Gov. Hochul overdoes it
The governor sends the National Guard into the New York City subway system to create a sense of safety. It’s a terrible idea.
All’s well. So let’s call out the National Guard.
That’s pretty much the conflicting message that Gov. Kathy Hochul is delivering on crime, in particular in the New York City subway system. Crime is actually down, but — the governor reasons — people don’t feel safe, so she has to take action.
And some action it is. Among other actions in her “five-point plan,” Ms. Hochul is deploying 750 National Guard members, with automatic weapons, to assist New York City police in searching people’s bags and creating what she maintains is a necessary reassuring presence.
This is not about reality. It’s about perception and politics.
The governor acknowledged as much in an interview on Fox 5 on Thursday, stating, “I’m not going to talk about statistics. I’m going to talk about feelings and emotions and the psychology of a city. I want more people on the subways. … And if people are feeling unsafe and won’t come, then I have to do something about it.”
The governor isn’t talking about statistics because the statistics wouldn’t justify this overreaction.
According to the NYPD, serious crime was “markedly” down from where it was a year ago citywide. In the subways, robberies and nonviolent larcenies like pickpocketing were down, too, and felony assault was flat. It’s worth noting that the raw transit crime numbers are relatively small to begin with for system with 3.2 million subway riders a day — 148 incidents in February compared with 175 in the same month in 2023.
Ridership has been increasing since it plummeted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, though it was still about one-third down last year from where it had been in 2019. It’s unclear how many people aren’t using mass transit anymore because they’re working from home, rather than avoiding it out of fear.
We appreciate that perception of crime can shake people’s sense of safety, especially in such a potentially claustrophobic environment as a subterranean station or a subway car. And the Democratic governor’s Republican critics incessantly stoke that fear, rail against criminal justice changes and paint her as weak on crime, no matter what the real numbers are or how tough she gets.
We have no argument with other aspects of the governor’s approach, such as banning assaulters from mass transit as part of sentencing, making sure that dangerous repeat offenders don’t slip through legal cracks, adding cameras to conductors’ compartments and putting more money into mental health crisis teams.
But requiring people to submit to searches just to ride the subway harkens back to the city’s unconstitutional “stop-and-frisk” tactic that left thousands of people — most of them young and Black or Latino — with lifetime criminal records for minor drug possession. It was a travesty that helped spur the changes that Republicans have been trying to use against Ms. Hochul and her fellow Democrats ever since.
And calling in troops to help do this — and to perform any of the work of a civilian police force at all, for that matter — is a deeply troubling tactic in New York City or anywhere in the U.S. It only makes the city look like and feel like a third-world country under siege: a place that isn’t safer, but more intimidating — and intimidated at the same time.