NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) — A spike in subway crime has struck New York City in the beginning of 2024, prompting the NYPD to extend officers’ schedules to 12-hour tours, a jump that Mayor Eric Adams said is intended to provide "more visibility, more movement."
According to the latest CompStat data, last updated on Feb.
18, there has been an 18.3% increase in transit crime citywide year-to-date.
The surge has not gone unnoticed, with violent subway crimes—like the slashing of a Brazilian tourist in Queens and a mass shooting that killed one and injured five others in the Bronx—making headlines in recent weeks.
To address the crime spree in an immediate fashion, Adams said that NYPD First Deputy Commissioner Tania Kinsella, along with the chief of transit police, put the 12-hour shifts in place.
"We want officers walking through the trains, being at the platforms, being near the token booth and identifying where the crime is actually taking place," Adams said at his weekly media availability on Tuesday. "And we're seeing a substantial amount of that crime taking place on our subways."
Adams presented the schedule shift as a return to strategies used in his 2022 Safety Plan that saw cops flood the subway system, despite funding for the program drying up.
Hizzoner said that he hopes to engage in conversation with the head of the transit authority and the governor’s office to receive "a complement of support" for additional overtime for officers.
In addition to providing more visibility, Adams said that officials are finding that officers have more days off when they work longer tours, making the change "good for morale, good for actions, good for the movement of the officers."
"The goal is our subway system has to be safe," Adams said. "Proportionally, the number of riders that we have, we are capping over four million riders. We have about six felonies a day on our subway system. That's six too many, we want to get down to zero."