Train-ing days for beat cops
SUBWAYS AREN’T typically a place for small talk with strangers, but Mayor de Blasio is hoping New Yorkers will strike up a relationship with some of their fellow commuters: cops.
Hizzoner announced Thursday (photo right) that he’s sending the city’s neighborhood policing program underground, assigning officers to patrol transit sectors the way they might a neighborhood — and posting names and email addresses for the officers on station advertisements.
“For all of who you have spent a lot of your lives in the subway, the notion that you’re going to know the names of the officers on your line, that if you have concerns or something you see you’re worried about, or a question you want answered about safety, you could literally walk up to them because now you know their names, or you could email them because their e-mail is there, they’re going to respond to you personally,” de Blasio said at the Barclays Center stop in Brooklyn. “We’ve never had anything like that.”
The program will start with Transit District 212 in the Bronx, which covers stations along the 2 and 5 lines, and Transit District 30 in Brooklyn, encompassing stations along the 2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, B, D, Q, F, G, N and R lines.
While de Blasio painted a quaint vision of the subway — “If you ride the subway, you know you get to know a lot of your fellow riders,” he said — they are more transient than neighborhoods, where people may be more likely to get to know cops on the beat.
But Chief of Patrol Terence Monahan said riders will be seeing the same officers, and their pictures on posters, in the same stations every day, growing a relationship.
“When there’s an issue, there’s someone you can reach out to,” he said. “You have your cop to reach out to.”
De Blasio said people will be intrigued by posters with the names, pictures and email addresses of officers, and then will see those same officers on their trains, sparking dialogue.
“If you see the same officer 10 times and you have something you’re concerned about, I think you know New Yorkers, they’re not going to be shy about it,” he said.
The officers will receive training with how to deal with homeless people — who can remain in the subway but, like all riders, are prohibited from lying down. As for fare evasion, a thorny subject for de Blasio as he pushes back against funding half-priced MetroCards for low-income people, the officers will have discretion, Monahan said.
“People have to pay to get on the subways. We don’t want people getting on for free, it’s a quality of life issue,” Monahan said, standing in front of a line of uniformed officers. “But in everything we do, the main focus of neighborhood policing is giving these men and women back here discretion to handle their area.”