In 1984, a shooting on a New York City subway thrust Bernard Getz into the center of the national spotlight.

After opening fire on four black teenagers, he said were trying to rob him,

Gets was hailed by some as a vigilante hero in a city gripped by fear in rising crime,

and condemned by others as a symbol of racial violence.

The case unfolded against the backdrop of New York's turbulent 1980s,

when public anxiety about safety collided with enduring questions about race,

justice, and the limits of self-defense.

In five bullets, Elliot Williams, a former federal prosecutor and legal analyst,

revisits the shooting, the trial that followed, and the cultural moment that turned a single act of violence into a referendum on American law and society.

I spoke with him recently about the book.

Elliot Williams, welcome to the News Hour.

Oh, thank you so much for having me here, Jeff.

Absolutely.

So this book revisits a case that many Americans remember in broad

strokes as the subway vigilante. 40 years later, why did this whole story feel so urgent to return to?

Right. It's lived in my head for quite some time. I grew up as you did in New Jersey and remember

this quite well from all over the headlines and the nightly

television every night. I think we are still living with many of the issues that are central

to the book five bullets. It's polarization, media bias, but also race and crime, and how much

society tolerates or even encourages vigilante behavior.

So there's lots of threads in the world we live in, and it just felt too ripe to pass up.

And the notion of fear, how does this entire episode reveal how fear operates in not just law, but public opinion?

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