This morning’s attack on New York City commuters comes at a fraught moment. New Yorkers are now more than two years into a prolonged decline in safety, particularly within the subway system. This has fed a growing sense of unease and vulnerability reflected in the polling data, and reinforced by the crime numbers: The NYPD’s most recent weekly CompStat report shows transit crime up 68.1%, year-to-date, despite ridership remaining depressed.
One suspects that this morning’s shooting will function as a sort of capstone on a series of high-profile incidents of serious and deadly violence underground. It may also prove to be a galvanizing moment for voters to reconsider their passive support for evermore-expansive reform efforts that have scaled back the footprint of the NYPD and the criminal justice system more broadly.
The shooting and the resulting manhunt (which, as of this writing, is still underway) also highlight the importance of maintaining and expanding police resources—especially with respect to the NYPD’s investigative capabilities—which include technological resources like CCTV cameras and facial recognition software, the expansion of both of which have generated substantial opposition in recent years. Though many New Yorkers have been wary of overreach on the part of law enforcement in recent years, we can’t lose sight of the high cost of rising violence.
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Rafael A. Mangual is a senior fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.