The alarming rise in subway crime over the past five years has New Yorkers on edge.
Attacks are up 56% this year compared to 2019, and after decades of underground murders averaging one or at most two per year, we’ve had ten so far in 2024 – double the number of murders in 2023 .
So it was great to hear on Monday that the City Council would be holding a special hearing to address the issue of subway safety.
Except: the hearing wasn’t about rampant crime, but about the only kind of bodily harm on the subway that is completely avoidable — because it’s completely self-inflicted.
“Subway surfing” is a craze in which passengers, almost always adolescents, climb onto elevated lines on subway trains and “surf” on them, balancing on trains that can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour.
This clearly dangerous activity has claimed the lives of six children and seriously injured another seven this year alone.
Subway surfing is clearly no joke. In early November, a girl fell from the 2 train in Harlem and lost an arm and a leg.
Creepy images of her arm lying on top of a traffic light should be enough warning to would-be copycats that this game is a bad idea.
In response, the MTA, the schools, the Department of Youth and Community Development and the NYPD have gone all out with subway ads, a social media campaign and school posts to spread the message.
Police are using drones to identify subway surfers in real time and have arrested 181 of these crazy daredevils so far this year.
But leave it to the City Council to protest, moan and grumble about the way New Yorkers have failed their youth.
Public Defender Jumaane Williams said he was “concerned about increased arrests of youth” and was especially concerned about the “increased use of surveillance technology, especially given the NYPD’s concerns about the NYPD’s history of surveilling New Yorkers.”
“I often ask myself: Would I listen to you as a young person?” Williams pondered during his testimony. “I’m not sure I have the full answer to that.”
He concluded his remarks with a predictable call to “expand resources for youth, including mental health services and safe, engaging after-school programs.”
Councilor Althea Stevens continued this line of research. “Why are young people doing this and not participating in our programs? Are our programs not interesting enough?” she was worried.
“We have a responsibility to tackle the root causes. . . including lack of involvement in activities.”
The left’s focus on “programs” and “activities” obviously supports their real goal: higher social spending – the eternal progressive answer to every problem.
New York City offers 900 after-school programs, all free or nearly free, in addition to dozens of sports teams and clubs, and spends billions of dollars maintaining parks, playgrounds, pools and recreation centers so kids have something better to do than play in traffic or stagger on the train.
Nevertheless, we have failed in our ‘responsibility’ to ‘engage’ our youth.
Subway surfing is a problem, and kids who do that should probably be introduced to the girl who lost two limbs falling off the train to scare them.
But what’s really telling is that the City Council rushed to convene a hearing on this issue — which, frankly, it can’t do much about — while studiously ignoring the subway system’s rampant crime, a problem that is within its control is something to tackle.
During a March 2024 public safety budget hearing — one of the few recent council hearings to even address transit crime — Williams emphasized that subway crime was driven by the presence of the police.
Councilman Lincoln Restler blasted the NYPD for “sweeping up” non-whites during “mass arrest” operations.
And Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark claimed without evidence that “the lack of youth and mental health resources is the cause of violence, subway crime and shoplifting.”
The dirty truth about subway crime is that the city knows exactly how to reduce it because we’ve done it before.
Proactive policing would deter caught people from breaching the system – a proven method for detecting and confiscating illegal weapons, or at least convincing people to leave their guns at home.
More police on platforms and trains keeps criminals out of the system.
And strong enforcement of Kendra’s Law would force seriously mentally ill homeless people living in the subway system to get the treatment they clearly need.
It’s one thing to pound the table and demand a solution to the problem of teenagers endangering themselves by clambering over moving trains.
It’s another to take on the gangbangers, maniacs and menaces who have been allowed to turn New York’s subways into their playrooms.
Seth Barron’s next book “Weaponized” will be published in 2025.
