Looking at Subway Crime
Terry H. Schwadron
March 8, 2024
After news of a few incidents of subway crime in New York City, we’re witnessing, even welcoming, another mismatched safety response.
The issue encapsulates a lot about what we’re seeing nationally, not only about crime, but about hyped politics that may have lost touch with whatever prompted the original concerns — whether about perceived urban safety, disputes over transgender bathrooms, or arguments about whether abortion laws also unduly affect non-abortion treatments, intended or not.
Because of news reports of subway crime, New York Mayor Eric Adams promised to add 1,000 uniformed NYPD officers to subway duty, the city boosted overtime pay for police, and Gov. Kathy Hochul dispatched hundreds of state troopers and National Guardsmen to open-ended duty doing random searches for weapons in the subway. A story this week in The New York Times proved quietly instructive in exploring just how much crime there is in the subways.
Prompting response were a random attack on a 45-year-old crossing guard who was shot on a Brooklyn train after intervening in what police said was a dispute between two passengers over loud music, and a shootout on a Bronx subway platform last month in which a man, 35, was killed and five wounded.
Nevertheless, the likelihood of being a crime victim remains remote for most riders, though there has been a rise in thefts and lots more instances of a homeless person sleeping on the benches. Crime reports rose month to month in February.
In 2022, there was about one violent crime per one million rides on the subway, according to The Times. Since then, the overall crime rate has fallen and ridership has increased, reducing the chances of random violence. Last year, overall crime in the transit system fell nearly 3 percent compared with 2022 as daily riders rose by 14 percent.
But it is an election year, and last time out, a few New York Democrats fell prey to Republican claims about urban crime. So a husky response seems politically wise and calming to the ever-present campaign to build back subway ridership savaged during the pandemic.
Safety and Reality
The subway will never entirely be without safety risk any more than walking down the street is or driving on highways where speed limits are considered optional. Traveling on the subway or bus is a necessity in New York; unless you are loaded, you can’t get everywhere you need to go by car.
There seems a tremendous pressure to deal with the perception of crime — or other issues — rather than with answers to the actual incidence of crime. Hey, if the presence of uniformed officers will keep annoying loud music quieted, perhaps there will be no need for a civilian to intervene in an inevitable subway dispute.
Following that logic, we can imagine whether seeking to control or reduce the number of guns available on the street would do to shooting incidents.
Riders certainly will welcome the presence of thousands more law enforcement but there is little attempt here to suggest that just maybe it is the perception being promoted that itself may be wrong.
If we’re responding to perception instead of reality, how will we measure that the job is done?
The few recent crimes in New York, Georgia and California supposedly linked to suspects who are migrants — reports that have proved incorrect in some cases — are being blown through political hyperbole into reasons to close the border altogether. The open question is whether this link is based on anything other than emotional response.
What keeps this discussion relevant is the constant dark patter from the election campaign and candidate Donald Trump especially about how America is failing in every way all at once because he is not the president. Trump’s recent speeches are recapping the darkness he has seen since his 2017 inauguration speech.
In his view, America is failing on the international front because Russia and Hamas have decided to invade Ukraine and Israel — all because of Joe Biden’s “weakness.” These are allegations that skip over the myriad successes in keeping allied multinational response together. Likewise, Trump ignores all economic measures that he did not suggest or promote that have the U.S. now as the world’s top energy exporter or the lowest sustained unemployment statistics in a generation.
The list goes on and on.
There is a lot for which to criticize or question Biden policies that do not require ignoring what is going okay about inflation or national security.
What seems clear is that this presidential campaign between two old guys we would rather was not happening will be unusually ugly. The least we can do is to work to match the boasts tied to some sense of reality.
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