(This is an image of a fellow named Bairon Hernandez, produced through police reporting. Our interns spent more time removing the NYPD markings than digging into his history. They assumed it was bad. Which is what started their contribution.)

Miles asked the interns to take a look. It was another in a continuing string of nearly identical reports from the New York City subway.

The photo shows trouble in his eyes. Hernandez had been apprehended after pushing two paying customers—one a long-retired Air Force veteran—onto the subway tracks as they waited for a train. The elderly vet, though injured, was helped by the other man who had also been shoved toward the rails.

There is no word yet on Hernandez’s prior arrests.

Most of us would avoid him on the subway if we actually rode that way. Of course, that isn’t true for everyone on the larger staff.

Miles seemed a little miffed at his Boomers at the Morning Production meeting. That is not how he ran a squadron of patrol aviators back on active duty. These days he relies on the Old Salt Boomers, some of whom go back to the Vietnam era—when maritime operations actually meant something.

Time for that may have come again.

They understand stress. Some worked with Fire Techs below decks who made raw steam and hurled things skyward. Others remember the jolt of the cat shot just to get to work.

Miles told them to shut up.

Their input had been useful as the air war moved into Day Ten. But this morning there was little drama in describing people launched from bobbing ships tied into a network of weapons and surveillance that now reaches to low Earth orbit.

Which oddly connects with the news overseas.

In Tehran, air attacks on military targets have shifted to drones carrying explosive grenades aimed at militants trying to keep citizens locked inside their homes.

In London, knife attacks have surged enough that buses and cabs are beginning to stock bandages and tourniquets.

Here in Fairfax, we worry about deranged people slashing passengers on the county bus line that allows us to live in our comfortable fifteen-minute universe.

There is a certain grim commonality in all this.

If you are old enough, you remember the last time New York looked like this—when the worst crime in Arlington or Fairfax was probably occasionally domestic violence or shoplifting.

Back then the answer was a set of laws aimed at what were called career criminals—usually younger men with long arrest records. The solution became known as “Three Strikes and You’re Out.”

After the third arrest came a longer stay in the county pokey.

Crime dropped. Streets got safer.

But there was another side.

Jails filled. Critics argued many offenders were themselves victims—of race, religion, or circumstance. Meanwhile some of the men pictured above accumulated dozens of arrests and convictions and still walked the streets among the rest of us.

It is a cycle.

A couple of the Old Salts remember when the Reagan years dismantled much of the old mental health system. That decision helped lead to the crisis that produced “three strikes” thinking in the first place.

And now here we are again.

Maybe it is time to find something reasonably human—even if it isn’t pleasant—that keeps the rest of us safe.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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Vic Socotra – Purveyor of glib words to the world