The push to saturate the New York City subway with police officers last year was supposed to make the system feel safer after a series of shocking crimes shocked commuters and discouraged many from using public transportation.
Months later, officials say the increase in police presence has had some beneficial results: passenger numbers are up and major crimes are down since the initiative intensified in October.
But after a passenger strangled a homeless man on the subway last week, a well-known debate has emerged over whether more police officers are the solution to subway violence, especially when confronting people who are mentally ill.
The homeless man, Jordan Neely, 30, screamed at passengers in a train car when another man, Daniel Penny, 24, put him in a chokehold and killed him. The killing has sparked outrage and divided city leaders and the public. Mayor Eric Adams has since been criticized not only for his response to Mr Neely’s death, but for the aggressiveness with which he has deployed law enforcement officers and attacked homeless people on the subway.
In addition to the political debate over using the police to help with societal issues such as mental illness and homelessness, there is the question of whether the mayor’s strategy works, especially in a vast and dynamic system that officers cannot possibly fully control.
Have the mayor’s efforts reduced crime and made New Yorkers feel safer, as Mr. Adams and his supporters claim? Or did they increase fears and even endanger the homeless by reinforcing riders’ fears about the mentally ill, as some of his critics have said – setting the stage for encounters like the one between Mr. Neely and Mr. Penny? In a speech on Wednesday, partly in response to those criticisms, Mr Adams said that while he was not in control of the legal process, “one thing can be said for sure: Jordan Neely did not deserve to die.”
Like other major U.S. cities, New York City has faced a confluence of problems exacerbated by the pandemic, including rising housing prices and homelessness, unemployment and crime, and mental health problems, and intensifying political debates about how to solve the problem. issues. them.
After Mr Adams took office, he announced plans to deploy a wave of police officers system-wide. That same month, many subway users were disturbed by the death of Michelle Go, who was pushed in front of an R train by a homeless man who police said had a history of crime and mental illness.
In October, after a continued increase in subway violence, the state said it would help the city pay an additional 1,200 hours of overtime per day for police officers to watch over the system.
“We can tell New Yorkers all the time that we’ve reduced crime in certain areas, but if New Yorkers don’t feel safe, we’re failing,” Mr Adams said at the time, adding: “That’s why the ubiquity of police officers is and removing those affected by mental health issues is critical to our second phase of this important plan.”
In recent months, subway officers have detained significantly more people for breaking the law. Police statistics show that there were about 3,000 arrests in the transit system from January through March this year, compared to 2,000 arrests during the same period in 2022.
A police representative said customs officials had conducted about 515,000 train and subway inspections so far this year, putting them on track to surpass the roughly 750,000 inspections conducted in the first 10 months of last year.
“The NYPD is constantly evaluating emerging crime trends and reassigning personnel based on the trends observed,” the representative said, noting that “the added number of station inspections and train rides create a ubiquity that travelers can see and feel at any hour as they make their way to school. find a job or a home”
Even after crime increased during the pandemic, the chances of someone falling victim to a violent crime while riding the subway remained incredibly slim, according to a DailyExpertNews analysis of MTA and police statistics.
So far, the number of serious crimes has decreased this year compared to the same period last year, although it is too early to say for sure whether that decrease is statistically significant.
There will be 10 homicides in the system by 2022, compared to an average of two per year in the five years before the pandemic began. In 2023, the most recent available statistics show one murder through March.
According to a police spokesman, most of the approximately 10,000 calls for help in the transportation system that police responded to this year were about homeless people in need of help. The majority of people in those cases accepted the support and agreed to go to a homeless shelter. Another 1,200 required medical attention and were taken to a hospital.
Police did not respond to questions about how many officers work the system on average on any given day, or how many arrests or outreach efforts involved the homeless or mentally ill and how those numbers compared to recent years.
Since Mr. Adams announced his first effort to remove homeless people from the subway system early last year, about 4,600 New Yorkers homeless in the transit system have checked into a shelter, according to city officials. As of this week, about 1,300 of them were in shelters.
The effort has also been criticized for violating the rights of the homeless, especially after the mayor last year urged police officers and other emergency workers to take people with severe, untreated mental illness to hospitals, if necessary against their will.
Encounters between the police and the seriously mentally ill can end in tragedy when officers can’t handle someone who behaves erratically, partly because people in a state of psychosis often cannot follow orders. That’s why many advocates, experts and elected officials have been urging the city to focus instead on solutions designed to help people cope with mental illness before they reach crisis.
“The mayor’s insistence on controlling those in need, rather than addressing the city’s housing crisis or lack of access to health care, only fuels the stigma against homeless New Yorkers and those with mental illness.” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Arrest and forced hospitalization do nothing to address the root causes of homelessness or the chronic lack of access to mental health care.”
On Wednesday, the mayor delivered a speech on Mr Neely’s death, saying he had called for reforms in how mental illness is being addressed “from the very beginning of this administration”.
The mayor has pushed forward a number of other initiatives to help mentally ill New Yorkers without involving the police, including programs to connect people to community treatment and to send mental health professionals and paramedics in response to 911 calls where people are mentally upset.
The city is also expanding the number of “intensive mobile treatment teams” that provide assistance to people with mental illness or substance abuse living in shelters, streets and subways, offering them a range of services. The teams usually do not force clients to accept care or shelter, but spend weeks and often months trying to connect them with help. They will soon serve nearly 1,000 New Yorkers with some of the greatest needs.
And last October, the state said it would set up two new units at psychiatric centers, including 50 hospital beds, to admit people with severe mental illness.
After Mr. Neely’s murder, many New Yorkers have called for more investments like this to help some of the city’s most vulnerable people, rather than more law enforcement.
“We understand that our current times have created a heightened sense of anxiety (sometimes reasonable, sometimes not),” Lennon Edwards and Donte Mills, attorneys for Mr. Neely’s family, said in a statement last week.
But, they said, “Passengers are not supposed to die on the floor of our subways.”
Hurubie Meko And Mary Kramer reporting contributed.