At the beginning of this year, Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced they would ramp up protections for New Yorkers riding the subway, expanding the MTA’s partnership with the New York City Police Department.
As a result of the initiative, 750 NYPD officers and 1,000 members of the National Guard are present at subway entrances and within stations across the city, with an additional 300 NYPD officers inside the train cars themselves. This militarization of the subway system, where over 3 million New Yorkers find themselves every day, is incredibly misguided and will likely yield more harm than good.
Specifically, the initiative will focus on the 30 stations that account for 50% of crime in the subway system, a statistic drawn from a 2025 report conducted by Vital City. However, the report cites a major, yet overlooked, caveat to this number. A majority of the stations deemed the most crime-ridden in Hochul’s initiative, such as 59th Street–Columbus Circle and Grand Central-42nd Street, are not actually the most dangerous — rather, because they’re transit hubs, these locations wind up being the most populated on a daily basis…