Underground Crime Wave

For weeks, MTA leaders have pleaded for help dealing with train and bus violence, and a rash of recent attacks proves they need it. Especially with middle-schoolers about to rely on the system as they return to in-person class.

Tuesday morning alone saw a 55-year-old woman shoved onto the tracks at a Bronx station and an MTA bus driver bashed in the head with a 2-by-4 in Brooklyn. That followed a week that saw five separate subway knifings and a spate of track-shovers in recent months.

Transit-system felonies rose 13.3 percent for the year as of Sunday, up a whopping 70 percent over three years ago — though ridership is just a fraction of the pre-COVID level.

In the face of this chaos, NYC Transit chief Sarah Feinberg early this year begged the city for a greater police presence: “We need the system to not be looked at as something that’s underground, forgotten.” Her letter to Mayor de Blasio cited such “troubling attacks” as “six separate incidents of violent assaults on women at the Morgan L station” in Brooklyn. “Challenges” posed by the “homelessness and mental-health crisis,” she noted, have “only worsened.”

MTA boss Pat Foye called the attacks “horrific and unacceptable” and demanded the city step up mental-health care and policing.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea and Transit Chief Kathleen O’Reilly seem to recognize the problem. The attacks have grown “too common,” said Shea; it’s “disturbing.” But the mayor is as hapless as ever. Last week, he actually denied Shea made that comment. And Tuesday, he for the 55th time blamed “a perfect storm” to explain a doubling of subway murders.

After a year, sir, you should have strategies for handling these no-longer-unexpected challenges. Yet he couldn’t even outline a plan to deal with subway violence, even as middle-schoolers head underground.

Pray de Blasio at least steps out of the way and lets the adults at the NYPD and MTA do what’s necessary to restore subway safety.