NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) -- Mayor Eric Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul and police and transit officials said Friday that transit crime is on a downward trend and that there’s a “greater sense of security” among riders.
During a press conference at the Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan, officials listed off stat after stat with one major message: the subway is safe and New Yorkers have more confidence in riding the rails.
“We had a blazing fire in our subway system, and we had to deal with that fire,” Adams said.
Hochul said there has been a 16% drop in overall subway crime since late October, as well as a 28% drop in major crimes on the subway.
Calling it a “good day” for New Yorkers, the governor said data shows per capita subway crime is down to pre-pandemic levels.
In 2019, the rate was 1.5 crimes per 1 million riders. It shot up to 2.8 crimes per 1 million riders in 2020 and then fell to 2.3 crimes in 2021 and 1.7 crimes for the first few weeks in 2023.
In fact, Hochul said, data for January shows the lowest level of transit crimes for any January since data collection began “many, many decades ago” in the 1990s.
“Despite all these facts, I can’t tell New Yorkers that they feel safe,” she said. “I’m not going to even try to do that, but the data is showing New Yorkers are telling us they feel safer.”
Hochul cited an MTA customer satisfaction survey of 3,000 riders that shows the overall number of riders who felt safe in November was up 18% over October, rising from 40% to nearly 60% in a month.
October is when the NYPD’s “Cops, Cameras and Care” strategy started. The initiative saw the NYPD and MTA police flood the transit system with an additional 1,200 officers on trains and at more than 300 stations daily. The ongoing strategy aims to tackle both crime itself as well as the “perception” of it as out of control.
Adams also increased the police presence in the system in January and May of last year, and the MTA has been cracking down on fare evasion using private security.
“Are we trending in the right direction?” Adams asked. “You are darn right we are.”
The mayor credited the precision policing on trains, platforms and mezzanines for increasing ridership as well as riders’ confidence.
“The subway system is the life blood of our city,” Adams said. “If people don’t utilize this system, it will impact businesses, it will impact tourism [...] it will cripple our economy.”
NYPD Chief of Transit Michael Kemper said the department was “extremely encouraged” after a “challenging” 2022, when transit crime shot up 41.6% during the first 10 months.
Kemper said the results of the “Cops, Cameras and Care” strategy was “swift and significant.”
“The turnaround began immediately, and it continues until today,” the chief said.
Among the declines was a 28% drop in robberies.
“We are currently at the second-lowest overall crime level in recorded history, going back to 1995 when the CompStat era started,” Kemper said.
Arrests, TAB summonses and criminal court summonses are all up double digits, he said. Fare evasion enforcement is up 170%.
While transit crime numbers are down to start the year, there have been high-profile incidents, including an attack on a Fox News meteorologist, who was beaten at a Chelsea subway station Sunday as he confronted a group of teens who’d just set a man’s hair on fire with a lighter.
Subway ridership has been steadily increasing after plummeting at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ridership surpassed 1 billion in 2022 for the first time since 2019. A pandemic-era high of more than 3.9 million riders was reached on Dec. 8, though that's still down about a third from the 5.5 million daily riders pre-COVID.
“Our goal is clear,” Adams told 1010 WINS on Friday ahead of the press conference. “The goal is to make sure we pivot, shift, put manpower where it’s needed. And there is no price tag on ensuring New Yorkers feel safe and are safe.”
In November, Adams also directed police and city medics to be more aggressive about getting severely mentally ill people off the streets and subway and into treatment, even if it means involuntarily hospitalizing them.
“We were dealing with homelessness, the feeling of disorder,” the mayor said. “We knew we had to have a comprehensive approach, and that’s what we put in place.”
Adams said the city has removed more than 3,000 people from the subway system since November, with more than 1,000 of them still in some form of care like safe havens or other supportive housing.
“We know that people who are living on the street or dealing with severe mental illness, they need community, they need care, they need support,” he said.
At his State of the City address on Thursday, Adams said the city plans to use federal dollars to offer free health care to anyone who spends at least a week in a city shelter.
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