Ameed Ademolu, a close-cropped and bespectacled nurse, descends the street-level stairs to the subway, clad in an orange and yellow vest and carrying a clipboard, paper and pencil. He halts, reaches into a pocket to unfold a K-95 mask and fits it over his mouth and nose. “The mask is for me,” he says, because “I’ve had people spit in my face.”
At the Fulton Street station in Downtown Manhattan, Mr. Ademolu encounters two men, one in his 20s and one older, the latter dependent on a cart piled with his belongings as a walker. The younger one is coherent but agitated, ripping up newspaper and scattering the pieces as he puffs on his vape. Both are homeless and have become friends after months on the subways.
Mr. Ademolu talks to them for half an hour. The older man declines Mr. Ademolu’s offer to have a shelter van pick him up, saying he knows that the shelter system cannot easily accommodate someone who cannot walk up and down stairs. The younger man decides he will go to a shelter. Mr. Ademolu takes the man upstairs to await the van.
Mr. Ademolu spends his days like this, pacing Manhattan subway platforms and stations, searching for people who appear severely mentally ill. He is a member of a Subway Co-Response Outreach, or SCOUT, team, a new project between the city and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
His work represents the newer of two strategies that New York’s city and state governments are using to dispel the atmosphere of disorder and danger that permeates the subways. The other is more old-fashioned policing and prosecution. Success for both depends on New York creating a functional mental health system and recreating a functional criminal justice system. If this strategy works, it could become a model for other American cities struggling with crime and mental illness.
Underground fear
New Yorkers have become fearful on the subway system, which remains the city’s main artery. Only 49 percent feel safe during the day, down from 86 percent in 2008 and 82 percent in 2017, a 2023 poll found. As night falls, anxiety grows: 22 percent feel safe, down from 46 percent in 2017.
“New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the day now as they felt on the subway at night in 2017,” Citizens Budget Commission surveyors observed.
Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul have sometimes framed these fears as more perception than reality. But after nearly three decades of crime decline beginning in 1990, the subways are more dangerous and disorderly than in 2019. In the first six months of 2024, compared with the same months of 2019, violent felonies — murder, rape, robbery, assault — were 16 percent higher.
Adjust for post-Covid ridership, and violent felony numbers are worse. In the first six months of 2024, trains carried nearly 585 million passengers; that’s 69 percent of the ridership in the same period in 2019, which was nearly 844 million. Violence per million rides has risen to 0.83, lower than the peaks reached during the worst of the pandemic, but 67 percent higher than in 2019.
Homicides have reached at least 37 since 2020, including six in 2024. During the earlier era, it took nearly 17 years to reach this murder tally.
These numbers may sound low, but in a system that moves millions of people per day in packed train cars, the rate of violence must approach a vanishing point to ensure public comfort. No other successful global transit system — not London, not Paris, not Tokyo — regularly suffers random homicides, adding to a sense of fear that is affecting ridership.
Subway riders often encounter disorder — arguing between strangers, aggressive panhandling, drug use — that could rise to violence.
“If someone smokes where they’re not supposed to smoke aboveground,” Janno Lieber, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, told me, “that might be annoying.” But “when you’re in a subway car, and someone lights up a joint, you say, what else might that person do?” If some people don’t play by the same rules, others get scared, he said.
An easing of enforcement
How did New York keep its subways safe through 2019? From 1990, the peak year for subway crime, until the late 2010s, the city’s police department, as well as prosecutors and judges used the criminal justice system to deter small crimes, such as turnstile-jumping, before they could escalate to violence.
By the late 2010s, New Yorkers felt so comfortable — 2017 was the first year in memory without a subway homicide — that they supported easing enforcement. The next year, the Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance, said that he would no longer regularly prosecute fare-beating.
That move, emulated by the Brooklyn D.A., Eric Gonzalez, made it harder for the M.T.A. and the Police Department (which does most subway policing) to deter the minority of people who repeatedly evade the fare and ignore fines; about 40 percent of transit fines go unpaid. In the first quarter of 2018, fare evasion was 2.8 percent; a year later, it was 3.9 percent.
