How safe are the subways? Hours before a gunman wearing a skull-and-bones mask shot a stranger on the Manhattan N train, Gov. Kathy Hochul assured us they’re much safer than they were last year. Guess what? They are. But they’re nowhere near as safe as they were before the pandemic.
The governor, standing Friday with Mayor Eric Adams at Fulton Street, touted the good news. The surge in subway police, launched just before Hochul’s election, has made a big difference.
With 1,200 extra cops on the subways daily, “we have seen a 16% drop in subway crime” in “a very short time,” Hochul said.
The subways are sure safer than the fall, when New York suffered four subway murders in little more than a month.
Greater safety proves that good policing works. As NYPD Transit Chief Michael Kemper said, arrests are up by nearly two-thirds, fare-evasion enforcement has well more than doubled, and quality-of-life summonses have also doubled.
“If you’re someone looking to do harm to somebody, that’s a powerful deterrent when you know there’s a police officer,” the governor said.
But contrary to another assertion Hochul and the NYPD made, the subways are nowhere near as safe as they were before lockdown — and thus nowhere near safe enough.
Hochul noted that before COVID, the subways had 1.5 felony crimes per 1 million rides. That level nearly doubled to 2.8 crimes per million, but it’s back down to 1.7 felonies per million rides, an “amazing trend.”
The trend is good — but this big picture ignores worrying details.
Hochul is talking about all felony crime, thus lumping in violence — murder, rape, robbery and assault — with nonviolent grand larcenies.
If you look just at violent felonies, we’re still far from normal.
In 2019, the last normal year, the subways had nearly 1.7 billion rides and 2,469 felonies. Of those felonies, 917 were violent — or a rate of serious violent crime per million rides of 0.54.
In 2020, the subways had 928 violent felonies and 639 million rides — a tripled rate of serious violent crime, 1.5 per million rides. In 2021, the rate remained high, at 1.3 violent felonies per million rides.
In 2022? With just over a billion rides, the rate of violent felonies was nearly 1.2 per million rides.
And in only October through December 2022, the months Hochul and Adams are touting? (Broken-down data aren’t yet available for January.) Those three months saw 305 violent felonies, against 311 for the same three months in 2021.
With 278 million subway rides during fall 2022, up from 245 million the previous fall, the rate of violent felonies fell to 1.1 per million last year, down from 1.3 per million in 2021.
So yes, Hochul and Adams are right — 1.1 violent felonies per million rides is better than 1.5, where it was in 2020.
But it’s still twice as high as the 2019 level of 0.54.
You’re not likely to be the victim of a violent subway crime. But you’re more than twice as likely to be such a victim as you were in 2019.
Recent incidents show how hard it is even to keep this up, relying on policing to fill the holes in the rest of the criminal-justice system.
The alleged perpetrator in the first subway murder of 2023, Andre Boyce, was on supervised parole for multiple violent-felony convictions when he fatally shoved a fellow straphanger two weeks ago.
A week later, the teens detained for attacking Fox News weatherman Adam Klotz on the Manhattan 1 train and trying to knock him unconscious were all immediately released.
Three are free with no charges, under changes to the state’s juvenile-justice law. The fourth, an 18-year-old, got a misdemeanor summons.
Just last week, police arrested an alleged shoplifter on the Upper East Side, to see him released with no bail. Hours later, he allegedly assaulted an elderly woman in a nearby subway.
Cops can make the subways safer with their expanded presence, which costs $200 million a year; for now the state is picking up the tab.
But alone, cops can’t make them as safe as they were in 2019. Hochul has to make sure the rest of the state-created criminal-justice system does its job, too.
As Adams put it, “Do we have a long way to go? You’re darned right.”
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.