Homicides on the city’s subway system are up 60% so far this year — a disturbing trend as overall crime on the rails has fallen.
According to NYPD data, eight people have been massacred on subway trains or at stations since September 8, compared to just five in the same period last year.
The homicide spike is approaching a 25-year high in 2022, with ten homicides.
According to the earliest public data from the NYPD, there have never been more than five subway murders in a single year between 1997 and 2020.
“It’s not a safe environment to wait for the train,” said Jakeba Dockery, 42, whose husband, Richard Henderson, was fatally shot on the 3 train in Brooklyn in January after trying to break up a fight between straphangers. loud music.
“It just feels bad,” she told The Post.
The last violent death on the subway occurred on September 5, just after 11 p.m., when a gunman shot 47-year-old grocer Freddie Weston near the MetroCard booth at the Rockaway Avenue station in Brooklyn, police and his family said.
If there had been cameras near the station’s ticket booth, Weston, 47, who was on his way to work in College Point, might still be alive, his sister Tina told The Post.
“They took the opportunity because it wasn’t there [any] camera,” she said, her voice cracking.
The rise in murders continues despite a slew of high-profile initiatives that helped stem a wave of underground crime at the start of the year. High-traffic stations were flooded with 750 National Guardsmen, while another 1,000 NYPD officers were deployed to police the subway system.
Overall crime in the metro is down nearly 6% this year compared to the same period in 2023, with robberies down about 18% and crimes down nearly 5%, an NYPD spokesperson said.
“This overall crime reduction is in large part due to thorough investigations by detectives into every major crime in the metro, and the proactive work of officers deployed on public transport,” the spokesperson said. “This year alone, those officers have removed 43 guns (compared to 28 last year) and 1,536 knives (compared to 1,004 last year) from the subway system, the highest number of gun seizures in the past decade.”
However, violent crime remains well above pre-pandemic levels, and straphangers are left wondering if their next ride will be on the Murder Express.
“You don’t know if you’re going to get home,” 68-year-old retiree Vickie Reeves complained as she took a rare subway ride at the Times Square station.
“There are a lot of mental illnesses and it hurts your heart not knowing who you’re going to come into contact with if they’re going to push you in front of the train.”
Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, attributed the persistence of the killings to a combination of a “depleted” police force, as well as a brain drain of experienced transit officers as officers resigned or retired.
“You can’t just have someone patrol the subway; it’s a different animal,” he said.
Dockery and her daughter will no longer use the subway, she said.
Today, she drives a 2025 Lexus NX 350 to get herself around town on errands and to take her teenager to and from her high school basketball games.
“I don’t do the MTA,” she said. “Among the anger [of violent straphangers]mentally ill, I can’t do that.
