A sure sign that New York leaders have utterly failed to made riders feel safe: The Guardian Angels are returning to the subways.
Founder Curtis Sliwa announced Sunday that the volunteer force will patrol the underground after a four-year hiatus in response to sky-high crime in the system and the vile arson murder of a suspected homeless woman on Dec. 22.
The Guardian chief said he wants to boost the group’s recruitment back up to 1970s numbers and increase training, claiming he’d “never seen” subway crime “this bad.”
As if to prove Sliwa’s point, a man’s throat was slashed during an argument on a C-train platform the next day.
Mayor Adams’ office dismissed the Angels’ return as a “meaningless stunt,” and it is indeed mostly symbolic — their patrols can only do wellness checks on the mentally disturbed and homeless, patrol cars and platforms for nefarious activity and alert cops to potential problems.
But every set of eyes helps, as does every visible source of order at a time when many New Yorkers suffer a well-founded fear that entering the subway puts you at risk of getting stabbed, robbed, pushed onto the tracks or worse.
Just look at the last few weeks: On Christmas Eve, a maniac stabbed a man in the wrist and a woman in the throat at Grand Central. The same day, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil allegedly lit his victim on fire and left her to die on the F train, and two men were stabbed in the face and chest on the 7.
Days before that, a rambling psycho stabbed a random stranger on the Q train.
Murders in the system are up a bone-chilling 60% so far this year — and that’s with ridership still well below pre-pandemic levels.
While Gov. Hochul claims that her infusion of National Guardsmen has made the system “safer,” she still refuses to do the one thing most needed to protect New Yorkers: Getting rid of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Adams put more cops in the subways in March, but their impact is badly weakened when the perps they cuff keep getting put back on the streets by soft-on-crime prosecutors and judges.
Meanwhile, 58,000 criminal migrants are walking New York City streets, thanks to the Biden administration’s open borders.
The subways are minefields; those still willing to brave public transit must routinely share trains and platforms with repeated offenders and the seriously mentally.
However you feel about the Guardian Angels in their red garb, they’re a natural and helpful response to public-safety vacuum.
And New York’s leaders have left a glaring one.