As fare evasion rose, New York’s legislature enacted other changes — limits on pre-trial incarceration and rules requiring prosecutors to turn over more evidence more quickly — that constrained the justice system. The final change took effect on the first day of 2020.
Safety on the subways shifted. In that year’s first two months, fare-beating arrests fell by 64 percent compared with the previous year, and felony violence rose 59 percent. On March 7, 2020, 25-year-old Rudolph Dunning, a fashion enthusiast, held the emergency exit gate open at the Soundview station in the Bronx so that a stranger could evade the fare, and after a short argument, the man stabbed Mr. Dunning to death.
New York never got the chance to see if these months were a trend. People who remained on trains during the pandemic — essential commuters and subway workers — were subject to ceaseless dysfunction. In March 2020, Garrett Goble, a train operator, was killed in an arson fire on a Harlem train — one of seven murder victims that year, the highest number in more than two decades. Customers disappeared but perpetrators — whether motivated by robbery or incapacitated by mental illness — did not.
By fall 2022, it was clear that rising ridership after the end of lockdown was not going to bring violence down to normal. In three weeks, four riders lost their lives, three of the murders random. The violence spurred Governor Hochul to pay the city for more Police Department officers to patrol subways via overtime shifts. Murders subsided, and so did the number of police officers underground, leading to a clear pattern: Attention to a sensational crime spurred the city to add police shifts; crime fell, though not to pre-pandemic levels. The city pulled back on extra staffing, only to experience a new crime surge. After the first three of four stranger-on-stranger murders in three months early this year, Mr. Adams repeated the pattern, adding 1,000 daily overtime shifts. The nadir of government helplessness came this March, when Ms. Hochul called in the National Guard.
A new approach to mental illness
New Yorkers want safer subways, yet they recognize that many people engaged in anti-social behavior are mentally ill. The new approach to untreated mental illness is where Mr. Ademolu and the SCOUT program, begun last fall by the city government and the M.T.A., comes in. Unlike earlier homeless-outreach programs, through which workers ask people who appear to be homeless if they would like assistance and are usually rejected, SCOUT employs a nurse — Mr. Ademolu is the first — who walks the train platforms looking for people in distress. (SCOUT works mostly in stations, not trains. Clinicians and police officials are concerned that they could lose control of a situation on an enclosed train.)
Mr. Ademolu is accompanied by uniformed M.T.A. police officers, who stand back while he works, improving the chances that the mentally distressed will not be scared off by their uniforms.
In his encounters, Mr. Ademolu makes a clinical assessment. Is the person wearing shoes and adequate clothing? Is the person acting dangerously, stumbling near the tracks? Is he or she coherent? If a person appears unable to ensure his or her own safety or appears dangerous to others, Mr. Ademolu summons an ambulance for transport to a hospital; the state has increased the number of mental health beds.
Through mid-August, SCOUT’s daytime teams persuaded 99 people to accept shelter and 26 people to voluntarily accept a hospital assessment, and made 24 decisions to transport someone involuntarily for a psychiatric assessment. The overnight teams determined that 27 people needed involuntary transportation to the hospital. The work is costly but worth it if even a few hundred people get into treatment, Mr. Lieber said. The M.T.A. plans to expand SCOUT teams to other boroughs; for now, they are confined to Manhattan day shifts, as well as night shifts at two end-of-the-line stations in Brooklyn and Queens.
Preventive policing still works
The city is also returning to what worked for nearly three decades: preventive policing. This, too, is hands-on labor, fare-beater by fare-beater, pickpocket by pickpocket. It still works: During the first two months of this year, police seized 19 illegal guns from suspects in the subway, mostly through spotting fare-beaters and low-grade rule-breaking stops.
