Transit Crime is Down Says Mayor Adams but Subway Riders Don’t Agree

Mayor Eric Adams recently announced that subway crime is falling. Indeed, during the first half of 2024, NYPD says that subway crime is down 7.8 percent compared to 2023.

Going further back, it’s claimed that subways today boast the lowest daily crime rate in 14 years, and the third lowest daily crime rate in 28 years. That’s when the Compstat crime stats used to comply the data was just a baby.

Whatever these decontextualized numbers really mean, the Mayor’s message is clear: The blue surge that he made after a brief surge in crime earlier this year is working with 1,000 extra NYPD officers below ground and augmented by National Guard troops from Gov. Kathy Hochul

Straus News went to the crossroads of the world, Times Square, 42nd Street at 7th and Broadway, to find out what everyday subway passengers—people who don’t have cars, or police details to accompany them— themselves think.

Gregory Acosta, a New York City pastor who takes the subway regularly believes the system harbors more people with mental health issues than ever before, especially since the pandemic.

“That’s the center of the whole problem,” Acosta noted. “A lot of people with mental problems use the subway, and you don’t feel safety... We are supposed to feel safety, and people come from other countries and spend money to visit our city, they need to feel safety.”

A lack of enforcement on substance abuse was another common complaint among those interviewed.

James Johnson, an East Harlem resident since the 1950’s, has the no-nonsense insight of a septuagenarian. If anything, the elder Johnson averred, the subways feel like they’re continually getting worse. His solution, bring back the hard-nosed cops of his youth. “It needs to be rebooted... Bring back some of the old police that were here years ago. Those guys were the guys that really maintained order in every facet of New York City. You have crime everywhere, a bunch of misfits everywhere, but it was much safer. I grew up in East Harlem, Spanish Harlem.”

Johnson went on, explaining the impact of what the predominantly Irish-American NYPD— with some other officers of different racial, religious, and ethnic groups mixed in—of his youth had on his community.

“Them police would kick your ass, but one thing about them police. If they see your mother or sister walking around at night, they would ask you, ‘where you going?’ ‘Oh, I’m going home.’ ‘Where’s your husband?’ ‘I don’t have a husband.’ They would escort you home.”

As for the mentally ill, Johnson brought the discussion to the street level by using the term “bug,” a now rare, if not quite archaic term for a crazy person. In Johnson’s youth, many crazy people went to the “bughouse.” Now, it seems, they’re everywhere, he said.

“The mental illness thing just got out of hand. It wasn’t like that before, every block had a bug. Every block in New York had a bug or two. ‘Oh that’s the neighborhood bug, don’t pay her no mind.’ Now you get maybe each block has 12 bugs, it’s like they went to a bug academy or bug school.”

Johnson concluded his history lesson by shouting out the 23rd Precinct up in Harlem, as well as Benjamin Ward, who served as New York City’s first Black Police Commissioner from January 1984 to October 1989.

One city worker who requested anonymity shared his thoughts on the city’s inability to effect substantive change in the subways— or anywhere, really.

“It doesn’t feel dangerous to me,” the public servant proclaimed, “But I don’t believe the crime rate anywhere in New York, even the subway has dropped. Things don’t change.”

Asked how she feels as a senior riding the subway, Upper East Side resident, Nancy Wight, had the sass and resolve of an old school New Yorker: “I just stay aware and read my Times [...] I mind my business, ya’ know?”