Yup ;)
Actually, people at that time were getting pretty fed up with the status quo of street crime. The cops actually seemed kind of supportive of him defending himself.
It wasn’t until AFTER he went on his crusade to tell the world just how bad the NYPD sucked that he was charged and prosecuted.
And, of course, the lengths the prosecutors stretched credibility to get him just paved the way for our current crop of “activists” to sound believable.
He spoke out against the city and the justice system because he’d previously been mugged, injured in the mugging, and although a perp was arrested, he went unpunished. The State used him to set an example. They didn’t want others to think they could get away with taking the law into their own hands. The Grand Jury refused to indict him on any of the more serious charges, and ended up indicting him on criminal possession of a weapon, plus possession of two other illegal weapons in his house. Having lived in NY State my whole life, and worked as a C.O. in NY’s prison system for 25 years, I believe he would have been charged by the D.A. whether he spoke out or not.