Vigilante Injustice

Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson. Pantheon, 560 pages. 2026.

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, 384 pages. 2026.

On December 22, 1984, sometime after 1:00 p.m., Bernie Goetz, a thirty-seven-year-old white man, shot four black teenagers from the South Bronx on the IRT downtown express 2 train. Troy Canty, Darrell Cabey, James Ramseur, and Barry Allen were on their way to a video arcade when Canty asked Goetz for five dollars. Goetz unzipped his jacket, as if to get the cash. Instead, he pulled out a gun and started shooting.

He shot Canty first, in his chest. Next, he shot Allen, who was trying to flee, and hit him in the back. Then he shot Ramseur in the arm, but the bullet also struck the side of his chest. Finally, Goetz approached Cabey. Goetz’s bullet had just missed him. He walked up to Cabey and remarked, “You don’t look so bad, here’s another,” and shot him at close range.

Miraculously, none of them died. But all were severely wounded and faced hellish weeks in the hospital as they fought collapsed lungs and life-threatening infections. Cabey’s case was the most serious: Goetz’s bullet had severed his spinal cord, resulting in permanent paralysis. The bullet had also seriously damaged his lung tissue, and eventually he contracted a life-threatening case of pneumonia. On January 8, Cabey stopped breathing and entered a coma. He awoke after two months with, according to doctors, the “mental capacity of an eight-year-old.”

After the shooting, Goetz escaped through the subway tunnels and then back to his apartment. He made his way to New Hampshire, moving from hotel to hotel, paying in cash and using a fake name in the hopes of evading law enforcement. On the news, he watched as the manhunt gained enormous traction, egged on by an increasingly powerful tabloid media landscape invested in capitalizing on the sensational event’s ability to transmute viewers and readers into profit.

From New Hampshire, Goetz watched as the mystery gunman received, instead of mass denunciation, public adulation. The eighties were, after all, awash in viciously racialized narratives about rising crime in the city that portrayed poor black people as a threat to the social order. Much of the city—and the nation—were primed to interpret Goetz’s actions as heroic rather than homicidal. And Goetz himself was fully invested in this ideology, stating once in a 1980 meeting of his Greenwich Village building’s neighborhood group that “the problem with 14th Street is the sp— and n— and until we deal with that problem we can’t deal with any others.”

Eventually, Goetz turned himself in. A jury went on to acquit Goetz of the most serious violent charges and convicted him of only the most minor offense—gun possession—despite the fact that Goetz testified that he had intended to kill the boys. Throughout the eighties, Goetz’s attempted murders and his acquittal attracted public fascination, going, as we might say today, viral, thanks largely to breathless tabloid coverage. The New York Post, which had become flagrantly right-wing after Rupert Murdoch purchased the paper in 1976, and the similarly reactionary Daily News obsessively covered the case, sympathizing with Goetz while gleefully portraying his child victims Cabey, Canty, Ramseur, and Allen as violent monsters.

Two recently published books from Penguin, Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury and Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets revisit the Goetz shootings and the trial. Thompson is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water, a history of the Attica prison uprising, and Williams is a legal analyst at CNN who worked extensively in law enforcement and legislative affairs for Democratic Party politicians and administrations (he served as a political appointee in the Obama administration for eight years).

Despite their topical overlap, the two books take vastly different interpretive approaches. Williams suffers from an amateurish incuriosity that denudes the story of its politics and reproduces the racialized frame that characterized the outcome of the case at the time. Thompson, meanwhile, takes a more scholarly and principled approach by using the Goetz case to make probing insights into the nature of racial capitalism in eighties-era New York City and the post-Civil Rights American state. Even Thompson’s book, though, suffers from a misguided (and indecorously sales-oriented) desire to contort the Goetz history into a parable about Trump and the right, irresponsibly obscuring the role of liberalism and policymaking in fueling the event’s noxious racial politics.

Williams’s account refuses a serious analysis of the racism that motivated Goetz’s crime and his acquittal, instead approaching Goetz’s anti-black vigilante terror and the U.S. legal system’s ratification of such violence as a flattening—and obfuscatory—commentary on “human nature.” In so doing, his analysis tends to justify the system that allowed Goetz to evade consequences, ultimately concluding that the case offers “an example of the system working,” even if he grants that “the fact that a legal outcome is supportable and sound isn’t everything.”

Take, for example, when he essentially defends the presiding judge’s decision to forbid race from being directly “addressed” during the trial. This jarring move, which had the effect of exculpating Goetz was, according to Williams, an act of “caution” that was “not misplaced.” “No matter how much the city’s racial tension was a staple on the nightly news, the case was, at least on paper, about whether one man’s fear was legitimate enough for him to open fire on people he felt were about to harm him,” Williams writes. Williams’s refusal to question the political foundations of a system that encourages the excision of race in a case where racism clearly permeated both the shootings and the trial itself reproduces the white supremacist fable of race-neutrality that led to Goetz’s shocking acquittal. Indeed, this impulse to neutralize systemic racial bias is the same tortured logic that led jurors to insist that their decision to acquit Goetz—a man who confessed on tape his intention to kill the boys—was unrelated to race.

