Get ready to open your backpack or bag to National Guard troops or state law enforcement when you ride New York City’s subway.
Gov. Hochul is deploying 750 members of the Guard and 250 state and MTA police officers to subway stations to inspect passengers’ bags following a spate of violent incidents across the system.
“No one heading to their job or to visit family or to go to a doctor’s appointment should worry that the person sitting next to them possesses a deadly weapon,” Hochul said Wednesday beside MTA Chairman Janno Lieber in front of a giant system map at the MTA’s Rail Control Center.
“They shouldn’t worry about whether someone’s going to brandish a knife or a gun.”
The random checks will fall well short of the body scans and pat downs of airport-level security. Straphangers are already familiar with how this will work — cops at tables performing random bag checks have appeared at subway turnstiles from time to time in the 22 years since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Transit officials said the state support would simply allow for more such spot checks throughout the system, and that the National Guard, MTA police or other state law enforcement won’t be patrolling the trains.
The additional law enforcement power is one of a slate of state actions Hochul hopes will reduce crime underground — a “five-point plan [to] rid our subways of violent offenders and protect all commuters and transit workers,” as she put it.
“I am sending a message to all New Yorkers — I will not stop working to keep you safe and restore your peace of mind whenever you walk through those turnstiles,” she said
Besides the bag checks, the five initiatives include a $20 million plan to beef up the number of clinical teams responding to people in mental distress on subways from two to 10 systemwide.
Another of Hochul’s five initiatives is her support for the MTA’s plan to install surveillance cameras inside conductor and train-operator cabs. That initiative is a direct response to the slashing of MTA conductor Alton Scott, who narrowly survived a random assault last week when he stuck his head out of his cab as his train stopped at a Brooklyn subway station.
“If a camera had been positioned in Alton Scott’s conductor cabin last Thursday, we probably would have already apprehended the person who slashed his neck,” Hochul said.
“Today I’m directing the MTA to install cameras in every single conductor cabin, as well as [on] platforms that face the cabins,” she added.
No platform-mounted camera caught Scott’s attacker last week either.
MTA officials have stated that the station had multiple working surveillance cameras, but none were pointed at the conductor’s mid-platform position when Scott’s late-night A train pulled into the Rockaway Ave. station in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Transit brass declined to comment Wednesday on how many other stations might need upgrades to their camera coverage, citing security concerns.
Transport Workers Union Local 100 has long opposed putting cameras in conductor and operator cabs, citing privacy concerns. The MTA said last week it will install the cameras anyway.
A Local 100 spokesman said Wednesday that the union will support the installation so long as the cameras are solely for safety purposes, and are not used to support disciplinary cases against union members.
Hochul’s fourth initiative is proposed legislation to ban anyone convicted of an assault on transit from the system for three years. Currently the law allows a ban only on those who are convicted of assaulting a transit worker.
Her fifth initiative is improved coordination between MTA officials and district attorneys and police. That initiative will include regular meetings to discuss subway crime, the first of which is scheduled for next week.
As part of that fifth initiative, Hochul said, the MTA will hire a new “criminal justice advocate to assist the victims of crime in the system,” and develop a system to “flag recidivist offenders” to district attorneys.
NYPD brass and MTA leaders blame the uptick in crime on repeat offenders.
“One percent of subway arrestees, according to the NYPD, are responsible for well over 20% of the crime,” MTA boss Lieber said. “We need to have a collaboration with the [district attorneys] so they have that full information.”
The NYPD is fighting a 15.5% jump in felony assaults at city subway stops and trains.
Police have counted 97 such assaults in the subway system this year as of Sunday, 13 more than in the same period of 2023.
Misdemeanor assaults — slaps, punches and other relatively minor attacks — are down 3.9% for the year, with 249 misdemeanor assaults as of Sunday, 10 fewer than the 259 that had occurred by this time last year.
NYPD brass has said grand larcenies — property theft and pickpocketing — are the main thing pushing crime rates up in the subway system. Those crimes are up 17.8%, from 163 reported incidents last year to 192 this year.
There have been three homicides on the transit system so far this year, up from one this time last year.
The most recent was two weeks ago, when a man was fatally shot two weeks ago while on board a southbound B train in the Bronx.
On Tuesday, police arrested a man for allegedly stabbing a passenger onboard an uptown A train in what cops described as a hate crime.
Arrests in the system are up 45% over last year, according to police, with 3,261 arrests so far as of Sunday, up from 2,243 last year.
Earlier Wednesday, Mayor Adams — who did not join Hochul at her announcement — said NYPD officers will also be increasing bag checks in the subway system.
Neither the mayor nor transit officials would say at which stations the ramped-up bag checks will take place. An Adams administration spokesperson said there will be 94 NYPD bag screening teams deployed to 136 stations each week.
“They’re going to be a seven-day-a-week operation,” NYPD Transit Chief Michael Kemper said in a Wednesday morning appearance with Adams on CBS New York.
Adams said the checks will be “random” and that the Police Department won’t engage in any “profiling.”
“People who don’t want their bags checked can turn around and not enter the system,” he said.
The governor’s plan to put National Guard soldiers in the subway system was met with alarm from civil libertarians.
“This plan is whiplash inducing. The city only recently trumpeted safety data,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
“These heavy-handed approaches will, like stop-and-frisk, be used to accost and profile Black and Brown New Yorkers, ripping a page straight out of the Giuliani playbook,” she said, comparing Hochul to the former Republican mayor.
Albert Fox Cahn, head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, expressed specific concern about the use of the National Guard.
“We shouldn’t militarize the MTA when crime rates are falling and budgets are contracting,” he said in a statement.
“I fear how many New Yorkers will be wrongly arrested or hurt before we recognize that soldiers have no place on the streets of democracy.”
