Before the sickos come in, I am just going to say it.
What Pamela Cisneros did was not okay.
And before somebody decides to make this about politics, capitalism, Bank of America, corporate America, class warfare, mental health, policing, or whatever else they want to use to justify it: a woman was stabbed to death in Times Square.
Her name was Erin Piacenti. She was 32 years old and worked as a vice president at Bank of America. She was apparently just going about her day when police say she was randomly and unprovokedly attacked.
Another man, 68 years old, was also stabbed and survived.
Cisneros was subsequently confronted by police while armed with two knives. Police say officers repeatedly ordered her to drop the weapons, Tasers were deployed, and she continued advancing toward officers. Two officers ultimately shot and killed her. The investigation into the police shooting is ongoing.
And yes, I know what is going to happen online.
People are going to find out that the victim was a Bank of America vice president and immediately start making jokes.
People are going to say she was a “corporate shill.”
People are going to say she worked for a company they hate.
People are going to say she was part of “the system.”
And somebody, inevitably, is going to say that she deserved it.
No.
I don’t care if you hate Bank of America.
I don’t care if you hate Wall Street.
I don’t care if you think corporations are evil.
I don’t care if you think capitalism is evil.
I don’t care if you think Erin Piacenti personally represented everything wrong with the economic system.
She was still a human being.
And being a vice president at a bank doesn’t magically make someone less deserving of life.
That’s something I think we have seriously lost sight of on the internet.
We have gotten so accustomed to turning people into symbols that sometimes we forget there was an actual person underneath the label.
“Bank executive.”
“Politician.”
“Cop.”
“Landlord.”
“CEO.”
“Rich person.”
“Poor person.”
“Immigrant.”
“Conservative.”
“Liberal.”
Whatever.
Those labels can tell us things about a person. They can tell us about institutions. They can tell us about systems. They can absolutely be relevant to conversations about inequality, power, economics and society.
But they don’t turn a human life into an acceptable target.
And this isn’t even a situation where there was some grand confrontation between Piacenti and Cisneros.
According to police, this was random.
Cisneros allegedly attacked a 68-year-old man and then attacked Piacenti within roughly 20 seconds. There was reportedly no prior relationship or altercation between the attacker and the victims.
So what exactly are we celebrating?
A woman getting stabbed because she happened to be walking through Times Square?
Seriously?
What the fuck has happened to us?
You can have complicated opinions about Bank of America.
You can criticize corporate America.
You can advocate for economic reform.
You can believe that wealthy institutions have too much power.
You can even believe that the economic system itself needs to be completely rebuilt.
You can believe all of those things without cheering someone’s murder.
In fact, I would argue that you should.
Because if your morality disappears the moment the victim belongs to a group you dislike, then your morality wasn’t really morality.
It was tribalism.
And that applies to everyone.
If someone you dislike is killed, you don’t have to suddenly pretend you liked them.
You don’t have to agree with their career.
You don’t have to agree with their politics.
You don’t have to praise their employer.
But you should still be capable of saying:
“That was a human being, and her life mattered.”
That’s not controversial.
At least it shouldn’t be.
And there’s another uncomfortable part of this story.
Cisneros reportedly had a documented history of mental-health-related encounters with the NYPD, although she had no prior arrest record.
That doesn’t excuse what she did.
It doesn’t erase the responsibility for the violence.
And it certainly doesn’t mean we should romanticize her either.
But it does raise questions about whether there were warning signs, whether something could have been done differently beforehand, and how we deal with people experiencing severe mental-health crises before those crises become violent.
Those are legitimate conversations.
“Let’s figure out how this happened.”
“Let’s figure out how to prevent another attack.”
“Let’s examine the police response.”
“Let’s examine mental-health intervention.”
“Let’s talk about public safety.”
Those are conversations worth having.
“She deserved to die because she worked for Bank of America” is not.
And I want to be clear about something else.
I am not writing this to defend Bank of America.
