The alarming rise in subway crime over the past five years has New Yorkers on edge.
Assaults this year are up 56% over 2019, and after decades in which underground murders averaged one or, at most, two a year, we’ve had 10 so far in 2024 — double the number of killings seen in 2023.
So it was great to hear on Monday that the City Council would hold a special hearing to address the problem of safety in the subways.
Except: The hearing wasn’t about rampant crime, but about the one type of subway bodily harm that is entirely avoidable — because it’s entirely self-inflicted.
“Subway surfing” is a fad where passengers, almost always adolescents, climb on top of subway cars on elevated lines and “surf” them, balancing atop trains that can hit speeds of 50 miles per hour.
This obviously dangerous activity has killed six kids this year alone, with another seven badly injured.
Subway surfing is clearly no joke. In early November, a girl fell off a 2 train in Harlem and lost an arm and a leg.
Grisly images of her arm lying on top of a traffic signal ought to be enough warning for any would-be copycats that this game is a bad idea.
In response, the MTA, the schools, the Department of Youth and Community Development and the NYPD have gone all-out with subway ads, a social media campaign and in-school messaging to spread the word.
The police are using drones to identify subway surfers in real time, and have arrested 181 of these dotty daredevils so far this year.
But leave it to the City Council to grandstand, groan and grouse about how New Yorkers have failed their youth.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said he was “concerned about the increased arrests of young people,” and especially worried about the “increased use of surveillance technology, especially considering the NYPD’s concerning history of surveilling New Yorkers.”
“I often ask myself, would I listen to me as a young person?” Williams pondered during his testimony. “I’m not sure I have the full answer to that.”
He concluded his remarks with a predictable demand to “expand resources for youth, including mental-health treatment and safe, engaging after-school programs.”
Council Member Althea Stevens continued this line of inquiry. “Why are young people doing this and not engaging our programs? Are our programs not engaging enough?” she fretted.
“We have a responsibility to address the root causes . . . including lack of engagement in activities.”
The leftist focus on “programs” and “activities” undergirds, of course, their real goal of increased social spending — the eternal progressive answer to every problem.
New York City offers 900 after-school programs, all free or almost free, in addition to dozens of sports teams and clubs, and spends billions of dollars to maintain parks, playgrounds, pools and recreation centers, so kids have something better to do than play in traffic or teeter on trains.
Nonetheless, we have failed in our “responsibility” to “engage” our youth.
Subway surfing is a problem, and kids who do it should probably be introduced to the girl who lost two limbs falling off a train in order to scare them silly.
But what’s really telling is that the City Council raced to schedule a hearing on this topic — which, frankly, there’s not much it can do about — while studiously ignoring the subway system’s rampant crime, a problem which falls within its power to address.
At a public safety budget hearing in March 2024 — one of the few recent council hearings that has even touched on transit crime — Williams insisted that crime in the subway was caused by the presence of the police.
Council Member Lincoln Restler lambasted the NYPD for “sweeping up” non-whites in “mass arrest” operations.
And Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark, without evidence, asserted that “the lack of resources for youth and mental health are driving violence, subway crime and retail theft.”
The dirty truth about subway crime is that the city knows exactly how to go about reducing it, because we have done it before.
Proactive policing would stop farebeaters who are caught entering the system — a proven method for finding and seizing illegal guns, or at least for convincing people to leave their guns at home.
More cops on platforms and trains keep criminals out of the system.
And vigorous application of Kendra’s Law would force seriously mentally ill derelicts living in the subway system to get the treatment they obviously need.
It’s one thing to pound on the table and demand a solution to the problem of teens putting themselves in danger by clambering over moving trains.
It’s something else entirely to deal with the gangbangers, maniacs and menaces who have been permitted to turn the subways of New York into their playrooms.
Seth Barron’s next book “Weaponized” will be released in 2025.
