Democrats’ standing is at a record low nationally. To inch their way up from their nadir, Democrats must demonstrate the basics of governing.
As New York City slouches toward the Democratic mayoral primary in June, a subway safety plan proposed by the front-runner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, raises the main question for the city’s ruling party: Why is it so hard to accomplish obvious things? Why have so many candidates and elected officials resisted common-sense ideas that not only could work, but have worked in the past?
Mr. Cuomo’s subway safety plan, being released Tuesday morning, is 20 pages of footnoted detail, a smorgasbord of ideas, some good, some not so good, some with a credible path to execution, some not.
But the plan illustrates why Mr. Cuomo, despite his known demerits, is ahead of his more progressive rivals. As the only major candidate running against Mayor Eric Adams as a moderate, Mr. Cuomo acknowledges three obvious facts and sets one clear and attainable standard that New York used to come closer to achieving: “The transit system exists for transit use only,” the plans says, not as a homeless shelter, not as a haven for the severely mentally ill.
As for the three obvious facts, first, the public is concerned about subway violence and disorder, and rightly so. Even though they have fallen from pandemic rates, violent subway felonies in 2024 were well above the lows that long persisted before 2020 — 14 percent above 2019 levels, even as post-pandemic ridership lags.
The nature of the crime has changed, too, rattling riders: Last year’s felony assaults, many of them committed by repeat violent offenders, without warning or provocation, were 55 percent above 2019 levels, higher than at any time since at least 1997. Last year’s 10 recorded murders, plus one apparently justified homicide during a violent robbery and one violent death after a fight, were also the highest in that time span. Through 2019, it took six years to rack up such a murder toll.
Second, part of returning to pre-2020 levels of public safety must be policing — but not the stopgap policing that Mr. Adams has engaged in. Continuing a policy that actually started in the final year of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, Mr. Adams, with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s financial support, has relied on overtime shifts and redeployed street officers to periodically surge the police presence in the subways. When sensational crime temporarily abates, the extra cops disappear; rinse and repeat.
The city relies on overtime and redeployments because the transit-police contingent of the New York Police Department, budgeted at about 2,700 officers, is well below the 4,100 in the mid-1990s, a time when crime sharply fell from its peak a few years earlier. Mr. Adams, despite his own 2021 pledge to cut subway crime, has never proposed a real solution to the staffing issue.
Mr. Cuomo says he’ll bring the Police Department’s transit ranks up to 4,000, to consistently enforce transit rules against behaviors such as lying across seats and smoking. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is doing some of this work, to early good results, but without more transit officers, she cannot keep it up.
Whether the transit system needs a full 4,000 is debatable, and Mr. Cuomo’s assertion that the city can “almost” pay for new cops by reducing overtime alone is implausible. (The word “almost” is doing a lot of work there.) But Mr. Cuomo is prominently running on a position that should be obvious, and what has worked in the past: We need more transit cops, and we shouldn’t put up with so much low-level antisocial behavior in the subways.
Third, to make subways safer and more orderly the city will need more aggressive mental health treatment, with civilian clinicians backed by police officers as they approach people in distress. Both the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city are doing some of this work already, but their ranks are limited: The M.T.A. is increasing its teams this year to 10 from five, and the city has four similar teams in the transit system overnight. And, as Mr. Cuomo acknowledges, this requires involuntary commitments of severely mentally ill people in some cases.
There are lots to question in the details of Mr. Cuomo’s plan, and it raises questions about the former governor’s role in our current problems. Mr. Cuomo himself signed the changes in criminal justice laws that kept more defendants out of jail and may have led to more crime by repeat offenders in the subway system; he also moved mental health beds out of psychiatric hospitals and into less rigorous community settings.
The biggest potential flaw in his plan is his idea for addressing fare evasion, which he himself says is a core component of crime prevention. Under the plan, most of it would be handled by new civilian M.T.A. inspectors who would ask riders for proof of payment during their journey, as well as new officers within the M.T.A.’s own police force, which has had a small presence in the subways, rather than the city’s Police Department. But what the M.T.A. does would not be within Mr. Cuomo’s control as mayor.
To make these sorts of reasonable criticisms of the plan, the more progressive Democratic candidates would have to acknowledge what voters feel: that the subways should be as safe and orderly as they were not that long ago. Achieving that goal will involve both more full-time transit police officers, more serious enforcement of fare evasion and subway rules, and more mental health treatment that involves involuntary hospitalizations.
State Senator Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn is the candidate who comes the closest, with his idea for 150 police-backed mental health teams of civilian clinicians in the subways.
But for most of the Democratic field, subway safety, top of mind for voters, is tacked to policy platforms as an afterthought, or is an answer to a question, not a major plank. Often, the candidates overlook one key component. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani of Queens, for example, running second in some polls, is reluctant to make it easier to involuntarily commit the mentally ill.
A safe transit system is an elementary, attainable goal: New York did it before. The voters want it and consider it a priority. But nearly four years after the last mayoral election, in which voters elected a Democrat with national aspirations who promised to cut subway violence, we’re all still talking about the same problem, and wanting the same thing: a subway like we used to have.
How can Democrats move forward if they can’t even achieve what was attainable not that long ago?
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