New York City is home to many cultural treasures, from Broadway and Central Park to the Yankees and Katz’s Deli. One can plausibly argue, though, that what makes the city tick is the massive network of trains that connects its residents to these and all the other attractions found throughout the city’s five dense boroughs—24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. With 472 stations (many with multiple platforms) linking more than 650 miles of tracks running above and below ground, New York’s subways make up the largest public-transit system in North America.
Keeping order in a system so vast is a daunting challenge, and New York City has seen its share of highs and lows in doing so. Shortly after New York’s hustle and bustle came to a Covid-lockdown halt in March 2020, subway ridership plummeted to 8 percent of its pre-pandemic levels within a month. Ridership recovered to 45 percent of pre-pandemic levels in 2021. Yet, four years on from the 2020 low point, the system still logged approximately 25 percent fewer riders than it had before Covid. Troublingly, despite this shrinking passenger base, the underground saw as many homicides between January 2020 and March 2024—34, according to reporting by the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas—as it recorded in the 15 years that preceded 2020. Other crime categories also saw rate increases within the transit system, as crime rose throughout the city post-2020.
Whatever else can be said of the New York City subways, one thing is clear: they’re not as safe as they could be. New Yorkers have noticed, which might partly explain the stubbornly poor ridership numbers. In a 2022 Quinnipiac poll, just 15 percent of New Yorkers said that they felt “very safe” on the subways. This spring, a survey by the Citizens Budget Commission of New York found that 78 percent of residents did not feel safe riding the subway at night last year—a 24-percentage-point increase from 2017.
Addressing such concerns—and they are reflected in poll after poll—will require drawing on lessons learned in the early 1990s, when the city began getting control of an underground crime and disorder problem even worse than today’s. That is, it will require more cops doing more targeted, proactive enforcement of subway rules. Today’s NYPD, with its Transit Bureau led by Chief Michael Kemper, wants to do just that—but much has changed since the approach was successfully implemented more than 30 years ago, when coauthor Bratton first arrived in New York.
Among those changes is the number of police officers at the NYPD Transit Bureau’s disposal. When Bratton began running the New York City Transit Police (then a separate department) in 1990, it had more than 3,700 members—approximately 1,100 more than are permanently assigned to the Transit Bureau today, according to the NYPD. True, on any given day, up to 1,000 additional officers (many not very experienced in subway-specific policing) can be redirected from their usual assignments into the transit system. Even so, this represents a meaningful gap in manpower, especially since New York is home to almost 1 million more residents than the city claimed in 1990. The drop-off becomes even more significant, given increases in ridership (from 929.4 million to 1.15 billion paid rides) and fare-evasion rates (from roughly 7 percent to 13 percent) between 1990 and 2023.
More obstacles include legal reforms, political shifts, and administrative rule changes that have eroded the effects of police enforcement by reducing the likelihood that it will lead to criminal charges or meaningful sanctions. Examples include the bail and discovery reforms of 2020 and “progressive” district attorneys’ refusal to charge certain categories of offenses, including fare evasion. (According to an MTA report last year, because fare-evasion prosecutions have fallen into disfavor, the NYPD now responds to most of these infractions by issuing a civil summons, which, if unanswered, does not result in the issuance of a warrant.)
Further, New York State and City have seen steady declines in the number of inpatient psychiatric beds available for the seriously mentally ill, many of whom make their way into the subways, where they sometimes commit offenses and are at heightened risk of victimization themselves. The city has suffered numerous high-profile violent subway incidents in recent years in which the perpetrator has a history of mental illness.
These changes lie at the heart of what has gone wrong. Reestablishing safety and order within the subways begins with three adjustments. First, fare-evasion enforcement should be simplified and toughened. Second, holes must be plugged in the legal reforms that contribute to the repeat-offender problem. And third, the city’s inpatient psychiatric treatment capacity must be expanded to ensure that those who need help receive it instead of being left to wander the transit system.
Fare-evasion enforcement is the cornerstone of maintaining an orderly and safe transit system. Unfortunately, the city’s fare-evasion problem is massive. Before 2020, the transit system was losing $200 million–$300 million yearly to transit scofflaws. By 2023, that number had more than doubled, to nearly $700 million.
The NYPD has renewed efforts to enforce the fare in recent years, but its efforts lack teeth for several reasons. Start with how complicated the enforcement rules have become. When the successful campaign to clean up the subways was launched in 1990, fare evasion meant an arrest, plain and simple. Most of those arrested were processed near the subway station and released with a desk-appearance ticket and a court date. Among the benefits of this approach were its deterrent effects and the public-safety gains associated with searching arrestees, which often turned up contraband. Such searches are much rarer now because fare-evasion arrests are much rarer. And that means that more crime goes undiscovered—even during interactions based on an observed violation of the law.
