100 Objects #6: "Sharpened Screwdriver"
99% Invisible - Roman Mars
This episode explores the 1984 Bernie Goetz shooting and the myth of 'sharpened screwdrivers' used to justify white vigilante violence. It traces how media narratives fueled racial panic and inspired real-world copycat incidents.
Key takeaways
- The 'sharpened screwdriver' myth was fabricated but widely believed.
- Media amplified fear of Black youth, shaping public perception.
- Goetz's actions inspired future vigilantes like Zimmerman and Rittenhouse.
Transcript preview
It's 1984. Ronald Reagan is president. MTV is just three years old. And it's the era of the Death Wish movies. This is the story of a man who decided to clean up the most violent town in the world. I said, turn around. You hear me the money. If you've never seen the Death Wish movies, they follow the actor Charles Bronson as he goes on a shooting spree to, depending on the movie, the murder of his wife or the murders of other ordinary New Yorkers who fall prey to the city's wildest most violent criminals. The plot sort of doesn't matter in a weird way. This is historian Heather Ann Thompson, author of the new book Fear and Fury. What matters is that the audience is relating to this feeling of always unsettled when you leave your apartment or your home and that at any given moment some young black or brown thug will cause you harm. The 80s were full of movies like this. Death Wish, the Exterminator, the Dirty Harry movies. This is kind of a glorified vigilante genre of media. Every man for himself, make sure you're armed. Take out any would be assailant on your own. Make sure that you're protecting your family. message resonated with people. All the movies came out in what was actually a very difficult moment in cities like New York. This is four years into the Reagan Revolution. Cities have been stripped of a lot of their social resources and trash is piling up on the city streets. Muggings are up. The drug trade is up. The city is feeling dangerous. There's mainly a sense that no is doing anything about any of this. There's a real lack of understanding of why our cities feeling so under siege. Then in 1984 something tragic happens in New York City. A white man named Bernie Gets, fed up with the crime and violence of the city, boards the subway and shoots four black teenagers. None of them have weapons. But as the story spreads and becomes a headline in papers across the city, it starts transforming into a fantasy pulled right out of death wish, complete with dangerous armed criminals. You know, they're not always necessarily going to have the gun, right? But they're going to have something. They're going to slash you with jagged glass or they're going to whip out a tire iron. And in the Bernie Gett case, there's sort of a new version of this, which is, is that young teenagers in the city are carrying screwdrivers. Not just screwdrivers, sharpened screwdrivers as in the normal tool transformed into a piercing deadly weapon. Only it was completely made up. The teens were not carrying sharpened screwdrivers or any other kind of weapon. That was the invention of this one moment in 1984. powerful symbol. From 99% invisible and BBC studios, this is a history of the United States in a hundred objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today how the mythical sharpened screwdriver at the heart of the Bernie Gets shooting surfaced a new era of misinformation and why it's still invoked as a justification for white vigilante violence today. Before the four teenagers in the Getty case became known as sharpened screwdriver wielding criminals they were just four kids in the South Bronx. If New York was in bad shape the South Bronx was in bad shape the South Bronx was in catastrophic shape. This is Elliot Williams, legal analyst and author of a book on Gets called Five Bullets. If New York was in bad shape, the South Bronx was in catastrophic shape. This is Elliot Williams, legal analyst and author of a book on Gets called Five Bullets The mid-19-19-AIDS were a quite significant period of transition. Certainly, just about everything withdrew as the city tightened its belt. Firemen, police, sanitation workers gone. Public schools were decimated and stuck in the middle of that were four young men, Barry Allen, Darrell Kaby, Troy Candy, and James Ramseur. They were all between 18 and 19 years old and lived in a subsidized housing project called Clermont Village in the Bronx. Like Bernie, the four teenagers were soon to become famous, but we still actually don't know much about their lives. I tried to speak to all of the surviving young men. Two of the four are surviving. I tried very hard to speak to them. I got as close to speaking to two of Darrell Kaby's sisters for the book, but they did not want to be on the record or quoted in the book, and I respected that. Still, there are some small details we do know. We know they had siblings. We know James R. that Barry Allen was a young father. We know, Darryl K. B. ultimately is raised for most of his childhood by only his mother, because his father, who had been working as a taxi driver, had been crushed by his own cab in a carjacking. And his mother very much wanted more for him, wanted him to get away from all of the pressures and troubles of the South Bronx to sort of find a better life. But at this point in 1984, none of them had been able to get away. So these are four kids who are hanging around essentially day after day and have no money, no jobs, no prospects, but who still of course want to go on a date, want to play a video game, want to be a teenager, and so they decide on December 22nd, 1984 that they're going to go into the city and they're going to be a teenager and they're going to to go to a video arcade because video arcades had machines that you could take a screwdriver, Jimmy open the receptacle, and you could get some quarters out of it. And in 1984, if you got a bunch of quarters, that was the difference between you being able to get something to eat, between you being able to imagine maybe taking your girlfriend to the movies. That was the difference between having a lot of life and not having a life. But I will note it was not that they were the sort of street gang who were out marauding or wilding or whatever else. This was a common act that teenagers did. I mean this was the golden age of arcade games. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. These games were everywhere. You're talking liquor stores, bodegas, bowling alleys. I mean, it was painfully easy for someone with a long long life. the screwdriver and a little ingenuity to just pop it open and run away with all that money in it and in many respects was cleaner or safer than mugging or robbing someone it wasn't that police were likely to move heaven and earth to try to track down a kid with eighty dollars of quarters in his pocket and even if you got caught you wouldn't go to jail for a long time. So three days before Christmas 1984 when the city is bustling and people are scrambling to get last minute gifts the four teenagers on a train to go to an arcade downtown. They got on, they jumped the turnstile in the South Bronx. We're goofing off. They were certainly doing pull-ups on the bars, walking around, asking people for cigarettes or for matches or whatever else. Meanwhile, Bertie gets in Manhattan about 30 minutes south of the Bronx on the train is about to leave his apartment. He's had a frustrating morning and he decides that he's going to get on a train on a train and he decides that he's going to get on a train. go down and potentially see some friends, maybe have a drink or two, but whatever, get out of the apartment. And so he leaves mid-afternoon to walk very nearby to the 14th Street station. He gets on the two train going downtown and onto this one car there are these four teenagers. back in the day, Subways had these straps that hung down and they were swinging on those straps and goofing around and talking to people, hey, what's up, you got a light. And so Bernie Gett sits down and decides to sit right across from them, which is noteworthy to the teens because of course, you know, nobody wants to sit next to teenagers. The train wasn't full, so Bernie Gett's didn't have to sit next to the teenagers. he did. And one of them who is really closest to him named Troy Canty is sort of interested in this and he says hey you know he greets him and Bernie gets kind of gruffly you know so you know hey responds back and he's kind of encouraged and he's encouraged in particular to ask this guy does he have five dollars so that was not a particularly weird thing for Troy Canty to say hey have you got five bucks hand handling is the name of the game. You