Williams’s salvific posture comes up again when he describes Reverend Al Sharpton’s attempts to get Rudy Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to bring a federal civil rights lawsuit against Goetz. Even as Williams criticizes Giuliani’s report for outright lying in its contention that “Goetz had never shown any bias against black people,” Williams still views Giuliani’s refusal to bring forward a civil rights lawsuit “legally sound,” finding Giuliani’s interpretation that Goetz “acted out of fear, not racial animus” legitimate. Williams’s issue is less with Giuliani’s claim that “federal civil rights laws didn’t provide a basis for opening an investigation” and more with the ways Giuliani used the power of his office to engage in undue “advocacy for Goetz” by patently denying his history of racism. The book, in other words, singles out Giuliani and his office’s discretionary excesses, not the narrow legal architecture of U.S. civil rights law that, in fact, enabled Goetz’s shootings to be deemed as technically unmotivated by race. Throughout Five Bullets, Williams twists himself into knots trying to protect the sanctity of the U.S. criminal legal system, and ultimately, the most criticism he can muster about Giuliani’s shameful report is that it gave “Goetz’s behavior a free pass where it did not have to.”

To be sure, Williams does dutifully reference Goetz’s virulent racism and admits that his defense team frequently relied on “dog whistles about the four victims’ race” to build their case. His decision to interview Goetz, now seventy-eight, also offers a relatively unvarnished sense of Goetz’s bigoted views. Williams notes that “without hesitation, [Goetz] made sweeping claims about the direct nexus between black people and crime.” Yet, in the following paragraph, he makes sure to mention that Goetz’s defenders (“friends, lawyers, jurors who have spoken out publicly”) claimed he did “not harbor racial biases” and even conceded that “he was making points that were harmless enough,” by which he means Goetz’s unsubtly racist claim that “Central Park at night” had “a significant number of . . . unemployed blacks and stuff, basically people looking for trouble.” Even here, Williams speaks cautiously and euphemistically about Goetz’s reactionary diatribes, as if to curb the logical conclusion that Goetz is a white supremacist menace.

Five Bullets is so pusillanimous in its determinations, so mealymouthed in its account of Goetz’s monstrous crimes, that it is, in the most generous interpretation, a boilerplate rehashing of a true crime melodrama, barely a notch above Court TV. Reduced to a decontextualized sketch of individual psychologies and surface-level courtroom spectacle, Five Bullets mirrors the journalists and jurors’ own nauseating dismissal of Goetz’s racist intent, reviving rather than correcting the record’s injustice.

Fear and Fury, by contrast, offers a far more strident and rigorously researched inquiry into the Goetz shootings, one that rips the story from the criminalizing grasp of racist tabloids and rightfully recasts it as an attempted modern-day lynching. Thompson’s more critical approach underscores the enormity of the injustice done to Canty, Ramseur, Cabey, and Allen, and centers their perspectives, which were so devalued and exploited at the time. In a striking contrast to Williams’s reliance on present-day Goetz’s unhinged commentary in his narrative, Thompson opens and closes her book with Darrell Cabey and his mother, Shirley.

Thompson’s retributive narrative refuses the tabloid fodder which, at the time, made much of Canty, Ramseur, and Allen’s previous misdemeanor charges, as well as the fact that on the day of the attacks, they were carrying screwdrivers, which media rags grotesquely fashioned into “evidence” of the four boys’ assaultive intent. Instead, she contextualizes their actions within broader discussions of racist policies, such as cuts to the public sector jobs and jobs training programs for low-income teens, the advent of crack cocaine and Reagan’s punitive war on drugs, and increased police presence in the South Bronx. In so doing, she casts the teens’ brushes with the law, as well as their later missteps during the trial, as results of a system structured to punish them. This is a far cry from Five Bullets, which, in its investment in portraying the legal system that acquitted Goetz as essentially functional and just, tacitly accepts the brutalization and injustice of four teenaged boys.

Beyond simply disputing the deplorable racial scripts that defined the Goetz trial at the time, Fear and Fury also offers a clarifying look at the pernicious interlacing of race, crime, and capitalism surrounding Goetz’s attack and the ensuing trials. Reagan-era elites encouraged white middle class people, already structurally amenable to racist arguments, to view problems of urban decay and disorder as the product of individual, pathological deviance among the predominantly black and brown working classes—not, in other words, a problem of racialized state violence in service of capitalist greed. “For many, if not most, New Yorkers, the exact origins of the desperation they saw each day were obscure,” she writes, adding that “few understood that more than $1.5 billion had already been stripped from city coffers,” resulting in devastating cuts to services, layoffs, an end to free college tuition, and a host of other civic harms.

In situating Goetz within a broader story of racial capitalism, Thompson demonstrates how crime panics and their vigilante “heroes” have a clear material function: They serve as justifications for the mass immiseration and criminalization of the working class, an ideology that allows elites to hoard wealth for the paltry few. As Thompson writes, “What they [white New Yorkers] also missed was that the very same policies that were causing them to feel both unsafe and enraged were meanwhile making it possible for the city’s wealthiest residents to earn more money than they had dared hope possible.”

