Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday he is pushing to permanently boost the number of cops on trains and subway platforms in an effort to curb the Big Apple’s burgeoning underground crime wave.
Adams stressed his administration was trying to find a “new norm for patrolling our subway systems” – including with increased police presence and enhanced bag checks – following the recent surge in violence that has seen three New Yorkers shot dead on trains and platforms since the start of the year.
“We’re going to continuously make sure our officers move as much as possible to show a greater presence to deal with how people are feeling in our system right now,” Hizzoner told reporters after being peppered with questions about transit crime during his weekly City Hall briefing.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, is slated to announce Wednesday new legislation to help beef up the city’s subway security after meeting with Adams, MTA officials and the NYPD last week.
“Governor Hochul has made historic commitments to make our subways safer, from security cameras to mental health personnel,” a rep for the governor said in a statement. “Tomorrow, she will unveil new legislation to protect riders, new state personnel to assist NYPD with bag checks, and other new measures to keep New Yorkers safe.”
The heightened focus on subway violence comes as The Post exclusively revealed last week that underground crime skyrocketed months after the number of transit cops on patrol had plummeted to levels not seen since Mayor Bill de Blasio was in power.
Meanwhile, subway crime rates surged in the first two months of this year alone, spiking by nearly 20% compared to this time last year, the latest NYPD stats show – largely driven by increases in grand larcenies, felony assaults and robberies.
The mayor — who just last week said the NYPD would be moving to 12-hour tours in the system — has previously blamed the crime spike on the city’s rollback of its 2022 subway safety plan, which saw the number of cops underground dwindle when state funding dried up.
“We need our officers out there,” Adams said Tuesday.
“When I’m on the subway system, I speak with riders and they say ‘Eric, nothing makes us feel safer than seeing that officer at the token booth, walking through the system, walking through the trains and that is what we want our officers doing.’”
Asked if the NYPD budget needed to be increase to make cop visibility in subways permanent, Hizzoner suggested his administration was weighing its options.
“That is what Commissioner [Edward] Caban and the team is looking at: How do we make this drastic shift and what are we going to do to normalize how policing is done in our subways?” he said.
Adams said cops would also be enhancing bag checks at subway stations going forward and that his administration was, yet again, looking at testing metal detectors in a bid to keep guns off trains.
City Hall said later Tuesday the NYPD’s transit division is currently deploying 94 bag screening teams to 136 subway stations, adding will increase, though no figure was provided.
The department last month boosted its presence in the system by 1,000 officers per day try and halt the recent crime wave, which includes the three homicides between Jan. 14 and Feb. 23.
While the governor’s camp declined to go into further specifics ahead of her announcement, Hochul had hinted Monday that it could include additional cops on trains and platforms.
“People want to see that,” she said. “They’ve been asking for it. We’re going to give that, we’re going to see more people on the platform.”
“I have man and woman power as well,” Hochul said at an unrelated press conference of potentially sending more cops down into the transit system.
“I have people I can deploy in different places, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to pay for this entity. I can bring in people doing this.”
The push for a subway crime crackdown comes after a particularly brutal weekend that saw a 64-year-old postal worker kicked onto the tracks at Penn Station on Sunday night.
A 20-year-old woman also fought off a creep who punched her in the face and tried to rape her on a Queens subway stop in the early hours of Saturday.
And just days earlier, an MTA conductor was slashed in the neck in a random Brooklyn subway attack while working an overnight shift.
