Early Sunday morning, aboard an F train at the Coney Island–Stilwell Avenue station in Brooklyn, New York, a man allegedly set a sleeping woman ablaze and emotionlessly watched her burn to death from the platform. It was a horrific scene, captured on video. Police have arrested a suspect in the case—an illegal migrant from Guatemala. The victim has yet to be identified.
The immolation was the 11th subway murder in New York City this year, surpassing this century’s high point of ten in 2022. The murder occurred hours after a straphanger used a knife in apparent self-defense during a robbery, according to the Queens DA, killing one of his attackers. Between 2000 and 2019, the NYC subways saw an average of 2.2 murders per year. Since 2020, the city has averaged eight murders a year—a nearly four-fold increase—despite significantly lower ridership, which means that the risk of such incidents is even higher than the raw numbers suggest. The gruesome trend, along with rising assaults and ever-increasing levels of fare evasion, has been reflected in recent polling, which shows that somewhere between 22 percent and 45 percent of subway riders report feeling safe in stations and trains, depending on the time of day—less than half, at best.
Despite these realities, many in the media and government have downplayed the city’s recent public safety challenges, even accusing those who express concerns about subway safety of “fearmongering.” For many New Yorkers, these scoldings come across as gaslighting. How can we solve a problem that our leaders won’t even acknowledge?
Consider Governor Kathy Hochul. Within hours of the Sunday homicides, she took to the subways—no doubt with her security detail close behind—for a photo-op and victory lap, touting a recent decline in still-elevated aggregate crime levels, which she attributed to her decision to deploy National Guard troops to the subway system earlier this year.
A sober assessment of the subways’ crime problem makes clear that assigning National Guard troops to major hub stations is not the solution. What’s needed is a comprehensive approach that includes more, and more aggressive, policing, as well as reforms that make it easier to incapacitate repeat criminal offenders and the seriously mentally ill via incarceration or involuntary commitment, respectively. This is precisely the approach I recommended alongside former NYPD commissioner and New York City Transit Police chief Bill Bratton in these pages last summer.
Commissioner Bratton and I ended our piece noting that the major question for subway safety was “whether lawmakers in the state legislature and on the city council are willing to do what’s necessary.” A woman has since been burned alive, and the answer remains unclear. Yesterday’s nightmare raises another, equally troubling question: How much worse will things have to get before policymakers act?
Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images