Mayor Promises “Police Omnipresence” and Potentially New Metal Scanners in Subway Stations

By Yehudit Garmaise

On the subway, a new violent assault seems to appear in the news every day, even though additional police officers are patrolling underground.

 “What are you going to do about it?” Mayor Eric Adams was asked this morning at his weekly press conference at City Hall. 

Before telling reporters his plan for subway safety, the mayor tried to downplay New Yorkers’ perception that the subways are dangerous.

“We have more than 4 million riders on our subway system a day, but we [only] have an average of 6 felonies a day,” the mayor said. “We want to get rid of every one of those six felonies: every one of them. Many of the attackers you are seeing are dealing with severe mental health illnesses.”

To address the many visibly disturbed New Yorkers at subway stations, the mayor said his administration has “put into place outreach workers, law enforcement, and others who go in and try to be proactive and not reactive. 

“Our position has always been: let’s not wait until someone does something harmful to themselves or to others.”

Adams will continue to work to ensure that police officers at subway stations, “have an ‘omnipresence: a very visible presence of that uniform,” he said. “That is part of the police officers who are on 12-hour tours on transit. We need to make sure we get a greater omnipresence of officers out there.”

When the mayor rides the subway, he said, they say, “’Eric, nothing makes us feel safer than seeing that officer at the booths, walking through the system, walking through the trains.’ That is what we want our officers to do. 

“We are going to continuously make sure we have our officers move as much as possible to show a greater visible presence to deal with how people are feeling in the subway system right now.”

To pay the additional police officers underground Adams said he “is always asking for more money from the state” after the money from the Subway Safety Plan sadly “ran out.”

Regardless of the funding he gets, Adams said, “We must make sure that our everyday practices find solutions to get the omnipresence we need and go after those bad people on our subway system who are committing crimes.”

In terms of possible new technology the NYPD could use at subway systems, the mayor said while hospitals and schools are currently using large metal detectors, those scanners are not only too “large and intrusive,” but they only identify sharp metal objects, such as razors, knives, scissors.

“To me, that is a low bar. I want to our scanners to able to identify a gun,” said the mayor, who has put out challenges to at least two technology companies he called, “promising.”

“We are seeing some promising technology that I think in the next year, we are going to really see something that people thought was not possible,” said the mayor, who added that he will not roll out any new scanners that don’t “meet our standards.”

“We are not going to give New Yorkers false promises,” Adams said. “We know people feel unsafe, and we want to make sure that the balance of the actual safety matches what they are feeling.”