How Bratton's NYPD Saved the Subway System

This piece was adapted from the Summer 2016 Issue of City Journal

At 10:20 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 2, 1990, 22-year-old Utah resident Brian Watkins, accompanied by his parents, brother and sister-in-law, entered the New York City subway system in Midtown, intent on a short D-train trip uptown for dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. They never got there. A group of teenagers surrounded Watkins and his family on the subway platform. They attacked Watkins’ parents, slashing his father’s pants open and hitting and kicking his mother. When Brian and his brother tried to defend them, the muggers plunged a knife into Brian’s chest, killing him. The murderers then fled to the nearby Roseland Ballroom, using money they had stolen from the Watkins family to buy tickets.

Watkins’ killing made national headlines. Time ran a cover story on “The Rotting of the Big Apple,” with its soon-to-be-famous image of the ‘I NY’ logo with the heart split asunder. The event “summoned forth horror and soul-searching in a city that has already known too much of both,” People noted. Coming in the first year of David Dinkins’ mayoralty, the murder would help propel Rudy Giuliani into the mayor’s office three years later, as Democratic voters turned to a Republican prosecutor to get a seemingly ungovernable city under control.

Watkins’ death was the 18th killing in New York’s subways in 1990, and eight more would follow by the end of the year. The year before, underground assailants killed 20 people. Such violence was familiar already in 1981, when 14 lost their lives in the subways. Many considered these deaths an inevitable part of living in the big city. In 1985, for example, The New York Times reported that the subways were safe enough, at least “for those who avoided the most dangerous stations, the ones with all the ramps and posts and connecting passageways in Midtown.”

By contrast, more than three decades later, New York really does have a safe subway system. Last year saw two subway murders, the same as the year before. Over the past 11 years, 26 people have been killed waiting for or riding on trains — matching the number killed just in 1990, the year of Watkins’ death. Today, few would worry that it might be unsafe to ride a train at 10:20 p.m. on the weekend.

Policing played a huge role in making Gotham’s subways safe, as it did in reducing crime throughout the city. In fact, the New York crime turnaround began in the subways, and what the police discovered about violence underground would prove essential to the broader battle for the city’s streets.

“When I was 8 years old, I used to ride the subway by myself,” recalls Ray Kelly, New York’s police commissioner under Dinkins and again under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That was just after World War II, when subway crime was negligible. Kelly remembers, too, the “feeling of danger and disorder” during the 1970s.

By then, the whole system seemed to be crumbling into ruin, as budget-crunched state and city officials slashed maintenance costs. In 1974, the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city subways, even stopped doing routine track inspections.

“It was horrendous,” says David Gunn, who headed the subway system from 1984 to 1990. “Each car breaking down every week.”

Violent crime began its rise. As late as the mid-1960s, subway murder was rare; during one stretch, only two people died over more than a year. In 1973, however, nine were killed. A year later, reacting to public alarm, Mayor Abe Beame decided to close the rear cars of subway trains, seeking to keep riders nearer to the conductor’s car and presumably safer. Ceding space to robbers and killers proved an ineffective crime-fighting strategy, and the body count climbed.

By the time Bernhard Goetz made headlines in 1984 for shooting four teenagers he claimed were menacing him on a Manhattan train, the public was on his side: A grand jury at first refused to indict him for attempted murder.

New Yorkers started shunning the subways. Between 1970 and 1980, annual ridership fell from nearly 1.3 billion trips to just over 1 billion, a percentage drop more than double the city’s 10 percent population loss.

Even as subway violence intensified, the city and state had been putting conditions in place that would later prove crucial in the fight against crime. In 1984, Gunn and his boss, MTA chief Bob Kiley, made the decision to go after graffiti, which they saw as a symptom of the city’s disorder. For years, Mayor Ed Koch had urged transit bosses to clean graffiti from their trains. In 1981, the MTA had even deployed two guard dogs to scare potential taggers away from a train yard. New York also launched a public-service campaign, telling would-be train defacers to “make your mark in society, not on it.”

The MTA repainted some train cars white, Gunn says, but “it was a stupid idea.” Transit officials would mix the clean white cars with dirty cars on the same train, so “you would have a pair of clean cars in the middle. You might as well have a sign that says, ‘Paint me next.’”

Subway managers came up with a strategy: Start with just two lines — the 4 and 7 — and clean the trains on those lines. And then keep them clean, washing and repainting to get rid of any new graffiti before trains went out again, even at the expense of delays. This sent a clear message to vandals: Spraying trains wasn’t worth it, since the graffiti wouldn’t be seen. “It took 40 cans of paint and as much as 12 hours to complete a mural,” The New York Times reported a graffiti expert as saying. “Now it is hard even to snap a photograph before the work is cleaned off.”

