After an attacker shoved a woman into the side of a moving subway train at a Midtown station last week, critically injuring her, Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief Janno Lieber wrote in The Post of his riders: “We cannot expect them to put up with random acts of violence.”
But we do. Nearly two years into a joint governor-mayor effort to secure the subways, they’re still twice as dangerous, per rider, as they were in 2019.
Wednesday’s subway pushing wasn’t the only random attack last week.
Moments before he shoved the woman at 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue, just beneath MoMA, the suspect, Sabir Jones, punched a man so hard that he broke his jaw.
A day later, a different suspect repeatedly stabbed a passenger at another Midtown station.
A day after that, a woman viciously beat another woman on a Queens train, yelling anti-white slurs.
Four “random” stranger-on-stranger attacks, all in busy areas, all during the day. Was it always like this?
Nope: The numbers back up riders’ perception of danger and disorder.
Let’s start with the top number — homicides.
This year, six people have lost their lives to violence on New York City subways: a man pushed to Manhattan tracks in January, a teen shot at a Bronx station in April, three people stabbed in three separate Brooklyn and Manhattan incidents in spring and summer and Jordan Neely, put in a chokehold on a Manhattan train in May as he threatened other riders.
Two of these killings — both stabbings in Brooklyn — are recorded as justified homicides, as the stabbers acted in self-defense against aggressive attackers. (Neely’s may end up on this list as well.)
Maintaining an orderly environment on the trains, as New York used to do, would have prevented this loss of life.
Six homicides this year means we’ll probably end 2023 better than we did 2022, which had 11 homicides, a level not seen in nearly three decades. That follows seven homicides each in 2020 and 2021.
From 1997 to 2019, the subways saw just one or two homicides each year.
So we’re nowhere near back to normal.
That’s true with all violent felonies, including rape, robbery and assault.
We’ve seen 825 violent felonies through September, new MTA data show. Yes, that’s down 6% from last year.
But it’s still up 26% from 2019.
Factor in lower ridership, and you’re twice as likely to become a victim of violence compared with 2019: nearly one in 1 million subway rides today, from one in 2 million four years ago.
More police are making a difference. Summons and arrests are up 55% over last year and even sharply exceed 2019 levels.
But this enforcement is mostly deterring crime by rational criminals, such as robberies, down 13% since last year and flat against 2019.
Gun seizures, too, are way up, nearly double 2019 levels.
What police can’t deter on their own are “random” crimes that arise from untreated mental illness or drug spaz-outs.
Felony assaults are up 3% since last year and by nearly two-thirds since 2019.
Over and over, perpetrators arrested for low-level crimes are still released, with no mandatory mental-health treatment, and then escalate their behavior.
Police arrested Sabir Jones, the suspect in last week’s pushing, for disorderly conduct in the subways in the past year.
Jones had three other disturbance “incidents” on his record. Police and social-services officials say he was a “constant presence” in subway stations.
Just like Jordan Neely — who was so disturbed that he was on a top-50 list of people acutely in need of mental-health services.
Regarding this latest pushing incident, Mayor Eric Adams should put his NYPD chief and his social-services chief in a room and say: Which of you failed?
Just as with Neely, if Jones was a “constant” disruptive presence, why wasn’t he arrested for each disruption?
If Jones needed mental-health care instead of arrest, why didn’t social services force him off the streets?
Plus: Under Adams, the construction of hundreds of new public-hospital beds for the seriously mentally ill is delayed by at least two years, until the end of next year.
This isn’t lack of money; the money is allocated. It’s incompetence.
As Waheed Foster, the suspect in the severe beating last year of a woman in a Queens subway stop, told The Post recently, “Somebody can lose their mind at any time.”
But they usually give plenty of warning before killing someone or nearly killing someone.
New York is not heeding those warnings.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