Fare evasion, in other words, has been functionally decriminalized. Most of those caught jumping the fare receive a Transit Adjudication Bureau (TAB) summons—a civil summons. If that summons is not paid, no warrant is issued. TAB summonses are the default response for those who can produce identification and have no history of offending within the transit system. If the person stopped for fare evasion has received at least three TAB summonses within the last two years or has at least three unpaid TAB summonses within the last eight years, he is then considered a “TAB Recidivist” and is given a criminal summons—which, if unanswered, will result in the issuance of a warrant. But even here, arrest is on the table only if the suspected fare evader is what’s known as a “Transit Offender.” To make it into this category takes some doing: you must be on parole or probation and have at least three unsealed fare-evasion arrests in the last three years or one or more unsealed arrests within the transit system for murder, a sex offense, robbery, felony assault, or grand larceny within the last ten years or, within the last three years, an unsealed transit arrest for a felony-weapons offense, assault, menacing, harassment, reckless endangerment, larceny, possession of stolen property, criminal mischief, jostling, forgery, fraud, or unlawful use of a credit card.
Sound confusing? If you’re wondering why the fare-evasion rules have become so convoluted, part of the answer likely stems from discomfort (among police critics and politicians pushing criminal-justice reforms) with proactive policing of public-order offenses—a discomfort that has undergirded the decriminalization movement in New York and other cities.
A principal objection registered by many of those skeptical of police-driven order maintenance on the subways is that the offenses and rule violations to which officers respond are nonviolent and (supposedly) driven by poverty. Police should focus on the big problems, they say. But how do you uncover the big problems? It’s not as if the city’s gangbangers and robbery crew members wear their guns in visible holsters. Drug dealers generally don’t lay their crack vials out on display tables. Sexual assailants don’t send out press releases ahead of their attacks. What anti-policing activists consistently fail to appreciate is that police often uncover “serious” crimes through an interaction triggered by exactly the kinds of violations that they want cops to ignore.
This past spring, during ride-alongs with NYPD transit officers (one plainclothes unit and one of the Department’s Transit Response Teams), coauthor Mangual observed firsthand this dynamic—and, in the process, the second area in need of substantial adjustment in New York City: the legal and administrative policy reforms of recent years, specifically designed to make it less likely that arrests lead to prosecutions, that prosecutions lead to pretrial detentions or convictions, and that convictions lead to meaningful sanctions. The result: many more chronic offenders walking New York’s streets and circulating in the subways.
During the first ride-along, which lasted a few hours, Mangual watched officers take two wanted (and violent) felons out of the transit system and off the street during an interaction triggered by one of the offenders riding his bicycle in the station, a violation of subway rules. The observation of that violation by a single uniformed officer meant that he could detain the individual and run his ID, which produced a “hit.” The bicyclist was wanted for a serious felony. Once the handcuffs came out, the wanted man’s two friends walked over to ask questions. The uniformed officer noticed a knife in one of their pockets—a crime. Without letting on, the officer calmly told the friends that he would talk to them as soon as he walked his prisoner over to the transit district house a few steps away. That was when an officer from the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information—who was accompanying Mangual on the ride-along and was not yet aware of the interaction that the armed suspect was having with the uniformed officer—also spotted the knife in the young man’s pocket. He alerted members of the undercover team that we were observing, and they moved in to make the second arrest. After running the second suspect’s ID, it turned out that he, too, was wanted and was also a chronic offender, with more than a dozen prior arrests and multiple open cases. Yet here he was in the subway system, carrying a weapon.
The pattern continued during the three or four hours that Mangual shadowed a Transit Response Team a few days later. That team made several arrests of wanted and armed suspects—including a convicted felon in his thirties nabbed with an unlawfully possessed and concealed firearm, discovered during an interaction that began when officers noticed him using a student MetroCard—the city issues these cards free to qualifying K–12 students—to swipe into the 125th Street station at Lenox Avenue in Central Harlem.
What Mangual found remarkable about the arrests was that virtually none of the arrestees taken into custody put up much of a fight. The two individuals collared following the bicycle violation, for example, acted almost as if they were sure that their arrests wouldn’t be more than a minor disruption in their lives. It was hard not to contrast their interactions with that of an alleged fare evader encountered by the plainclothes officers just minutes earlier, when the scofflaw, a young man seemingly in his early thirties, jumped the turnstile after first peering down the platform to ensure that no uniformed police were in sight. The would-be fare evader was wearing a Burberry polo shirt tucked into a crisp pair of khaki pants held up by a Burberry belt. (Poverty didn’t seem to be an issue.) When the undercover officers identified themselves and asked him to produce an ID, he bolted, prompting a short scuffle that caused him and a few officers to fall to the ground. Surprisingly, the man, who was briefly detained before leaving with a summons, had only one prior run-in with the law—more than a decade ago.
