his life. He’s not trained. He doesn’t know the consequence of what’s going to happen. Where are the police?’ said Macari.”

He, too, is right. Where are the cops on the New York City subways? And what is criminal justice for if not to protect the citizenry from the likes of Jordan Neely? And who are we to judge such a fluid and dangerous situation? And who is AOC to do so? And who is New York City’s Trump-obsessed soft-on-crime district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to do so?

Experts, though, say that the good Samaritan — and he is a good Samaritan — faces a “tough legal road” and will likely be arrested and charged with second-degree manslaughter or criminal negligent homicide.

What would we do without “experts”?

Neither of those charges carries a mandatory jail sentence. But still. When are we as a society going to return the benefit of the doubt to everyday Americans when they rightly fear for their safety and take action to defend themselves?

According to witnesses, Neely hadn’t physically attacked anyone when the good Samaritan took action to neutralize him. But who’s to say he wouldn’t have? Who’s to say that Neely, who had a history of violent behavior, wasn’t going to get physical? Who’s to say he wasn’t about to pull a knife or a gun, as other mentally ill assailants have done in similar situations on New York City subway cars?

Indeed, how much abuse are innocent subway passengers — or shoppers or diners or fans or moviegoers or pedestrians — required to take before putting a stop to it?

How many times, for example, must a dumpy George Zimmerman allow a younger, bigger, stronger, and dangerously aggressive Trayvon Martin to bash his head into the pavement before he’s allowed to defend himself? The two cases are markedly different, but the principle is the same: self-defense.

The right to defend oneself is, after all, the first civil right. For without that fundamental right, all other rights lose much of their meaning.

If we allow the leftist Mob to turn this tragic incident into George Floyd 2.0, shame on us. Shame on all of us.

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Updated with a clarification on the method used to subdue Jordan Neely, which, as one of our readers pointed out, was a carotid restraint and not a “chokehold,” which is the term being used by our lazy and generally agenda-driven mainstream media. We regret the error.