Have you ever seen the police actually do anything useful in the subways?
What are all those cops doing??
Subway crime is being unsurprisingly used as a political prop again this week in two grotesque ways: one from the Trump administration, which threatened to cut federal funding if the MTA fails to turn over crime statistics — a set of information that is not only mostly publicly available already, but also largely portrays the MTA in a positive light.
“If you want me to take a train, make the train safe, make it clean,” Real World Boston alumnus and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said to a studio full of people who get chauffeured into Midtown. “But if you won't do that, we're gonna pull money." Never mind that some of that money is used to make the subways safer.
The other is from another guy trying to ride the macho-rights wave to a political comeback, Andrew Cuomo, who is running for mayor. He released a big splashy policy pitch this week about “subway safety,” which called for pouring another 4,000 officers into the system. Cops get a firm number, but he vaguely mentions only “increasing the resources” for mental health outreach in the system, and says more details are coming. (We’ll say this a lot over the next few months but: Do! Not! Rank! This! Man! There are many other people running, some of who actually have some new ideas, and none of whom have a demonstrated track record of screwing over the MTA.).
All of that brings us to the question of the headline. Tough-sounding guys like Duffy and Cuomo will bang on safety but they only have one solution in mind: more cops in the system. But in all these years of safety plans and cop surges in the system, have you ever seen a police officer actively diffuse an unsafe situation on a train?
I sure haven’t! I can’t actually recall a single time in nearly 20 years of subway riding, at all hours of day and many parts of the city on assignment, that I’ve seen a uniformed officer step in to help any of the many, many, highly charged or chaotic incidents I’ve commuted my way home through. I’ve never seen a police officer deescalate a spat or tell someone to calm down, you’re freaking everyone out. I’ve never seen them tell someone not to throw their bag of McDonald’s trash on the tracks, and I’ve never seen an officer walk around the J platform at Delancey-Essex telling everyone to put their cigarettes out. Despite all the pledges to crack down on fare-beating, which NYPD officials say is a gateway drug for crime in the system, I have watched in wonder as packs of uniformed officers stood near an open emergency gate and watched fare beaters pour in. (Other fare-beating control methods seem equally doomed: at one Lower Manhattan station last month, a private security guard stood blocking one gate, while on the other side of the turnstiles, a man stood holding the other gate open for tips).
You see police officers standing on platforms, looking bored, you hear about them in the announcements, but how often have you actually seen them be helpful? I’ve seen plenty of civilians step in, separate a scrum or turn down the temperature, or just push a creep off the train, and I’ve been drafted into breaking up a few bloody fights myself. Often this can be done with a bag of chips (not murder, never murder). But we’re not paid or trained for this.
The Trump administration blackmail and the Cuomo proposal are alike in their nature because they’re both demands made by men who like to yell on TV about a transit system they don’t personally use, and frankly can’t fathom why anyone would. They’re also alike because they likely are aiming toward the same outcome: more cops, sent to stand around in the subway system. But, I ask: to do what!! Interactions with police pose very real dangers for many New Yorkers, and that’s another layer to this, but for now we’re just focusing on one simple question: what are all those cops doing??
We know how these kinds of things go because turning the big dial labeled “MORE COPS” is the only solution anyone seems to want to try. For instance, In 2022, after a gruesome subway stabbing, Mayor Eric Adams announced a new subway safety plan that included asking officers to remove people from train cars at the end of the line. Streetsblog recently camped out at the Coney Island station overnight, where a woman was recently burned alive in a random attack, and saw that it just wasn’t happening. NYPD records showed that two thirds of the calls coming out of the station were closed in just 13 seconds.
"You went down there and you saw they're just going through the motion,” a retired veteran NYPD official told Streetsblog. “It's like one of those football practices where they're just walking through the plays, not making contact or doing anything.”
After a spate of attacks in 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul flooded the system with National Guard troops, who stood around with long guns at tourist-heavy subway stations, poking into a tiny fraction of the millions of bags that enter the system every day.
“I’ve heard very little evidence of the NYPD actually finding explosives and stopping violence from happening when using this program,” a civil rights lawyer, told The Groove at the time.
Tim Donnelly
And yet, “more cops” still polls well. A majority of riders the MTA surveyed earlier this winter said there were not enough cops in the system. That’s even though crime rate on the subway overall has plummeted this year, which officials attribute to increased police presence on the platforms, where the NYPD says most crimes occur. But there's another thing that has made the crime rate drop: having more regular, non-armed people fill the trains. As ridership ticked up after congestion pricing went into effect in January, crime incidents ticked down. So naturally, the various reality television alumni of the Trump administration are trying to kill congestion pricing this month.
I lied a little earlier when I said I've never personally seen a police officer intervene in the train. One time I was on an uptown 6 train with a man trying to sleep on the train floor, under a shopping cart full of cans and a Guitar Hero controller, cuddling a live chicken. Eventually the police stopped the train and gently escorted them off. It took 90 blocks for this to happen though, and it was in 2010.
For what it’s worth, if you search for viral videos of NYPD breaking up fights on the subway, NYPD saves the day on the subway, etc., you don’t find much, save for a few cops who help people who fell on the tracks, usually with an assist from bystanders. You can find lots of videos of civilian bystanders stepping in to help on their own.
More often the search produces the video of officers trying to confront a fare beater that somehow ended in a mass shooting. If that’s how they’re going to react to someone not paying a fare that costs less than the price of a single avocado now, I’m not sure I want them intervening in other things. But there has to be a middle ground between doing absolutely nothing and a mass shooting.
The problem is, the things that often make people feel the most unsafe in the system are the visible ones — the unhoused person camped out on a bench or the unwell people following you around —that are tied to mental health issues. And those are the ones, like at the end of the line in Coney Island, that cops seem to prefer to just go through the motions on, or avoid altogether.
Maybe that’s justifiable fear of confrontation, or turning up as a villain in some viral video, or because a lot of cops are just scared kids after all, but clearly more police alone is not solving the root of the problem. The city and state have launched several overlapping efforts to send civilian mental health responders to subway incidents, but some of those are still in pilot form. When the fear goes up, these folks are usually not usually the ones getting a surge of resources.
We have turned the more cops dial all the way up and fare beating still persists, the problem of mentally unwell people living in the system still exists. Maybe it’s time to turn a different dial for a while and see if those folks actually be caught doing something.
The headline here really is a question: What are you seeing out there? Tell us! We'll share our answers in next Thursday's newsletter (subscribe now so you don't miss it).
Comments ()