NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — New York City Transit Interim President Sarah Feinberg on Friday said NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea has agreed to deploy more auxiliary police officers to the top 20 busiest subway stations.
In a statement, Feinberg said that NYC Transit is “grateful that Commissioner Shea has heard our concerns and agreed to deploy more auxiliary police officers to the top 20 busiest subway stations.”
The statement came shortly after Shea appeared on Fox’s “Good Day New York,” saying that the NYPD is offering more overtime for transit officers, has moved officers from subway trains to subway platforms and has restructured management to organize the best strategy to keep the city’s underground safe.
“We’ve [also put] auxiliary officers, recently, into the top 20 stations in the city just, really all to make New Yorkers feel safe and to really give New York a ‘shot in the arm’ as we start to come back,” Shea said on the show.
The commissioner’s appearance on the show came just hours after the MTA reported that one of its employees was in critical condition after being slashed in the face on a southbound J train in Brooklyn.
The attack was just the latest in a string of assaults, which caused the MTA to escalate its calls for more officers to be deployed across the city’s transit network.
“We know our employees and customers agree: 87% of riders say that seeing a visible presence in our system is very important to them,” Feinberg said of police patrols in the subway system.
She says the addition of auxiliary police officers is a “good step forward.”
“But make no mistake more needs to be done to ensure the system comes back, and in turn the city comes back,” Feinberg added. “We know that in order for more and more people to return to mass transit they need to feel safe. That’s why we continue to call on the city to add additional full-time police officers and mental health resources to the subway system immediately.”
MTA Chairman and CEO Pat Foye, in an interview with WCBS 880’s Michael Wallace on Friday, agreed with Feinberg, saying that the transit system needs more protection.
“That is that is a helpful step, and we thank Commissioner Shea for that. Obviously, auxiliary officers have a role to play, we don't know the number of [auxiliary] officers that the NYPD is gonna put out but, what we need for our customers and our employees is full time uniformed officers in the system, as soon as possible together with mental health resources,” he said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has continued to address MTA officials’ concerns, saying he believes the subway is safe and regularly encourages his children to utilize mass transportation.
On Friday, the mayor appeared on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show,” where he was again asked about safety on the subway and accused Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the MTA of “fearmongering.”
“What's happening right now is clearly at the instruction of the governor, the MTA leadership is fearmongering. I've never seen anything like it,” the mayor said. “There have been some incidents that truly are troubling. You're right. The individual incidents are troubling, and we need to do a lot to make sure there's not even a single one, but we sent 600 more officers into the subways. We've sustained that. We have a huge amount of mental health outreach and homeless outreach now happening in the subways.
What's really going to help the subways get safer is more and more people riding them.”
In February, following a string of stabbings that left two people dead on board the A train, the NYPD moved to send an additional 644 officers to its subway patrol.
However, since then, MTA officials have said the number was too low. The agency had previously requested an additional 1,000 officers be sent in to patrol the transit system, but the NYPD has denied the requests.
Mayor de Blasio has repeatedly taken the NYPD’s side, and on Friday, claimed the MTA’s push for more police is a political strategy.
“What leaders should be doing is saying, ‘Hey, we can do this and we're going to make the difference,’ and they should be rooting for New York City, not trying to undermine the recovery for political reasons, and it's absolutely for political reasons,” de Blasio said.
However, Foye paints a different picture, saying crimes against MTA employees have continued to climb over the last few months.
“I ought to mention that 1,000 transit workers over the last six months have been attacked, assaulted, threatened or spat upon and that's reprehensible and outrageous,” Foye said.
He says employees are concerned for their safety and 75% of customers are also concerned about crime and harassment – and the MTA has an obligation to make the system feel safer.
“The bottom line is we need additional uniformed police officers in the system and mental health resources to deal with the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the number, frankly, of emotionally disturb people on city streets and on subways and that's what we’re asking on behalf of our customers and our employees,” the MTA chair said.
On Thursday, he said he had no immediate plans to increase police patrols in the system.
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