Fix the Subway, Not Society 

“The New York subway system has a proud record for safe delivery of its passengers to their destination. … In spite of this record, the public does not feel safe in the subways. There has been an alarming and continuing increase in felonies, climaxed recently by a brutal, senseless murder in a Brooklyn train. Then again, over the weekend, terror struck in the form of a stabbing and an assault on a woman rider.” So said a New York Times editorial just a few months before a woman was pushed to her death in front of a train in the Bronx by a woman who told police she was obeying an “inner voice.” In response to rising subway crime, elected officials recently announced that police officers would be placed on trains and stations throughout the system.

While this may sound like a description of recent headlines and the policy response by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the events above happened 60 years ago. And there are lessons to be learned.

In 1964, subway crime was up 52% compared to the prior year (crime was up 9% for the city overall), with 1,700 reported subway felonies. In 2024, there were 2,200 reported felonies on the subway (though one should exercise caution before comparing crime figures over such a broad time span).

It is a fact too rarely stated that not all crimes are created equal. Jack Maple, the late, great co-creator of NYPD’s CompStat in 1994, explained that crime in the subway has a particular effect on the public’s overall perception of safety: “A robbery on the subway is like a murder in the street. A murder in the subway is like a multiple-murder in the street. Because the subway is everybody’s neighborhood.”

In language more typical of 1965, Joseph O’Grady, the chairman of the Transit Authority, promised that “with solid backing from the community we can reverse the trend and instill fear of swift and sure justice in the hearts of the punks, the halfwits and the no-wits who threaten the safety and well being of our passengers.”

On April 7, 1965, police officers were placed on every train from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. This became known as the 8-P Program. Mayor Wagner said this would free the subways of the terror spread by “the mugger, the hoodlum and the young punk.”

“No price tag,” continued the mayor, “can be placed on safety.” And pricey it was. Increased policing cost $22 million annually ($220 million in 2025 dollars) at a time when the total police budget was $272 million, 6.8% of the City’s budget.

So did it work? Did increased police presence on every train at night reduce crime? The short answer is: Yes. Arrests nearly doubled the first weekend (to 15 a night). And over the following year, major crime in the subway declined 65% (though some of this was displaced to city buses). With more police, the odds of getting caught, the clearance rate, increased from 10% to 40% (and 75% during the late-night hours when the extra police were on duty).

A study by the RAND Institute said it was “conclusively demonstrated” that the increased police activity led to a “decrease in the felony crime rate [that] was genuine and substantial.” And they noted a “free” side benefit: a “phantom effect” that daytime felony crime rates also decreased, at least for the first eight months of the program. Interestingly, in the 15 years from 1958 to 1973, 1965 was the only year in which murders in New York City did not increase.

But subway crime increased again beginning in 1967, as murders and other crime in New York City more than doubled between 1967 and 1972.

The key to effective crime prevention is to effectively delink society’s problems from criminal activity. Focus not on so-called “root causes” but on proximate causes. We can’t wait to fix society’s intractable problems, given our seeming inability to accomplish that.

Murders on the subway remain rare — 10 in 2024 — but if you ride the subway and think things used to be safer, you are correct. There were zero subway murders in 2017, and two or fewer every year from 2008 to 2018. Then police in the subway stopped enforcing many of the rules. In the name of social and racial justice, New York City, in essence, gave up its commitment to public safety.

The Second Avenue Subway opened in 2017. Stations deep underground were — as befitting a decades-long process, massively over budget — large and resplendent with art. When I mentioned how pretty it was, a veteran transit cop said to me, “Professor, it’s gonna be the Taj Mahal of homeless shelters!”

I was baffled at this take until he told me that police had been told, presumably from Mayor de Blasio’s office, that transit police were to curtail quality-of-life enforcement. Instead of policing loitering, for instance, offenders were to be “offered” services by a homeless outreach unit (later defunded and disbanded in 2020) and then left alone if and when they declined.

Police enforcement was seen as worse than any of the problems being policed. This belief resulted in a series of protests in late 2019 in which protesters (remember the kooky movement to “decolonize” the subway?) vandalized the system in support of free fares and police abolition. The year before, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced that fare beating would no longer be prosecuted as a criminal offense. Today, there is no longer a penalty at all for getting caught the first time, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that subway turnstile jumping has doubled, and half of bus riders simply choose not to pay.

