'Nightmare for NYers'
MTA chief’s vow to act after shove
New York City can’t surrender and return to the bad old days of subway crime, MTA boss Janno Lieber stressed Wednesday — as the agency touted its latest plan to tackle mental illness underground.
Lieber’s comments came days after an unhinged man allegedly shoved an innocent straphanger to his death at an East Harlem station in the latest random attack on the subway system.
“This is a nightmare for New Yorkers,” Lieber said during a Metropolitan Transportation Authority board meeting in downtown Manhattan.
“I grew up in New York riding the trains at a time when crime and subway breakdowns were much more frequent. My kids grew up in a different subway era. They were able to come and go at all hours of the night feeling safe,” the transit chief said.
“We’re not going back. We’re not going back!” he vowed.
Mental-health unit
Agency officials touted the success of the MTA’s new SCOUT pilot program — which has two teams that include mental-health clinicians who can intervene if a mentally ill New Yorker suffers a breakdown in a station.
The teams, who are tasked with sticking with the person until they are admitted to a hospital or taken to an appropriate shelter, have gotten 90 people out of the transit system over the last three months — or roughly one person a day, officials said.
“We are not surrendering our city to anyone — not to criminals and not even to the people who have severe mental health issues, even though we feel a ton of compassion for them,” Lieber told the transit agency meeting.
“For millions of New Yorkers, there’s no alternative to mass transit, they need to live their lives,” Lieber said. “There is no New York for them without mass transit.”
Gov. Hochul last month gave $20 million to rapidly expand SCOUT, which runs alongside the state-funded Safe Option Support (SOS) program and a city-backed response team rolled out by Mayor Adams in 2022.
Adams’ mental health team currently removes 130 people involuntarily from various stations per week, a City Hall spokesperson said. It isn’t clear how many of them, if any, are admitted to hospitals for treatment.
Transit-crime concerns have continued to surge in the aftermath of Monday’s attack, in which a 24-year-old Bronx man with a history of mental illness and several past arrests is accused of pushing a rider in the path of an oncoming train.
Relatives of suspect Carlton McPherson’s said they had tried to get him psychiatric help — to no avail — in the months leading up to 54-year-old Jason Volz’s slaying at the East 125th Street station.
The number of felony assaults in the transit system jumped 53% last year from pre-pandemic times, with 570 attacks in 2023 compared to 373 in 2019, the latest NYPD data show.