Yet again, a commuter walks down the subway steps and is carried up in a body bag.
For Mayor Adams, every day is Groundhog Day in the subways. Two years and nearly three months ago, he started his tenure as mayor with a horrific random attack at a crowded Manhattan subway stop — and vowed a surge in police.
He clocked another horrific random attack at a crowded Manhattan subway stop Monday. It was the same day his NYPD had vowed a surge in police.
The theatrics aren’t working — and he needs to start explaining how and why they’re not working.
Just two weeks into Adams’ mayoralty, Michelle Go met her pushing death at a Times Square subway stop on a busy Saturday morning.
She died at the hands of a severely mentally ill individual with a long violent record, a man already in violation of his recent parole.
Go’s murder wasn’t even 2022’s first random subway murder.
Early New Year’s Day, four fare-beating teens had allegedly menaced a stranger at The Bronx’s Fordham Road stop, forcing him onto the track; good Samaritan Roland Hueston was run over when he tried to save the man.
Both killings were shocking tragedies, but they didn’t plunge New Yorkers into despair, because they knew they had a brand-new mayor who had run on cutting subway crime.
The first week in office, Adams announced his plan: more subway police, yes — the mayor promised an “omnipresence” — but also more mental-health treatment. “We’re going to utilize our police to do public safety and our mental-health professionals to give people the services that they need,” he vowed.
The mayor failed. That year, 11 people were murdered in the subway, following seven killings in 2020 and another seven in 2021, the worst results since the early 1990s. (For a quarter-century before 2020, the average number of annual subway homicides was fewer than two.)
One of the problems was the mayor had said something but never followed up. His “omnipresence” of cops was, basically, police parking their cars aboveground and going into the subway to make brief “visual inspections.”
It wasn’t until fall 2022, when Gov. Hochul, alarmed at four subway murders in six weeks just as voters were determining her electoral fate, paid for a specific number of new NYPD shifts.
These 1,200 extra daily shifts more than doubled the underground police presence.
It kind of worked: Homicides fell to six last year, better than 11, but a whole lot worse than two.
But without the mayor or the governor actually saying so, those extra shifts melted away.
And we’ve now had four murders in the subways in 2024, all the victims random commuters.
Four subway murders is the worst start to a year since at least the early 1990s.
The latest killing was just like that of Michelle Go: a 54-year-old man waiting for a train at the busy 125th Street Lex station brutally shoved in front of the train.
The alleged perpetrator, 24-year-old Carlton McPherson, is a man with both including an open assault warrant, and a mental-illness history with city government. (And like many of these cases, his apparent homelessness was caused by severe mental illness, not the other way around — his grandmother, afraid of him, locked him out.)
Meanwhile, after a massive transit crime surge in January — 47% since last year — the extra police shifts — or 1,000 of them daily, anyway — have been back since early February. Just Monday morning, the NYPD vowed a bigger crackdown on farebeating — “Operation Fare Play” — more Adams theatrics.
Why isn’t the police surge working?
Three reasons.
First, Adams must stop thinking subway crime surges are temporary —easily fixed with temporary police surges. Since early 2020, the risk of being a violent-crime victim, per subway ride, has consistently remained double the pre-2020 risk. We need a bigger transit police force, permanently. But the mayor refuses to prioritize in his budget.
Second, the extra police are doing their job, but the rest of the criminal-justice system remains broken. In January and February, total arrests in the subway system, at 3,113, were 49% higher than last year’s levels. They’re even creeping up to 2018’s figure for those two months, 3,688. Police made 1,219 farebeating arrests in January and February, up 76% from last year.
And they’re writing tens of thousands of civil summonses for farebeating.
The police should make more arrests; farebeating arrests are still far short of the 5,017 farebeating arrests in January and February 2013, the last Bloomberg year.
But people arrested don’t stay arrested.
McPherson, the suspect in this week’s fatal pushing, was arrested in January for spitting on a woman on the L train.
This is not normal behavior; nor was the behavior that led to his previous arrests, including at least four within the year.
But he was free. As NYPD transit chief Michael Kemper warned Monday — hours before the latest fatal pushing — “We find ourselves arresting the same people over and over again. Let’s look at last year . . . in 2023, NYPD cops made over 13,600 arrests in the subway system. 124 of those individuals were arrested five or more times in the subway system last year alone. These 124 people alone . . . totaled over 7,500 arrests in their lifetime.”
Third, what happened to secure mental-health treatment? McPherson made his mental illness apparent to officials in just the January instance, in spitting on someone on the train.
Maybe he shouldn’t be in prison — but he should have been in secure mental-health care, something perfectly possible under existing law. What went wrong? Did city officials think he was going to fix himself?
Adams was grim Tuesday, saying of recidivism that “our practices, laws and policies are not going after these issues.”
Fine, but he needs to find money for a larger transit-police presence, fix his own failings on mental-health care and call on Albany — every day — to allow judges to keep dangerous people behind bars and fund even more long-term mental-health beds.
But he so quickly loses focus — until the next subway pushing or shooting. Even yesterday, he stepped on his own message, insisting the city isn’t “out of control.” Yes, it is.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