I’m not writing this because I think corporations are inherently good.
I’m not writing this because I think everyone needs to suddenly love wealthy executives.
I’m writing this because I don’t want us to become so consumed by our hatred of institutions that we start treating individual human beings as disposable extensions of those institutions.
Erin Piacenti wasn’t a bank.
She wasn’t a corporation.
She wasn’t Wall Street.
She wasn’t capitalism.
She was a person.
Someone’s daughter.
Someone’s wife.
Someone’s friend.
Someone’s coworker.
Someone who had a life outside of a job title.
And now she’s dead.
That’s fucking sad.
It doesn’t need a political qualifier.
It doesn’t need an ideological qualifier.
It doesn’t need a “but.”
A person was killed.
And the fact that some people will inevitably cheer because they think the victim represented something they hate says far more about the people doing the cheering than it does about the person who died.
We don’t have to agree with each other.
We don’t have to like each other.
We don’t have to like someone’s employer, politics, religion, ideology, career, wealth, or worldview.
But maybe—just maybe—we can agree that randomly stabbing someone to death isn’t something to celebrate.
Because if we reach a point where we decide that murder is acceptable depending on who the victim is, then we’ve crossed a pretty fucking dark line.
And I don’t want to cross it.
Erin Piacenti deserved to go home that day.
That’s it.
That’s the whole point.
And No, Pamela Cisneros Isn’t the “Female Luigi”
There is another part of this story that I think we need to be able to talk about honestly.
I don’t think we should automatically assume that the police response was perfect.
Cisneros was armed with knives, and the situation was obviously dangerous. Officers had to make decisions in an incredibly short amount of time. I wasn’t standing there. I didn’t see everything the officers saw. I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what was going through their heads.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask questions.
Could the officers have created more distance?
Could they have contained the situation differently?
Were there other less-lethal options available?
Was deadly force truly necessary at the exact moment it was used?
Those are legitimate questions.
And asking those questions doesn’t mean you support what Cisneros did.
Both things can be true.
Cisneros can be responsible for an absolutely horrific attack, and we can still scrutinize the police response to what happened afterward.
But here’s where I think the internet is going to get really fucking weird.
Please don’t turn Pamela Cisneros into the female Luigi.
I’m already imagining it.
Someone is going to make a meme.
Someone else is going to give her a nickname.
And before long, we’ll probably have people calling her Peach or Daisy or whatever the fuck because apparently we can’t have a horrific act of violence without turning the perpetrator into an internet character.
No.
Just no.
Cisneros isn’t a revolutionary.
She isn’t a folk hero.
She isn’t some misunderstood anti-capitalist icon.
She didn’t become a symbol of resistance because one of her victims happened to work for a bank.
She allegedly stabbed people.
That’s what happened.
You don’t have to defend the police response in order to condemn the attack.
You don’t have to defend the attack in order to question the police response.
And you definitely don’t have to turn the attacker into a fucking meme.
I think that’s one of the biggest problems with the way we talk about violence online.
We take real human beings and turn them into characters.
Victim becomes “the corporate executive.”
Attacker becomes “the revolutionary.”
Police become “the villains.”
Or police become “the heroes.”
And suddenly a horrific real-world event gets flattened into some kind of fucking video-game morality system.
Real life isn’t Mario.
There aren’t heroes and villains with convenient character classes.
There are human beings, terrible circumstances, split-second decisions, victims, families, investigators, and consequences.
So yes, investigate the shooting.
If the officers acted improperly, they should be held accountable.
If they acted appropriately given the circumstances, then that should be established by the evidence too.
But let’s not turn Pamela Cisneros into some kind of internet folk saint because people want a convenient character to project their politics onto.
Erin Piacenti was a human being.
The 68-year-old man who was attacked was a human being.
The officers involved are human beings.
And even Pamela Cisneros was a human being.
None of that makes what happened okay.
It just means we should be mature enough to talk about a tragedy without turning it into cosplay.