Mayor’s Subway Safety Teams Make some Headway, Have a Long Way to Go

By Yehudit Garmaise

The headlines regarding subway crime remain disturbing, however, after arresting 143 people in the city’s subways and removing 455 people from trains and stations, the teams of NYPD officers, homeless outreach workers, and social workers sent out by Mayor Eric Adams on Feb. 21 are making progress in cleaning up the city’s public transit system.

Mayor Adams’ Safety Subway Plan aims to crack down on subway crime by enforcing rules and also helping and relocating the many New Yorkers who live and sleep on the trains and stations by providing mental health resources, food banks, hospitals, shelters, and other temporarily housing.

In the first week of the launch of the Subway Safety Plan, City Hall said outreach teams connected 22 people with shelters.

The many homeless people who take refuge in the subways and stations say they do so because the streets and city shelters are more dangerous, a formerly homeless New Yorker said at the Feb. 18 press conference.

“We are not going to wait until someone shoves a passenger onto the tracks,” Mayor Adams said. “We are being proactive, and we are going to engage New Yorkers who are unhoused and dealing with crises.”

The plan seeks not only to crackdown on crack and disallow homelessness, but to enforce a code of civilized behavior that disallows public drug use, smoking, sleeping, and other anti-social behavior that disturbs passengers and creates a sense of chaos, lawlessness, and disorder.

One frequent subway rider who reports frequent disturbing and inappropriate behavior in subway stations in Brooklyn pointed out that she noted that as many as 50% of riders do not pay their fares.

“Just requiring payment at the turnstiles would greatly decrease the number of people who make trouble on the trains,” one Brooklyn subway rider said.