Yesterday, Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul jointly announced a subway safety initiative that will have 750 National Guardsmen and 250 state police and MTA personnel checking straphangers’ bags at multiple stations, while proposing legislation to allow judges to ban violent offenders from the system. Beyond significant legal questions around active duty military conducting law enforcement, the plan seems designed for show more than benefit.
There’s a mismatch here between the reality and the response. Judging exclusively by the plan, one might imagine that the subways have descended into a Hobbesian state of chaos and disorder, with New Yorkers being constantly shot and stabbed as they simply try to take a train. If you actually venture down into the system, you’ll largely see normal people going about their days, grumbling more about service outages than violent criminals.
Insofar as there are people disturbing the peace, they’re often homeless New Yorkers with mental health issues who’ve suffered from a dearth of psychological and psychiatric care options and who need help, not troops. The governor understands this, which is an increase in so-called SOS teams — made up of social workers, medical specialists, and others that help homeless people in subways find bed placements and services — and is a welcome part of the effort. This is the type of targeted intervention that gets results, not just headlines.
None of this is to minimize the impact of the crimes that do occur on trains and platforms, and the ripple effects they have. While crime may be generally down in the subways, felony assault was up slightly and burglary up significantly in the last year. The headline-grabbing severity of these assaults — with straphangers hit with metal objects or tossed to the tracks — creates shock that obscures the sheer unlikelihood that someone will be harmed on the trains.
Last year, the NYPD reported 570 assaults on the subways, every one of them terrible for the victim and society, but that represents something like two million rides for every assault, or an assault likelihood of around 0.00005% per ride.
Yet these assaults can and do make the public afraid of riding, and anything that keeps riders away is a self-reinforcing problem as fewer people pay fares and occupy the stations and trains at all hours. If we’re going to get serious about stopping the upward trend, the solution is not untrained soldiers to gum up the works, perform invasive searches and increase the likelihood of altercations with the public. More real transit cops on the platforms and the trains are helpful, but that is also quite expensive.
Instead, Adams and Hochul should scrap the showy but ineffective Guardsmen plan and focus on targeted interventions. Don’t make the subway system feel more like the airport with bag searches, but put more NYPD transit officers specifically in known problem areas, and have them be visible but relatively unobtrusive.
Also, expand having social services staff develop relationships with those suffering from substance abuse and mental illness by offering placements and supports. The subways cannot serve as campsites, which is degrading for people living there and unsettling to those using the trains for their intended transportation purpose.
This approach will work better, cost less and help more people in the long run.
