The New York City subway is getting a show of force:
Hundreds of National Guard soldiers and State Police officers will patrol the New York City subway platforms and check riders’ bags beginning this week, Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Wednesday.
....Subway safety is a constant concern in New York City, where the system’s recovery is critical to the city’s rebound from the pandemic, and public officials can be as sensitive to the perception that mass transit is dangerous as they are to an actual rise in crime.
I don't live in New York City or use its transit system, but naturally I got curious about this. Is there an actual rise in crime on the subway or only the perception of one?
It turns out that transit crime has been flat over the past two years while ridership has increased about 20%. Here's what that looks like:
The trendline of transit crime is down 13% over the past two years, and the most recent week had nearly the lowest crime rate of the entire period. Two felonies per million rides seems pretty safe to me!
Note that these figures are for all transit, including subways and buses, because that's the way New York City reports things. But it's very likely that crime trends are pretty similar for both.
Could tourist season be just around the corner?
Nothing makes me feel more secure than seeing the National Guard deployed in subway stations.
“Crime” = “visible disorder” + “publicized horrific events”
Where “visible disorder” = sum of all (“unwashed people” X “non-white people”) + level of “lack of maintenance and routine cleaning”
And “publicized horrific events” = sum of all (“murders/rapes/violence caught on video” X “number of viewers who were shown video” ^ “number of Fox News segments that politicians watched”)
“Crime” in most voters minds does not equal whatever actual crimes the FBI or state police agency compiled and reported during any given time period.
This is why “crime” is perceived as low in red counties even if the actual violent crimes-per-million-people is high. There’s usually no video of it, and even when there is, all the faces are generally housed white people in bucolic (well-maintained) settings so it’s dismissed as a one-off “random” event. Whereas, cities have cameras everywhere so most horrific crimes have video to splash across the airwaves… and in the background viewers can see lots of unwashed and brown faces on the bystanders standing in what generally looks like rundown settings, thanks to a century’s worth of states and the Feds not investing as much per capita in urban areas vis-a-vis ritual areas, due in turn to Senate malapportionment. So cities become “hellholes of crime” no matter what they actually do to combat it, while rural areas get a free pass on it unless it’s super-horrific.
Another big factor is the rightwing media hypes crimes in blue cities and the national media plays along to look unbiased. The mainstream “liberal” media can also hype crime without rightwing propaganda driving them. Remember the stranger danger and satanic panic of the 80s? Salon calls it “trickle down fear”.
https://www.salon.com/2023/10/21/what-80s-kids-also-remember-on-stranger-danger-satanic-panic-and-generations-of-trickle-down-fear/
This is part of what I call the NextDoor-fication of, well, anywhere cursed with NextDoor. As anyone who visits here regularly knows, crime is orders of magnitude lower than it was 10, 20 and (even more drastically) 30 years ago. Yet, in my own deep blue area of LA, all people on NextDoor seem to do (beyond talking about lost pets or traffic) is share stories about rampant crime.
I assume that this holds true in NY and elsewhere. A scared populace is an easily manipulated one.
I’d also add that we tend to visit NY a few times a year, always ride the subway and have never felt unsafe on it (well, certainly not since the ‘80s or early ‘90s).
Also perhaps important that many crimes that aren't felonies can be upsetting. I've only used the New York subway several times, all during a week's visit two years ago. it was great and we saw no problems. On the other hand, there was a fatal shooting at a subway station we had intended to use. d
Didn't make us apprehensive, but of course we frequently risk death on LA freeways without concern too. You need to pay attention no matter where you are.
Pretty sure fatal shootings are felonies in NYC... so I'm not sure your anecdote matches up well with the rest of your point. An "upsetting" non-felony crime would be something more like public urination or graffiti, both of which are way down in NYC compared to 30 years ago. Or fare evasion, which progressives successfully got mostly decriminalized, and now is becoming super rampant... it's distressing to have paid your fare and then feel like a chump watching a dozen people not pay at all. This is about the only thing I wish transit authorities would do something about, but I doubt the National Guard is going to be enforcing fare policy.
Sorry I was not clear. Of course fatal shootings (or almost all shootings period) are felonies. The chart showing crime on the subway going down was for felonies. An increase in misdemeanors can be a serious problem even if felonies are going down, it seems to me.
I live in Brooklyn and work in midtown. I don't track it, but my guess is that I take 10-12 subway rides per week on average. With the exception of March 2020 - Julyish 2021, I've been doing this since August 2007 (with less frequent but still common subway use the four years before that.
Obviously, my experience is anecdotal. I'm not looking to contradict hard data. I'm just sharing what my experience is.
I do not perceive any material safety concern that is elevated compared to most of my time living in NYC. There are isolated incidents of shady-looking characters on the platform, but that's nothing new, and I've never seen any physical violence (other than the standard "hey, you pushed me" "no, you pushed ME" that happens on a crowded train).
That being said, I do perceive *disorder* on the subway to be up noticeably. This comes in two flavors.
First, the amount of fare evasion I see regularly happening is absolutely crazy. I'm used to the occasional kid jumping the turnstile, but this is on a completely different level. And it's not just disadvantaged people - plenty of young (and even not-so-young) professionals who are clearly on their way to knowledge-economy jobs are regularly committing class A misdemeanors. I have seen the same older, well-dressed, college-professor-esque looking guy crawl under the turnstile several times, once literally wearing a tweed jacket. This robs the MTA of an important source of funding, and it makes me feel like a chump for paying, to boot.