As with searching platform after platform for the mentally ill, it takes a lot of summonses to catch a serious criminal: someone with a warrant, someone with a weapon. In the first six months of 2024, transit arrests, at 10,447, are 56 percent above last year’s levels, although just above half of 2016 levels. Civil tickets, mostly for fare-beating, at 104,553, are 22 percent higher than they were last year, and more than twice as high as in 2016. This work produces lasting results only if the criminal justice and mental health systems are working aboveground.
The process from arrest to prosecution to incapacitation, whether through jail time or effective mental health treatment, is broken. This year, as Hannah Meyers at the Manhattan Institute has found, of 6,041 transit-system arrests, prosecutors declined 33.6 percent of cases and dismissed 22.5 percent. This collective 56.1 percent rate is higher than the 36.7 percent in 2018, when District Attorney Vance stopped prosecuting most fare-beating; the rate was 15.6 percent in 2017.
Lowering the cost of low-grade lawbreaking has consequences for safety. First, the negligible consequences even for repeat fare-beating tempt many more people to evade the fare — people who may not go on to commit any other crime, but who consume police resources. Fare evasion, as of early 2024, was 13.6 percent, near a high.
Even when evaders don’t escalate to serious crimes, “fare evasion,” Mr. Lieber said, “is the No. 1 existential threat,” because “it says at the doorway, this is not an orderly place.”
Second, police work cannot keep suspects who do escalate their behavior out of the subway, because the same people face repeated arrests and releases. On June 22, a 21-year-old Bronx man allegedly slashed a stranger at the Queens Plaza subway station and went on to slash two people nearby. Nine days earlier, he had allegedly punched someone in the face at a Bronx station; after that arrest, he spit at a police officer. The suspect has a previous criminal history, at least four incidents in the prior two years.
Similarly, the woman who allegedly shoved two tourists onto Manhattan subway tracks in early August has a long arrest record, indicating several opportunities to provide her with adequate mental health care if necessary.
To prevent these incidents, New York’s criminal justice and mental health systems could have worked together to ensure public safety. If a suspect was not mentally incapacitated, and thus responsible for his own actions, then repeated lower-level violence should have put him behind bars to await trial on serious charges. Or if he was mentally incapacitated, he should have been hospitalized.
Shielding low-level lawbreakers, including the mentally ill, from short stretches in jail means that lowering crime requires far more human labor. Mr. Ademolu can pace hot subways day after day seeking out the mentally ill, but what happens after they are placed in the system? Does that person remain hospitalized past 72 hours? Once he is stable, does the hospital release him, only for him to deteriorate? The city can’t reveal personal medical histories, but doesn’t offer even aggregate data, which would protect patient privacy.
In an earlier era, a suspect might have been arrested only once. If suspects are going to be repeatedly released only to be repeatedly rearrested, then the police force will have to be larger so that the police presence itself can deter more crimes. When transit police began to cut crime by double digits in 1990, the transit police force was on its way to 4,100 officers, 52 percent larger than today. The criminal justice system — prosecutors, judges and the mental health system — needs to be far more publicly accountable for its decisions.
The most straightforward measure of success would be a violent-crime rate that falls back to 2019 levels, when subway homicide truly was rare — one or two a year, the norm since the late 1990s, rather than the six to 11 annually, as has been the case since 2020. In 2019, there was no debate over perception versus reality, because people weren’t perceiving subway crime.
Asleep on the train
It’s rush hour at Grand Central Station, and passengers have beckoned the police to a young woman sprawled across the seats of a jam-packed car. Police wake her and ask her to step off the train. She seats herself on a bench. She’s not dirty; she’s wearing fluffy slippers; she’s compliant and not in obvious distress. Police write a ticket for breaking transit rules; her last address is a homeless shelter. She settles into the bench as everyone else rushes by: people staring into their phones as they race from work, race to the theater. Clutching her ticket, the woman asks a question of her own. “When is the next train coming?” she whispers.
The post New York’s Promising Experiment in Making the Subways Safer appeared first on New York Times.