It seems reasonable to ponder: Was the resistance of the stylish turnstile jumper based on his belief that getting caught would mean real trouble for him, an assumption drawing on his past experience—back when the NYPD had a tougher posture?
In all, the officers whom Mangual followed for roughly six hours over the course of two days arrested 12 individuals, several wanted for serious offenses. Those individuals had a combined total of 141 prior arrests—an average of nearly 12 each. Nearly all the arrests grew out of interactions based on what depolicing advocates would call “minor” infractions—underscoring the value of public-order enforcement for public safety. That so many of those arrestees had previously offended so many times also illustrates a recidivism problem that consistently frustrates the efforts of the NYPD both above and below ground.
The potential public-safety benefits of an arrest vanish if arrestees are reliably allowed to waltz out of the courthouse and back into the transit system, where they had just broken the law. That is particularly true for the chronic offenders responsible for a disproportionate share of the crime underground. According to data shared by Mayor Eric Adams with NY1 in March, just “38 individuals arrested for assault in the transit system [in 2023] were linked to 1,126 additional crimes across the city.”
New Yorkers are all too familiar by now with what Adams described. Examples abound. Last Christmas, a man with 17 prior arrests, characterized by law-enforcement officials as “emotionally disturbed,” was booked for stabbing two teenage girls inside Grand Central Terminal. In February, a viral video showed a cellist struck over the head with a bottle during a performance inside the 34th Street Herald Square station. The female assailant was swiftly released, despite eight prior arrests; she was rearrested for an alleged theft days later. In March, a man reportedly having “mental-health issues” was accused of shoving his girlfriend in front of a moving train. He was on parole from prison, where he had served time briefly for a brutal home invasion and stabbing of a woman in 2017. In May, a man with 25 prior arrests, according to the New York Post, was arrested for an unprovoked assault on a woman and granted supervised release the next day.
The goal for policymakers should be to plug the holes in the city’s boat. A good start would be reworking the state’s controversial bail reform by allowing judges to consider the risk of repeat offense when deciding whether to release a pretrial defendant. Another would be to make the much needed changes to the state’s overly burdensome rules regarding prosecutorial compliance with “discovery”—the process by which information (irrespective now of whether it’s relevant to the case) is acquired and shared with defense attorneys. A saner discovery regime might help encourage some prosecutors to rethink their prior commitments to non-prosecution of certain offenses.
Note that many of the above examples of violence committed by repeat offenders mention the mental health of the alleged perpetrators. Anyone riding the subways even infrequently will be able to recount moments in which he came across individuals who were clearly unwell—having a loud argument with someone who isn’t there, urinating in a station elevator, or threatening terrified passengers with violence. This is not a new problem. As noted in a Manhattan Institute report, a 1992 study of the 49 subway pushing incidents that occurred during 1975–91 found that 19 of the 20 offenders referred for a psychiatric evaluation were “psychotic, and 13 (65 percent) were homeless.” That study also found that most offenders had “extensive histories of psychiatric hospitalization and several prior arrests and convictions, often for violent crimes.”
The problem of subway violence committed by the mentally ill appears to have worsened in recent years. In 2020 alone, the system saw 26 incidents of riders getting pushed into oncoming trains or onto the tracks—a figure representing more than half the incidents reported between 1975 and 1991.
This is almost certainly related to the sharp decline in the number of inpatient psychiatric beds in New York State and City. Between mid-2014 and December 2023, that number declined by nearly 1,000, with just under 400 of those beds located in community hospitals and the rest in state psychiatric facilities. More than half the lost beds (506) were in New York City. If that doesn’t sound like a lot in a city of 8 million, remember Adams’s point that many of the issues underground—as aboveground—are driven by a small group of individuals committing a huge share of the offenses.
Building out mental-health treatment capacity must be part of the response to the problem of subway crime.
The good news is that we’re still not very deep into this period of resurgent crime and disorder. An urgent push to reprioritize the public-safety strategies and policing tactics that have proved successful can go a long way toward restoring order and safety. New Yorkers seem ready for it. Mayor Adams and his NYPD are also on board. The only question is whether lawmakers in the state legislature and on the city council are willing to do what’s necessary.
Top Photo: Addressing voters’ concerns about subway safety will require more cops doing targeted proactive enforcement. (4k-Clips/Alamy Stock Photo)
