State Police, National Guard in Subway is Misguided
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
New Yorkers should rightfully be concerned about recent, isolated acts of violence on the subway system. But we should be equally unnerved by the militarization of the public transit system, a strategy that would have been politically taboo just a few years ago as promoting inequality, insecurity and injustice.
The surge of 750 National Guardsmen and 250 New York State Police sends the wrong message to New Yorkers, and the revival of random bag searches for weapons feels over the top. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams – who put no time limit on the surge – must be mindful of history: New York City law enforcement crackdowns typically unfairly target Black and Latino/x young men.
We can be fairly sure State Police and National Guard troops won’t be searching brief cases on Wall Street, tourists’ bags near Madison Avenue or backpacks on Staten Island. Besides, bag checks don’t promote a feeling of safety like increased police presence does, which has the added benefit of being less intrusive. Still another problem with bag checks, besides ensuring that they are conducted fairly and without bias, is that they will very likely trigger litigation.
Ultimately, the way out of this mess involves New York City Transit Police finding ways to increase their visibility on the subway platforms and subway cars, but without a mandate for biased enforcement that disproportionately targets low-income neighborhoods for non-violent crimes of poverty. Uniformed officers on patrol breed confidence, especially among second- and third-shift workers who use the system at night. Reviving the bag search policy sounds great, but may not turn the tide as much as antagonize the innocent.
The surge also obscures the fact, rightfully trumpeted by Mayor Adams, that New York is one of the safest big cities in America. Indeed, in a post-pandemic revival, more than 50 million Americans visited the Big Apple last year. Yet another example of facts being overshadowed and perception becoming reality.
In January, NYC Transit saw a 45-percent spike in serious incidents, largely driven by theft. Another major factor in the highest-profile subway crimes is people with mental illness roaming mass transit. How else do we explain the rash of random, unprovoked attacks and shoving incidents? If there is any upside to the surge in law enforcement officers in the subway system, it is the expectation that they will be accompanied by teams of social and mental services personnel. Because the transit system needs the help of mental health professionals as much as it needs State Police and the National Guard.
New York City is not alone in expanding police tactics and powers to halt crime and fare evasion. Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., have all signed off on “hardening” initiatives to stop fare beaters. This represents a stark reversal from 2020, when Blue State progressives fueled a national effort to curb police powers and scale back law enforcement budgets following the murder of George Floyd.
The get-tough-on-crime approach in Democratic strongholds is influenced by the false narrative of Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters that American big cities are a dystopic wasteland. It is part of their years-long strategy to frighten voters into supporting Trump by telling them that terrible things are happening in Democratic-led cities.
We’ve reached the point of embracing troops and State Police in the subways because, in part, of the folly of believing Trump’s narrative as well as the NYPD’s focus on lingering around subway station turnstiles to stop fare evaders. Of course, police maintain that the system’s loss of income is not the only concern. They say there is a strong correlation between fare evasion and disorderly conduct on the platforms and trains, and even dangerous, life-threatening illegal activity.
To combat both problems, last year the agency and approximately 3,500 NYPD officers who oversee the subway launched an all-out war on fair evasion, with New York City spending a record $155 million in overtime pay as part of the crackdown, the Gothamist reported. The crackdown resulted in a roughly 250-percent increase in summonses and 160-percent jump in arrests over the prior year, according to police records.
Yet Black and brown New Yorkers bore the brunt of it, accounting for more than 90 percent of those arrested. As for “major crimes” on the subway, the police reported a mere two percent drop.
Money does matter, though. The MTA’s operating revenue is a fraction of what it was before the pandemic. Fare evasion is the agency’s Enemy No. 1 (disclosure: I’m a member of the MTA board), but the solution cannot be yet another return to racially disproportionate enforcement. A smarter fix is to increase knowledge of and eligibility for the Fair Fares program, which halves the cost of transit for low income New Yorkers.
For the latest law enforcement gambit, however, the price tag – both economic and the impact on New York City’s spirit – is still unknown.