New Report: Addressing Soaring Crime on New York City’s Subways

NEW YORK, NY — These days, New Yorkers are scared to ride the subway: in recent polling, 74 percent of commuters said safety on the city’s public transit systems had declined since the pandemic started; 94 percent said not enough was being done to address the homelessness and mental illness contributing to the problem. In a new report for the Manhattan Institute, senior fellow Nicole Gelinas acknowledges New Yorkers’ fears, arguing that consistent enforcement of laws against fare evasion and other low-level crimes underground are imperative to return to safety.

Beginning in March 2020, subway ridership fell as low as 6.5 percent of pre-Covid levels and with it the beneficial “safety in numbers” effect on which New Yorkers rely to keep the transit system safe. At the same time, the NYPD and prosecutors failed to fill the vacuum. As a result, violent felonies on the subway have risen sharply, not only on a per-rider basis but in absolute numbers. Before 2020, with an average of one or two murders a year on the subways for more than two decades, and with daily ridership nearly 6 million people, the risk (assuming two-way trips) of becoming a murder victim was truly minuscule: less than 0.05 per 100,000 people. The per-capita risk has thus increased 14-fold over a dizzying two years.

Ridership gradually returned to an average of 59 percent of normal levels by the end of 2021, yet violent crime has not declined in tandem, meaning crowds are still insufficiently large to deter violent crime or that crowds are no longer providing safety in numbers the way they did before the pandemic. Gelinas says the stagnation of both crowd size and public safety is unlikely to fix itself. When people fear taking trains because of violent crime, they keep crowd levels low, thus enabling violent crime to persist at elevated levels. An intervention is needed to stop the cycle.

Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have jointly announced a subway safety plan. While their plan addresses homelessness and mental health, it says little about additional criminal and civil enforcement of laws and rules. To effectively curb the rise in transit crime, and in addition provide needed mental health support, the city must return to proactive and preventive policing and deterrence—and prosecutors must follow through on these cases.

Click here to view the full report.