Subway Thefts Increase by 50%, NYPD says

     by Yehudit Garmaise

     Although the NYPD reports crime slowly decreasing in general in New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is expected to announce a 50% uptick in thefts that targeted passengers on the city’s transit system.

     While in August, the subway system saw 64 acts of theft in September, the number of thefts shot up to 96, according to the NYPD.

     Similarly, while the NYPD recorded August: 44 subway robberies, which are acts of theft that involve a threat of force, in September, the number of subway robberies jumped to 52.

     The MTA does not seem worried, however.

     “The stats show what New Yorkers coming back to transit in record numbers know: subways are safer than most places in the city,” MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said in a statement. “Crime came down this summer, and has stayed low, because the NYPD surged officers and the MTA put cameras in every station.”

     After a frightening surge of shovings, slashings, and other assaults that harmed subway commuters in May, such violent crimes have sadly persisted.

      In September, although the MTA reported no murders, rapes, or burglaries last month, felony assaults on the transit system dropped, from August, by just one: from 35 to 34 incidents.

      After prominent labor leaders, whose members felt unsafe commuting to wrote, wrote Mayor de Blasio to ask for an increased police presence on the subways and then-MTA Interim Transit President Sarah Feinberg repeatedly accused the mayor of “negligence on the issue,” the mayor first added 500, then 250 more police on duty on the subways during the morning and afternoon rush hours, which both the MTA and city cited as reducing the crime rates in both June and July.

     Those police officers on subways and in subway stations, however, are not readily visible to the public transit users, who wonder uneasily where those police officers are stationed.

     In May, however, MTA workers, who also wondered where those extra police officers were, conducted an observational study that revealed that police officers were seen in only 14%, on average, of the city's subway stations.

     On May 13, MTA employers observed police officers at only 1% of stations visited on May 13, and on May 21, observers noticed a police presence at 31% of the city’s subway stations.

     When BoroPark24 asked the mayor at the time whether he would consider stationing uniformed police officers more visibly in the subways to deter crime, he seemed open to it, but police are still rarely seen.

     This morning, when a reporter asked Mayor de Blasio how he planned to address the surge in subway crime, the mayor responded by saying that "overall, we have seen a lot of success with the NYPD presence in the subways: but we will keep refining it.

     "We surged NYPD officers into the subways over the last year at the highest levels we have seen in decades," said the mayor, who added that the addition of extra NYPD police officers "had a huge impact."

     "We will keep doing that whenever we need to and wherever we need to. If there is a particular pattern of a particular type of crime, sometimes that is handled in a 'pinpoint fashion:' that is Precision Policing.

     "But, we will make the deployments, as needed, to address any trend."