Deny rights, Deflect blame, Dispose of PR crises. What exactly does the single best-funded police force in the world do with all that money? Buy surplus military gear to break up peaceful protests with, I guess. Install facial-recognition systems on every lamppost in New York City, I guess. Hire PR firms to come up with unorthodox solutions to their bumbling, I guess.
What happened with Brian Thompson was simple. Someone killed a corporate feudal lord, escaped the scene of the crime without being detected, and it took the NYPD a fricken business week to come up with any evidence: a backpack, left by a wastebin in a high-traffic area of Central Park. Massive PR crisis for the world's richest police force. Thus, we arrive at Luigi Mangione. He is either a working-class hero who killed a billionaire with bullets engraved with the words his industry lives by, or he is some random guy who did nothing more sinister than wear a hooded jacket to McDonalds one day. The latter seems far more likely than the former.
How very convenient it must be for the corporate cops to have managed to get a tipoff from a minimum-wage worker hoping to cash in on their generous reward, to go there and find The Guy, at a chance encounter at a place hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime, with the modified handgun, the engraved bullets, the manifesto, a handwritten confession, and everything they could possibly want to send him away for murder. ISN'T. IT. CONVENIENT? Read as, the cops are desperate to look effective and they decide to pin a high-profile murder on some rando in a hoodie. Don't you just love our system of public safety in this country? They get clowned by an assassin killing a corporate feudal lord, so they go out and arrest someone at random, claiming he had everything up to and including the smoking gun, smelling of freshly-ignited gunpowder, on his person.
All the while, some PR firm in Manhattan unleashes an army of AI chatbots on social media trying to discredit anyone who has looked behind the curtain, while they sway the popularity contest by introducing weasel words into press releases and encouraging news agencies to refer to Luigi as "the shooter", "the perpetrator", or "the killer". Meanwhile, the unthinking American public, trained on police procedurals and crime-scene investigation shows, positively inhale the prolefeed and start spreading NYPD propaganda far and wide.
This is the corporate feudal state. Uniformed cops play judge, jury, and executioner, and walk away with impunity. They decide you're guilty and you go away forever. Certainly UnitedHealth doesn't care if the actual killer is caught or not; they never cared about Brian Thompson, he was just a means to an end. All they're interested in is sending a message, but it's not the message they think it is. What they've said, in as many words, is "You cannot effect change. We will take advantage of you until the day you die because we can do that. You are nothing to us except an open moneybag, and we will continue denying claims and ending coverage as we please."
Message received and understood. Our answer: "Get fucked."