New York's governor and the head of the MTA outlined sweeping new state efforts, including deploying the National Guard, to address surging subway crime in the city on Wednesday, a day after Mayor Eric Adams announced plans to reimplement heightened security measures at select stations across the five boroughs.
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced her new five-point plan alongside MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber at the NYC Transit Rail Control Center on West 54th Street in Manhattan. It aims to use state resources to shore up subway safety.
The plan includes surging state personnel to help with the NYPD bag checks, proposing a bill to allow judges to ban more violent offenders from the system, adding new cameras for conductor cabins, increasing prosecutorial and law enforcement coordination and deploying more outreach teams along with existing Safe Options Support (SOS) ones.
The state personnel surge includes 750 National Guard members and 250 personnel from MTA and State Police, totaling 1,000, and the effort was underway the same day she announced it. The idea, Hochul says, is for people to have a felt sense of safety. They don't just want to hear that the situation is improving, she says.
"Let me be very, very clear. These brazen, heinous attacks on our subway system will not be tolerated," Hochul said. "This will not stand -- not on my watch."
The governor's subway plan is “another unfortunate example of policymaking through overreaction and overreach,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
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“Sound policy making will not come from overreacting to incidents that, while horrible and tragic, should not be misrepresented as a crime wave and certainly don’t call for a reversion to failed broken windows policies of the past,” she said, referring to the policing theory that going after smaller crimes can help stem greater disorder.
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Police in New York have long conducted random bag checks at subway entrances, though passengers are free to refuse and leave the station, raising questions of whether the searches are an effective policing tactic in a subway system that serves over three million riders per day.
Adams did not join Hochul at the podium Wednesday due to what the governor said was a scheduling conflict, but he did appear on four different TV stations and displayed a poster to highlight his focus on repeat offenders.
"We don’t have a surge in crime, we have a surge in recidivism," said Adams.
Wednesday's developments come on the heels of Adams' announcement about enhanced bag checks at certain subway stations starting this week. He didn't immediately say which stations would see enhanced security, but according to City Hall, police will be deploying 94 bag screening teams to 136 subway stations each week.
Some of the state-run bag checks started Wednesday at key transit hubs, including Grand Central, while full deployment is likely to be completed by week's end, officials say. Intelligence, threat assessments and passenger volume will factor into the locations of the NYPD checkpoints, City Hall said. Adams also said the city continues to review metal-detection technology for subway entry, but nothing is imminent.
Overall, crime has dropped in New York City since a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, and killings are down on the subway system. But rare fatal shootings and shovings on the subway can put residents on edge — and a few high-profile cases of subway violence have killed and injured a number of New Yorkers in multiple boroughs as of late.
Last week, a subway conductor was knifed in the neck in Brooklyn, a 27-year-old was slashed in the hand in Manhattan and a 61-year-old man was stabbed in the stomach in the Bronx in three unrelated incidences of transit violence within 36 hours. This week, a man was kicked to the tracks at Penn Station. In the last 24 hours, another rider was victimized in an unprovoked hammer attack at a Queens station, while one was attacked with an umbrella on the Upper East Side.
And about an hour after Hochul's press conference wrapped up, police were investigating a report of an MTA employee in her 30s being struck in the head, possibly with a bottle, as a southbound 4 train was pulling into 149th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The conductor was taken to Lincoln Hospital with minor injuries; the suspect ran off.
A recent trio of homicides also made headlines.
MTA officials, union representatives and elected leaders at all levels of government have decried the violence.
Recent NYPD data paints a concerning picture, with 2023 seeing the highest number of subway assaults since at least 1996. Over that year, there were 570 assaults, marking a slight increase from the previous year and averaging about 1.5 incidents daily.
But NYPD Chief of Transit Michael Kemper says progress is being made. An infusion of 1,000 more officers into the subway system — done in direct response to a January spike that featured a 45% jump in crime, according to Kemper — led to a 17% reduction in crime in February, Kemper said.
That crime spike came after the city ended its police overtime program in the subway at the end of 2023. It was not clear whether the city or state, or some combination, would foot the bill for the estimated $15 million a month that the extra policing costs.
Mayor Adams asked the governor for money to cover those costs, to which Hochul replied that the city is no longer in dire straits financially.
"The mayor has many requests before us in our state legislature. Many, many requests. And I’m glad to see their surpluses and finances are looking better than they had been," said Hochul.
For the year, subway crime is still up 13% compared to 2023, with assaults on the transit system up 11%. NYPD transit police are investigating 86 assaults, up from last year's 77. And three homicides in the first two months of the year mark a troubling start, especially when compared to 2023 at this time, when there were none.
Anthony Izaguirre of the Associated Press contributed to this report.
