The senseless killing of Richard Henderson on a Brooklyn subway train last weekend is a painful sign that the city has a long road ahead in the fight against crime and disorder.
The beloved husband, father and grandfather was trying to play peacemaker in a dim dispute over loud music when a snarling thug on one side of the argument fired at the other side — and hit Henderson instead, fatally.
His killer remains on the loose — and straphangers on edge.
Count it as one more terrible bit of evidence that the city hasn’t turned the corner on crime.
Mayor Adams and the NYPD are trying, but the City Council and Legislature aren’t.
Despite some gains this last year, since 2019 felony assaults are up nearly 35%, shootings 27% and murders 21%.
Oh, and robberies 26%.
Though she called retail theft “a breakdown of the social order” in her State of the State speech, Gov. Hochul seems to have given up on seeking major fixes to the pre-2020 criminal-justice “reforms” that badly undermined law and order: Raise the Age, no-bail, the pro-perp rules for pre-trial discovery.
As Hannah E. Meyers noted in The Post, “More than a quarter of all cases that passed through Manhattan criminal court during the first 11 months of 2023 were automatically dismissed because overburdened prosecutors ran out of time” under the new discovery rules.
And now the City Council has moved to bury cops under paperwork.
Adams is still trying, but he and Hochul — and all the pigheaded city and state lawmakers still pushing the wrong way — owe it to Richard Henderson and all too many victims of disorder to make restoring public safety their overriding priority.
The gains the city’s made in reversing the crime pendulum remain all too fragile; if New York’s leaders don’t get serious fast, the bad old days will soon be back.
