MTA chief Janno Lieber seems intent on infuriating the entire city.
First came his Saturday celebration of the midnight start of the much-despised $9 toll for “congestion” when entering Manhattan below 60th Street.
Then on Monday, the first day of commuting under the new tolls, he used a “Bloomberg Surveillance” interview to . . . gaslighting about subway crime.
“Some of these high-profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten into people’s minds and made the whole system feel unsafe.”
In people’s heads. Feeling.
Is there anything more insulting than “it’s just your imagination”?
He then doubled down and bragged, “The overall statistics are positive. Last year we even had 12½% less crime than in 2019, the last year before COVID.”
Firstly, passenger numbers are still down over 12½%, so overall crime per capita is still the same upwards.
Moreover, it is assumed that crime is reported as often now as it was then, while the difficulty in comparing crime statistics is one reason why experts call homicides the gold standard for measuring crime: there is always a corpse left behind.
And the subways produce a lot more dead bodies these days: 43 in recent years, since COVID hit in March 2020; it took the prior 20 years to total that many.
Furthermore, the total in 2024 was higher than in the previous two years, so the number of underground murders is not equal drop.
And it got worse: Lieber went on to talk about fare evasion, which is indeed a “gateway crime” of disorder and danger on the subway – but he acted as if spending up to a billion on new turnstiles would make a real difference, as tests show. revealed that they can’t.
The only The answer is better policing and serious prosecution, and not wasting money on bogus technocratic solutions (including the million dollars it will burn on that absurd farebeaters “personas” study).
At a time when New Yorkers are hurting from the MTA’s toll theft, Lieber first talked about the subway’s biggest problem, crime, and then bragged about stupid MTA spending that clearly won’t help.
A word of advice, Janno: Instead of digging a deeper hole, call out the politicians who actually caused this crisis.
