Subway Strife

By Nayaba Arinde
Editor-at-Large
The MTA posts ‘Don’t be a subway story,’ but an encounter with someone experiencing a severe mental episode — a violent outburst, hunger or homelessness leading to aggressive panhandling — may take the decision away from a commuter.

Mayor Eric Adams’ default position has been, “We’re fighting a perception issue.”
Is there a gaslight on?

The recent reality, not perception: a woman attacked on the F-line in Queens; a subway train conductor slashed on the C line; and a commuter shot on the A-train.
Ruth Smith, a criminal and social justice professor at Adelphi University and Monroe College, told Our Time Press, when there’s an incident on the train, riders do not usually interfere because of “an internal fear and a healthy paranoia; you don’t know what may happen.”

Finally, after months of blaming the press for fear-mongering reporting on subway crime (and even stating to this reporter in 2022 that “It was a perception, not reality”), this week Mayor Adams said, “We have over 4 million riders a day in a reliable system, and we know that we have approximately six felonies a day out of those 4 million riders. But … stats don’t matter if people don’t believe they are in a safe environment.”

“It means you have lost control of the city,” Brooklyn activist Caleef Cousar, founder of Transitions, a community advocacy group, told Our Time Press. “They have now brought in the National Guard to monitor a situation that the City should be capable of handling.”
Last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul sent 750 National Guard members to major New York City subway hubs.

But the mayor, a retired NYPD captain, insists, “The presence of a uniform makes people feel better, and if the National Guards or the state police want to add to that presence, I applaud that.”

Adams said there are “three problems that we must correct in this city: recidivism…severe mental health illness…. random acts of violence. Those three aspects are sending the message that our city is out of control. Our city is not out of control.”

In February, the Mayor said that he deployed 1,000 additional police officers into the subway every day, resulting in a 16% decrease in crime in March. He just announced the NYPD’s new electromagnetic weapons detection systems from the much-criticized Evolv company.

Mayor Adams actually said, “This is a Sputnik moment when President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon and everyone responded. We are going to bring technology that could identify guns and other dangerous weapons…We’ve got to wait 90 days. But think about it, 90 days idealism collides with realism.”

As for “our extreme mental health crisis,” the mayor said his solution is, “We are ready to start hiring more clinicians for our Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams, also known as SCOUT. Governor Hochul has announced $20 million to expand the program to 10 teams by the end of 2025.”
The teams comprise clinicians and police working together to swiftly move individuals with untreated severe mental illness out of the subway system and into care.

Prof. Smith, also a licensed clinical social worker, told Our Time Press,” some of the people causing concern on the trains are the dual-diagnosed once, known as Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICAs).
Those who are having an episode, she said, “shouldn’t be locked up, but they should be apprehended. People who are mentally ill have to work with a lot of so-called mental health professionals, who have different levels of skill sets. Cultural sensitivity and cultural awareness are mandated training that everyone has to take, but that doesn’t mean they get it.

“A lot of the people on the train are not getting the right help, because the professionals say, ‘Ok, my job is to get you to the hospital and put you on some medication, (and then) stabilize you. Once I get you stable, I’ll send you over here.’ Now when you get over there, they don’t do the work that they need to do to keep you stable…those are the ones who will push you on the tracks. There must be consistent, comprehensive help for those who need it.”

Danny Pearlstein from the Riders Alliance said the mental health focus should be greater. “We haven’t seen it at the scale that we need,” he told Our Time Press.

As for the proposed weapons detection system, he said, “The subway really can’t turn into the airport terminal. You can’t have people on line waiting to go through metal detectors. It’s not realistic. It’s not a worthwhile investment. It seems impractical.”

Meanwhile, Deputy Mayor David Banks, “The reason why we looked at Evolv is that it is designed for crowds. That’s why stadiums use them. You can walk through this and never have to stop.”

“If someone is coming into the subway system, they see this machine, they turn around, they [walk] away, that’s their right,” Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters, Michael Gerber, “No one is required to go through the machine…If someone chooses to go through the machine, to go into the transit system, and the machine alerts on a potential weapon, officers will then search for that particular area.”

He added that the “crime panic” is fueled by “seductive sensationalism” by some tabloid media makes people nervous, and others “foolish” But, he said that the Mayor ran on “‘I’m a transit cop, and only I can fix it,’ but, had to dramatize it into a crisis. There’s a real collateral consequence of that, in that people are more nervous than they should be.

What are we doing constructively to improve the situation and stop violence from happening?”

He added that the “crime panic” is fueled by “seductive sensationalism,” by tabloid media making people nervous, and others “foolish” But, he said that the Mayor ran on ‘I’m-a-transit cop-and-only-I can-fix-it,’ and dramatized it into a crisis.
“There’s a real collateral consequence to that — people are more nervous than they should be.”