Before this turn away from policing, rule violators were warned, cited, arrested or simply (and legally) “ejected” from the system. Ejection was a simple but useful punishment of sorts. The drunk and disorderly had to take their party elsewhere (or perhaps pay for a cab home). These once averaged thousands per month but have become far less common.

Unlike the 1960s, today the public safety problem is perceived not as gangs of robbing youths, but people with obvious mental illness or high on drugs acting in a way potentially harmful to others and not at all helping themselves.

How have the good people of New York City convinced themselves that people clearly out of their mind are best left to be so long as they restrain from assaulting fellow passengers? There is no endgame to living in the subway other than exit or death. This is important not just for them, but for riders who shouldn’t have to navigate prostrate bodies during their commute.

In 1989, when violence in New York City was far worse, the subway system faced problems similar to today in terms of crime, disorder and homelessness. Up to 12 people a month, 200 in three years, were dying in the subway from hypothermia, overdose, electrocution, fire, murder or being crushed by a train.

The Transit Authority responded: “The ultimate goal is to do what we said we were going to do, which is restore a safe, civil environment.” Rules of conduct and behavior were posted, 1.5 million pamphlets were distributed, and the homeless residents, many of whom had been deinstitutionalized in the previous two decades, were to be pushed to social services and shelters, or at least out of stations, trains and tunnels.

This initial attempt to move people to shelters was countered by demonstrators urging people out of vans and back into the subway. Homeless advocates filed a lawsuit, Young v. New York City Transit Authority. In January 1990, a lower court sided in favor of the plaintiffs, and the Transit Authority took down its posted rules of conduct. But four months later, just one month after Bill Bratton became Transit Police chief, the federal appeals court in Manhattan reversed the lower court’s decision, and the MTA was able to legally (and morally) remove vagrants, housed and unhoused, from the subway.

Public fear is driven not just by major crimes but by erratic, disorderly behavior, particularly when targeted at strangers. Determining whether a miscreant in mental distress is nodding out and harmless to others, or tweaking out with a history of violence, is something neither subway riders (nor workers) should be asked to diagnose.

In the winter of 1990-1991, the Transit Authority began operating six buses to take people to City shelters and transported 1,253 people. In the last five months of 1990, one in six people stopped for fare evasion was wanted on an active warrant, and about one in 80 carried an illegal weapon. Subway crime in every category declined. It wasn’t that most homeless people were active violent criminals, but rather a system without rules created an environment that allowed predatory criminals to run amok.

In 1991, misdemeanor arrests on the subway doubled to 2,000 a month (felony arrests remained relatively constant); summonses increased 35%, to 25,000; and ejections — simply kicking rule violators out of the subway system — skyrocketed, from roughly 1,500 to 8,500 a month. The result? Robberies plummeted. Pickpocketing and chain snatching decreased 23%. Transit murders dropped from 26 in 1990 to 20 in 1991. By year’s end, subway crime dropped 15%, compared to 4.4% in the city overall.

This was the beginning of New York City’s great 1990s crime decline. Murders would continue to drop, to four in 1997. As the system became safer, subway ridership began a decades-long rise. Yet it was hardly obvious that New York City had turned a corner. The New York Times quoted a rider in 1992: “Let’s be realistic here. Who feels safe in New York City?”

But a corner had been turned. Between 1993 and 1998 (even as Mayor Giuliani slashed social spending), murders in the city declined 67%, and the number of people detained in jails decreased. (A long-term decline in the city’s jail population began in 1996 and in the New York prison population in 1998.)

In 1994, when Bill Bratton became police commissioner, he declared the mission of the NYPD to be to fight crime, fear of crime and disorder. That may seem rather unremarkable as a police department’s mission statement, but looking back 31 years, it is both remarkable in the way it refocused the NYPD and provides guidance for subway safety today.

The key to effective policing on the subway is not police and much policing. In other words, the number of police matters less than what those police do. Subway rules already define unacceptable behavior. The bulk of riders simply want to ride without incident. What has been lacking is the political will to enforce rules which may reveal racial disparities in offending and also may put police officers in situations that involve use of force. More police on the subway can prevent crime and disorder, but only with clear leadership and an understanding of what can and should be legally policed.

One hears too often that “we can’t police our way out of this problem.” And indeed, police cannot cure mental illness or provide stable housing or health care. But if we define the problem more narrowly, as maintaining order on the subway, we can police it very well. The well-being of the city at large depends on it.