Transit crime hurdle to return to normalcy

CHICAGO » For months, Anna Balla, 47, tolerated the unruly behavior she says has become commonplace when riding the “L” downtown: smoking, harassment and even a stranger’s uninvited use of her shoulder to vault himself into a spot in a crowded Chicago train.

But it was a ride in March that made her swear off the trains completely. At a busy stop in the heart of the Loop during rush hour, she saw a young shirtless man yanking a woman and hitting her with an empty beer bottle as she cowered and screamed on the platform. Balla bolted from the packed car and fled to the street.

“I was just worried that someone was going to pull out a gun, or if the cops arrived, it would become a shootout,” said Balla, a museum registrar in Chicago. “It had that feel to it.”

Just as a number of major cities are trying to lure people back to formerly bustling downtowns, leaders are confronting transit crime rates that have risen over pre-pandemic levels in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. This month, a shooting on a subway train in Brooklyn injured 23 people. In other cities, stories of violent assaults, muggings and stabbings on buses and trains dominate the evening news and worried conversations in neighborhood apps.

Low ridership has left many passengers saying they feel more vulnerable than before. In Philadelphia, the number of certain serious crimes reported on public transit is higher than before the pandemic, and in New York about equal to previous levels, even though ridership in both places is significantly lower. In other cities, there are fewer crimes being reported than in 2019, but the crime rate is up because there are so few passengers.

The crisis on public transit systems threatens the nation’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic: Restoring confidence in subways, commuter rail and buses, officials say, could help rescue local economies from two years of the doldrums, encourage more workers to return to urban offices and make tourists comfortable moving about cities freely. In densely populated places like Chicago and New York, where public transit is essential for millions of people, the well-being of the system can feel like a proxy for the city itself.

Mayors, transit agencies and police departments are wrestling with ways to reduce crime and restore the confidence of commuters, but the fates of public transit and downtowns, experts say, can be intertwined in complicated ways: If more people return to public transit as they go back to offices and shops, trains can feel safer; yet if transit systems feel unsafe, people are reluctant to go back to the downtowns that hollowed out amid COVID.

In Chicago, where the nation’s second-largest public transportation system served an average of 800,000 riders on weekdays in March, crime on the city’s trains and buses has spiked this year — and even before the pandemic, serious crime was rising on public transit. Last month, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced heightened security and additional police officers to address fears from riders.

“It’s one of the most important things we can do to actually change the perception of the city overall,” Kevin Ryan, vice president of security for the Chicago Transit Authority, said of safety on the public transit system. “It’s the first thing a lot of people who are coming into the city see. It’s the lifeblood of a lot of the underserved or poorer communities that don’t have private vehicles who rely on this. It’s key that the CTA is a safe system.”

The number of crimes reported on public transit in Chicago is about half what it was pre-pandemic, he said, but ridership has also fallen by about half. The drop in riders on many public transit systems is essential to the rates of crime on those systems: In Los Angeles, the raw number of crimes recorded in 2021 was lower than in the years before the pandemic, according to data provided by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but because the number of riders plunged, the rate of crimes per ride was higher.

In other cities, like Philadelphia, actual incidents of certain crimes on public transit have been mounting throughout the pandemic. In 2021, SEPTA police recorded 86 aggravated assaults, up from 46 in 2019. Robberies increased to 217 from 118 during that period.

Crime numbers from the first months of 2022 indicate a slight decline in incidents of aggravated assault.