The other is that there is a noticeable increase in the number of homeless people on the train. This has always been a thing, but I perceive it to be much more common now than it used to be, especially at rush hour, where it used to be extremely rare. I think this is consistent with a rise in homelessness generally in NYC, along with our shelter system being overwhelmed.
Both of these trends are less than a year old, and my perception is that they are getting worse as time goes on. i don't know if calling up the National Guard is going to help (I think we've got a better shot at fare evasion), but I do think the government should be doing something to address these issues.
Just wanted to share this perspective as a fairy standard liberal. I'm always skeptical of the Fox News take on NYC generally and subways in particular, but things are different right now than they were even a year ago.
You know, I've ridden on the NYC subways. They did not strike me as dangerous so much as smelly and dirty and full of colorful characters.
Now, I grew up in the country and dealt with "smelly and dirty" every day. I stepped around cow and horse poop and got chicken poop on my boots. Daily. So the subways seem much, much better than that.
But I can definitely see "there's so much crime!" as a reason to give to not go on the subway. People share stories for a reason, and they get to sharing stories of "crime on the subways" and yeah, the city gov better squash that fast.
Well, Paul Krugman certainly seems to think they're safe enough to use them regularly. Gee, who am I gonna believe 😉
Also remember that Hochul is an upstate New York Democrat. The kind that spent years boxing out other Democrats by colluding with Republicans.
Among other things, being Tough on (poor people) Crime by solving nonexistent problems with big, visible displays of force is exactly the kind of thing she gets off on.
When people feel crowded they feel crime is going on?
Yes. Partially because crowded places invariably always have higher raw numbers of crimes recorded - it's hard to rack up, say, 500 murders a year in a town of 1,000 vs. a city of 10,000,000 - and most people don't adjust for per capita. And partially because crowded areas themselves offer lots of distractions and obstructions so that criminals can operate without being seen as much - stealing someone's wallet out of their pocket in a tightly packed and loud subway car where nobody can see the floor below everybody's waistlines is going to be easier than trying to do it on a quiet bus with 4 people on it all sitting far apart from each other. Crowded places do enable crimes... but it's just not true that uncrowded places have zero crimes, unless they get so uncrowded that nobody but yourself is there. Alas, far too many people live in suburban and rural bubbles, where most of the day they actually aren't in contact with any strangers whatsoever - they're in their homes, or they're in their self-contained cars, or they're in their office cubicle, or they're in a vast sprawling parking lot or whatever - and so they have no sense of proportionality when dealing with the inevitability of some crime existing in the more crowded places they rarely visit.
Um, the time I got pocket-picked in NYC I was on a bus...
I love it when Democratic politicians amplify BS crises ginned up in the fever swamps of the right. Rampant crime and nasty immigrants are hear to KILL YOU!! Be afraid, very afraid. Great job Hochul!
Seems like an awful lot of the same sort of Cope that we saw wrt to San Francisco voting yesterday...
The issue is not whether the League of Extreme Leftists Across America thinks the NY subway is just dandy, it whether the actual NYC population thinks this. Because if they do, then Hochul's choices are
- do nothing (and watch another segment of the voting population decide that, maybe this Trump fellow has the right idea) OR
- try to get ahead of the sentiment.
But yes, we all know, a certain segment of the US population (amply represented on this site) cares more about calling anyway to the right of Pol Pot a racist than they do about a possible Trump win in November.
Purity Uber Alles – it ain't just for the Germans.
And they aren't going to get some stupid technicality like what happened in SF on Tuesday change their tactics.
Remember WHY Nixon won in 1968? Yeah... I expect a LOT of that this summer...
Nah, we don't want to call the four people to the right of Pol Pot racist. We want to call the entire republican party racist.
given the importance of the pandemic in this discourse, I would really have preferred a plot of like 2018 to the present.
What would that tell you about relative need to militarize the MTA today?
The crime increase that the media has obsessed over was a covid factor but the media isn’t reporting on the fact that last year we saw the sharpest drop in crime rate ever. Either Hochul doesn’t know the facts or she is reacticing to public perception to cover herself politically.
It would tell us if things are or are not better/safer than before an event which we know significantly affected ridership.
"Two felonies per million rides seems pretty safe to me!"
Really KD? With ridership of 3.2 million per day on the Subway and 1.4 million for busses, that's over 9 felonies per day. What counts in most people's minds is the risk of an assault. Here is another local prospective:
https://abc7ny.com/subway-crime-nyc-statistics-assault/14381702/
My understanding is that subway ridership is still about 70% of pre pandemic levels. I live about an hour north of NYC but grew up in Brooklyn.
Convincing the average capita that they are safer because the quantity of capita had increased more than the thing they fear is a very tall order.
If I lived in NYC I would be demanding Hochul's resignation (obviously Adams is also incompetent and should resign but that's not new news).
"check rider's bags": That sounds a lot like illegal search to me.
I was curious and looked into it a bit. Looks like in January 2024 the subways had significantly more crime than January 2023 including some high profile cases that got a lot of coverage. In response the police increased their presence and subway crime in February 2024 was lower than February 2023. So that does follow the chart Kevin included. Why did the governor act now? Presumably to take credit for the already decreased crime rates.
I wasn't able to confirm this, but one person talked like the decrease in subway crime in 2023 was due to some police program that was financed in 2023, but then ended. The implication being that the police presence in the subways dropped in January at the same time as the spike. Still not sure if that is what happened.
It also does look like subway crime in 2023 was definitely higher than before the pandemic, but none of the articles I saw gave complete statistics.