Watch the opening doors!
Prepare to enter a rolling lunatic asylum when you get into a subway car.
The “progressive” crowd will howl at me for telling the truth about the subways, the supposed “lifeblood of the city.”
The MTA and the NYPD will claim I’m exaggerating.
But facts must be faced. It’s time to drag the mentally ill off by force and move them to where they can’t harm anyone.
If we don’t, the underground madhouse will soon reverse the recent increase in ridership — and kiss the city’s nascent recovery goodbye.
Oh, I forgot — laws don’t allow us to do that. Silly me!
I’ve ridden the subways for 50 years. I’ve never seen so many deranged individuals — schizophrenic, otherwise demented and/or drugged to the point of unpredictable potential violence.
Neither have you if you use the subways at all, even if nobody tried to push you onto the track.
I have no medical or academic credentials to make such judgements. My credentials are my eyes.
On Monday around 7 p.m., a tall, lanky white man on the uptown F in Midtown paced back and forth in the crowded aisle, muttered incoherently about a lost hat and flailed his arms so widely that he struck seated passengers who shrank at his approach.
Everyone did the “proper” thing — kept their eyes elsewhere as if no potential assault or homicide were in their minds. Of course not!
A young black man sat coiled into a ball and apparently unconscious at the end of an N train car I boarded at 49th Street. His dropped pants exposed legs-full of bruises and sores. He might have been dead.
Two cops entered the car at 57th Street, gave him a perfunctory glance and stepped back out, oblivious to or uncaring of the human being in obvious need of help — if he didn’t first rise from the seat to terrorize fellow passengers.
The unprecedented omnipresence of the ticking-time-bombs this summer might be due to steaming-hot weather from which air-conditioned trains offer relief.
More likely, it’s because City Hall quietly gave up on the plan it announced last year to remove homeless people from trains and stations who behaved in an “unsafe” manner, even if they resisted help — because the city ran out of room for them in shelters that are now over-capacity with migrants.
The “progressives” who set the media agenda hilariously blame subway vagrancy on “lack of affordable housing.”
But you could put the psychos up for free on the Plaza Hotel’s VIP floor and they’d give it up for the subway in an hour.
I’m not “afraid of the subways” in the same way that I was in the 1970s-1980s, when we feared being mugged for money. I ride the trains seven days a week, day and night. So do my wife and most of our female friends, despite claims by no-nothings that “women don’t use the subway any more.”
But I look up and down every car to decide whether there’s someone who might go mad the moment the doors close.
Someone who’ll scare the daylights out of everyone, as did Jordan Neely and Devictor Ouedradogo, both recent killed by passengers fearful for their own safety and that of others.
Transit crime, most of which occurs in the subway, is down 5% this year-to-date over the same period last year, according to the NYPD. It’s still up 49% over two years ago.
That this year will likely see under 2,500 transit crimes — a relative handful compared with ridership that sometimes exceeds 4 million a day — is cold comfort when a raving madman has everyone in the car counting the minutes to the next stop.
It’s fair to blame the mayor, the governor, legislators, judges and DA’s — up to a point. But there isn’t much more that they can do, short of locking up every subway maniac without a trial.
Criminal justice “experts” and the “social justice” clerisy long ago sold politicians on the demonstrably ridiculous notion that the profoundly mentally ill are better off outside hospitals.
The hideous depiction of convulsive electroshock therapy in the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” created the popular perception that mental hospitals were essentially torture chambers.
It was only a movie, of course! But today, our subway system is the cuckoo’s nest.
Beware the opening doors.
