Kamen Rider wrote:DarkSun wrote:McCollum also never 'hijacked' a subway train. "Hijacking" means "to take over by force." This is something McCollum has never done.
He still took the thing. doesn't matter with force or withour force. No training what so ever, If something had gone wrong utside of his control, he'd have been up a creek without a boat, let alone a paddle.
It matters a whole lot. If he had a record of
hijacking a subway train, I'd support incarcerating him for life with no possibility of parole. Hijacking = very bad. Think 9/11. I
definitely would not support the MTA hiring a former subway hijacker. Doing so would be
insanely reckless.
McCollum has usually done what he did
because he was asked to do so by MTA employees. For example:
On a winter's night in 1981, Darius was riding with the driver of an E train when the driver became ill and asked him to take over. The driver got out at 34th Street and Darius drove downtown to the World Trade Center, his passengers unaware, until it was time to turn around. He was apprehended as he walked back through the train to start the journey back uptown. He was only 15.
By the time he was eighteen, TA employees had begun calling him at home and asking him to pull shifts.
[McCollum] ran into some old friends at Queens Plaza soon after he got back to New York, and they invited him to hang out and take some of their shifts, and he thought he could do a few and go back to North Carolina, "but it just kept going, and that was it."
And he was trained:
Darius's apprenticeship began with a motorman he called Uncle Craft, who drove the first train Darius took regularly. When Craft began working at the 179th Street yard, he taught Darius to drive along the generous stretch of track between the yard and the last F stop. Darius learned how to ease a train into a station, aligning it with the markers that match its length, how to read signals while simultaneously observing the track connections the signals predict (he was taught never to assume the infallibility of signals), and how to understand the timers that govern the signals. Darius was an exceptional, methodical student: he learned quickly and thoroughly, building on each skill he acquired and instantly memorizing terminology. Soon he was doing yard maneuvers and taking trains into passenger service, as both a train operator and a conductor. (By the time of his first arrest, he had driven trains dozens of times.)
To broaden his knowledge, Darius visited employees from 179th Street who had taken up new positions elsewhere. He learned to drive garbage trains and de-icer trains and to repair the electrical boxes that control signals. In renovation shops he learned how to dismantle trains and reassemble them. In control towers he learned how to direct traffic: routing trains around obstructions, replacing late trains, switching ABD trains ("abandoned due to malfunction") out of service. The more he learned the more he volunteered to do, and the easier he made the lives of the people who taught him.
If multiple TA employees trusted him to do their jobs, doesn't that say something?
arrow wrote:RearOfSignal wrote:Impersonating federal agents, transit and railroad workers and hijacking a subway train is not enthusiasm, it's criminal!
I agree, and I also think that hiring him is not a solution. Rather, it would encourage more of this kind of dangerous behavior.
Again I'm going to refer you to my previous reply to RearOfSignal's post, and also I'm going to repost this segment from my first post in this thread in reply to your post:
DarkSun wrote:Unless "guilty until proven innocent" is the new standard for judging in the U.S., there is no reason to claim that McCollum poses, or would pose, a safety risk to riders. McCollum does not have any record of putting any riders in harm's way. In fact, he's even helped riders in at least one safety-sensitive situation in the past. Furthermore, McCollum need not necessarily be placed in a safety-sensitive position in the TA.
As far as 'encouraging' people to follow in McCollum's shoes... if he were given a job at the TA, do you really think people are going to want to follow his path? Bear in mind his path has involved in excess of
25 arrests and plenty of jail and probation time...