“Capitalism requires inequality,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, and “racism enshrines it.” Through Goetz, Thompson substantiates this crucial theoretical claim through the specter of “crime”—a nexus that authorizes both vigilante-style racial terror and structural violence alike.

Despite its superior analytic frame, Fear and Fury is not without problems. The most glaring is Thompson’s insistence that the Goetz’s shootings and trial “unleash[ed] and legitimiz[d] a new era of white racial rage” which she argues laid the groundwork for Trump’s rise to power. Undoubtedly, the garish racism of the Reagan administration and the ascent of Murdochian-style news coverage helped pave the way for Trump. But it’s unclear how Goetz embodies a novel form of white rage distinct from, say, the vitriolic anger spewed by Jim Crow segregationists and anti-integration northerners throughout the postwar period.

Her most lucid evidence to this end is that the eighties featured “a marked uptick” of white vigilante violence against black and brown people. What made the Goetz-ian phenomena of quotidian white rage distinct, Thompson argues, is that the post-Civil Rights period had made vigilantism “incompatible with the rule of law,” and thus anathema to our nation’s core values. So its reemergence, and its “embrace” by politicians and the media, signaled a shift, one whose foundations can be found in “the economic and cultural overhaul that had taken place during the Reagan eighties,” where “the idea that poverty and racial disparities stemmed from laziness and lack of a moral compass” gained renewed legitimacy.

Yet establishing this “rebirth of white rage” in the Reagan eighties erases a longer and more complex history of post-Civil Rights white racial resentment that implicates both postwar conservatism and liberalism. Indeed, as numerous scholars have detailed, the racial scaffolding of liberal New Deal-era housing and welfare programs incentivized white working- and middle-classes to resist racial integration and encouraged their belief in the racist idea that persistent inequality derived from the pathological lawlessness and indolence of black and brown people. As Thompson well knows, this history is rife with expressions of vicious white rage in the form of struggles over racial integration in schools, labor unions, and neighborhoods, which had roots in New Deal policies, and many of which did not neatly track along partisan lines. Goetz’s “white rage,” and specifically his interpretation of urban disorder as the fault of the racialized poor rather than state abandonment, is just as much the product of polite, technocratic postwar liberalism as it is extremist Reagan-era reaction.

Besides its sketchy historicity, Thompson’s desire to narrow Goetz into a Trumpian omen muddies her book’s analytic lens. Thompson frequently overdetermines the link between Goetz and Trump, straining to insert him into the narrative, like when she attempts to draw a correlation between the success of Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice and the Goetz trial. “Had [ordinary people] not cheered on every audacious stunt Bernie Goetz’s lawyer Barry Slotnick had pulled in his criminal trial,” she writes, “had they not loved Goetz and his outrageous assertion that the world would have been better off had Darrell Cabey never been born?” Simply noting that there were shared dynamics does not a connection make, and such attempts to manufacture one cheapens her research. The inclination to give Goetz a contemporary analog in Trump may be a tactical bookselling strategy, but it comes at the cost of serious rigor, and undermines more astute elements of Thompson’s project.

The forced Trumpian analogy also occludes more precise comments on the relation between Goetz and present-day white vigilante violence. Thompson and Williams both see a connection between Goetz and figures like Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse. But in Thompson’s desperation to pin this all to Trump, she insists it is Trump and his coterie of emboldened MAGA grifters who really ensured that these figures could evade justice—ignoring the central fact that Goetz himself largely escaped real consequences years before Trump was even a player on the political scene. In 2024, she writes somberly, “men like Daniel Penny were now legally protected in all ways that mattered.”

Yet a cursory glance at modern American history suggests that the “rule of law” has often deemed extralegal violence against racialized groups lawful. It’s not to say that these more recent heinous acquittals are not important or worth analyzing. But to route them through a rigid narrative of right-wing politics that begins with Goetz and ends with Trump escapes a more scrupulous and politically complicated confrontation with the inherently racialized character of the U.S. criminal legal system, and of the shared qualities between conservative and liberal policies writ large.

In other words, Thompson’s clunky Trump connection ultimately serves a tired narrative of liberal absolution. This impulse reaches a fever pitch when she rather tediously uses her concluding chapters to rail against right-wing media’s infrastructure of “race-baiting misinformation” and exculpate the Democratic Party, whom she positions as victims of this allegedly fresh wave of Fox-News-cultivated white rage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the connection to Goetz in these chapters gets even thinner and the prose more meandering, making her final analysis both opportunistic and half-baked. It’s an unfortunate turn toward “vote blue no matter who”-style partisan rhetoric for a serviceable, at times even enlightening book.

This selective, almost mercenary approach to retelling the histories of racialized trauma and black (near-)death is not only ethically murky and extractive. It’s also bad history, misleading readers to taper their understanding of how racial fascism works at a time when razor clarity around such forces is sorely needed. We can, and must, expect better.