Police also began cracking down on vandals. Steve Mona was a “train buff growing up,” he says. He took the police exam and fortuitously “wound up in transit” in 1985 and soon had a new beat: Keep tabs on the subways and see which graffiti tags appeared most frequently. “I would stop kids, and ask, ‘What does that say? Who is Jon156?’ ” He also started subscribing to graffiti zines. The city’s transit police (a separate force from the NYPD until 1995) eventually learned who was responsible for a disproportionate amount of the tagging and went after those people. The vandal squad he headed “would stake out homes, art shows,” looking for specific targets.

The law-enforcement goal was not to put small-time graffiti “artists” behind bars for years. In fact, the police and the MTA established a restitution program for taggers: cleaning trains. “I guess it’s fair that we pay for what we’ve done,” said one 19-year-old vandal. Often, Mona says, visits to vandals’ parents’ houses were enough to stop the tagging. “Parents would say, ‘My kid does graffiti only at home,’ ” but officers would find notebooks in the house with tags identical to those found in the subways.

Still, hard-core recidivists did face real prison time. By 1990, many said, “That’s it for me,” according to Mona. “They found out this was a kind of badge-of-honor scrutiny you didn’t want.”

By 1989, the trains were clean. These days, they’re so clean that people will go up to police officers and say, “This train car has graffiti on it,” says Vincent Coogan, the current assistant chief of the Transit Police. No one would have done that back in the 1970s or early 1980s, when graffiti was everywhere.

As the MTA worked to solve its graffiti problem, it also began to improve the transit system. Slowly, and with an infusion of state cash, workers repaired tracks, stations and turnstiles. Service grew more reliable, and people started to use the system again. Annual ridership rose, in the 1980s, by 19 million. That represented a modest increase of 2 percent, but the hemorrhaging had stopped.

The newly clean and better-functioning trains set the stage for the fight against subway crime. As Joseph Fox, chief of the NYPD’s transit bureau, observes: “It’s a simple correlation”; the defaced trains and dilapidated system gave “the appearance that no one was in charge.”

The turnaround in the transit system accelerated in 1990, the year that Bill Bratton came to New York to head the Transit Police, armed with ideas from criminologist George Kelling. At the time, the MTA was frustrated by disorderly behavior such as aggressive panhandling, turnstile-jumping and public urination.

In his two years in charge, Bratton put the focus on reducing illegal behavior underground, not ridding the system of its squalor. Homelessness was not a crime; jumping a turnstile was. Going after illegal disorderly acts — what came to be known as “broken windows” or quality-of-life policing — would improve the lives of all New Yorkers.

But before the laws against disorder could be enforced again, the public had to be warned. Every day, 250,000 people were beating the fare, Kelling notes, and “there were not 250,000 criminals — good people had got into bad habits.” They thought that the ride was not worth the money or they had gotten used to broken turnstiles, frequently disabled by thieves trying to steal the tokens. “You don’t want to arrest people, but the thing is to get them to stop,” says Kelling. The MTA launched a PR campaign to “warn people, educate people,” he adds.

The Transit Police had an advantage street cops lacked: You had to pay to get into the subway. That meant the police could stop lawbreakers at entry points, whenever fare-beaters broke theft-of-services law. The transit system has its own set of rules, including prohibiting walking between cars or taking up two seats, and breaking these rules will invite police attention. Police made an important discovery: Fare-beaters and other bad actors were disproportionately criminals wanted for other crimes, and they often carried weapons. (The muggers who killed Brian Watkins had entered the system illegally, by not paying their fare.) Stopping turnstile-jumpers, in other words, helped prevent bigger crimes. “By cracking down on fare evasion, we have been able to stop serious criminals carrying weapons at the turnstiles before they get on the subways and wreak havoc,” Bratton told Newsday in 1991.

Toward the end of Bratton’s first year as Transit Police chief, misdemeanor arrests were up 80 percent and felonies began to fall. In 1990, transit riders were victims of 17,497 felonies — murders, robberies, rapes, assaults and thefts. Two years later, the number had dropped to 12,199. As proactive policing continued, the subways got safer.

By 2000, felonies had plunged to 4,263, and in 2015, the figure was 2,502. New Yorkers once endured 48 felonies a day in the transit system; now it’s fewer than seven. The last time more than two people were murdered in one year on the subways was 2007, when four lost their lives.

New York’s subway system now has more users than at any time since just after World War II, when Ray Kelly was riding the trains as a child. New Yorkers, visitors and commuting workers take nearly 1.8 billion annual trips — nearly double the number who did so in 1980.

Kelling notes that people now stand on the far ends of train platforms, looking at their iPhones, and women often stand alone. They never would have done that in the bad old days, he says. “They would have been targets.” Now, they’re just hoping to squeeze onto the next train.

This piece originally appeared in the New York Post

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

Photo by Andrew Burton / Getty (top), Hulton Archive (train)

This piece originally appeared in New York Post