One way to ‘Fear City’ for travellers daring to use New York subway
Surge in violence on metro leads to claims of return to the ‘bad old days’ fuelled by soft policing and homeless problem
Carrying a Taser in one hand and pepper spray in the other, Jay James wasn’t taking any chances on the A Train home to Harlem. Just last week a man tried to rob her, which is when she first put the spray to use. “I remember a time when I would sleep on the subway to work, now I don’t dare close my eyes,” said Mrs James, who takes the 6.45am train each morning to her job at the Marriott Hotel in midtown Manhattan. “There’s a lot of mentally sick people. It’s getting worse and nobody is doing nothing about it,” the 59-year-old said.
New York saw a huge increase in assaults in the last year, as a result of the pandemic, a rise in homelessness and the city’s soft-on-crime policy reforms.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) recorded 461 violent incidents on the underground network last year, the highest number since 1997.
Earlier this month Michelle Go, 40, a managing director at Deloitte, was killed when she was pushed on to the tracks at Time Square.
Her death prompted a commentator for The New York Times to warn of a return to the “bad old days”, alluding to a period in the 1970s and early 1980s when violence was so bad New York was nicknamed “Fear City”.
It has quickly become the most pressing challenge for Eric Adams, the former policeman newly elected as mayor, who ran on a crime-fighting platform.
The Daily Telegraph joined a subway patrol with the Guardian Angels, a group of volunteer anti-crime crusaders, to see just what the mayor is up against.
Female passengers have taken to standing with their backs to the wall until the train comes to a stop to avoid being pushed on to the tracks.
“I wait until the train has come into the platform now,” says Mrs Jones, standing at the 145th Street stop. “I make sure to sit in the first carriage next to the conductor to avoid any trouble.”
Mrs Go’s killer, a schizophrenic with a long criminal record, had been living in the subway after being thrown out of a shelter. The Angels had come across him several times before that fateful day. “He was not well. It was a disaster waiting to happen,” they say.
The city of eightmillion has 50,000 homeless people with as many as a third thought to suffer from mental illness, drug addiction, or both.
Bitterly cold winter temperatures and over-burdened shelters have seen the trains transformed into moving motels. At one end of the station we see an unconscious woman bent double on a dirty mat. Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, checks her pulse and nudges her for several minutes before she eventually stirs. Rats scramble over discarded hypodermic needles and piles of rubbish while carrier bags of human faeces litter the platform.
“I stopped doing night shifts and turned down overtime as I didn’t feel safe riding the subway after dark any more – and I’m a retired corrections officer,” said Robert Triboli, who works as a security guard at a medical college. “People shoot drugs, smoke, get into fights, it’s the Wild West.”
Further down the line at busy Penn Station two men light up crack cocaine pipes. A man without shoes paces the length of the platform, shouting at a mother and her young child.
A pair of NYPD transit officers stand looking at their phones near the entrance, watching on as riders jump the turnstiles.
“Look at them, they don’t do anything,” said Mr Sliwa, 67, who ran as against Mr Adams in the November mayoral election. “Cops don’t bother any more as they know these guys won’t be charged with anything.”
Alvin Bragg, the city’s new progressive district attorney, has been keen to enforce a change in the law in 2020 that ended pretrial detention for nearly all misdemeanour and nonviolent felony cases.
Critics say the reforms only foster a culture of impunity that serves to embolden criminals. “Progressive criminal justice reform has to find a balance,” said Karen Agnifilo, a former deputy district attorney.
“Old-school law enforcement went too far in one direction, but lessons we’re learning in some big cities suggest that others may have gone too far in the other direction.”
The city has seen a rise in almost every category of major crime in the last 12 months. In an effort to stem public anger, Mr Adams has pledged to shift 1,000 police officers to subway patrols. Crime was the number one concern among New Yorkers polled during the mayoral election.
Democrats ignore voters’ concerns at their peril. “I’m a Democrat but at the end of the day you’ve got to vote for whoever can stop this,” Mr Triboli said.
‘I stopped doing the night shift and turned down overtime as I didn’t feel safe riding the subway after dark any more – and I’m a retired corrections officer’