On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said that not even he has felt safe riding the city’s subway system.
Mayor Adams told the press about the time he took the train on January 1, shortly after he became mayor, and dialed 911 to tell officials about an altercation close to a subway station. He also saw a passenger shouting, and another individual asleep on one of the trains, as reported by ABC News.
“On day one, I took the subway system, I felt unsafe. I saw homeless everywhere. People were yelling on the trains. There was a feeling of disorder. So as we deal with the crime problem, we also have to deal with the fact people feel unsafe,” he said.
The tone is a shift from earlier in the week when Adams stated that the subway system is primarily not dangerous after a woman was killed when a person pushed her in front of a subway train this past weekend.
The Daily Wire reported on Tuesday, “The New York Post reported that Adams had dismissed concerns over increasing crime on the subway, claiming the concerns were merely a ‘perception of fear.’”
“New Yorkers are safe on the subway system,” Adams said on Sunday. “What we must do is remove the perception of fear.”
“When you have an incident like this, the perception is what we’re fighting against. This is a safe system,” Adams also said at a press conference shortly after the attack took place.
On Tuesday, Adams told the press, “We’re going to drive down crime and we’re going to make sure New Yorkers feel safe in our subway system, and they don’t feel that way now. I don’t feel that way when I take the train every day or when I’m moving throughout our transportation system.”
Janno Lieber is the acting chair and CEO of Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway. Lieber said Adams’ discussion of not feeling safe was the mayor “showing that he gets it.”
“The mayor is showing he gets it and he is sensitive to the way New Yorkers are feeling,” Lieber said. “People don’t feel based on statistics. They feel based on their personal experience and what they’re hearing.”
The number of people taking the subway is low, causing problems for the economy of the city. While ABC noted that police data shows “major felonies in the subways have dropped over the last two years,” the number of riders has decreased as well, making the statistics hard to measure against prior data.
ABC reported, “Daily rides over the last two weeks have hovered around 2.1 million, about 44% of the same time pre-pandemic, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which falls under state control.”
The Daily Wire reported that New York Police Department (NYPD) statistics show that serious crimes have increased.
“Major Big Apple crimes jumped by more than a third in the first two weeks of this year compared to the same period in 2021 — with transit crimes alone soaring 65.5 percent,” the Post reported. “While the figures remain a small sample size, the upward trend provides an early challenge for Adams as he tries to reassure jittery straphangers that cops have everything in hand underground after several terrifying recent rail attacks, particularly Saturday’s horrific random fatal subway push in Times Square.”
“The report said there were 96 incidents in the transit system compared to 58 last year, led by an increase in robberies and grand larcenies, but the overall number was lower than it was before the pandemic in 2019,” The Daily Wire added.
Police data also showed that serious crime in the city has gone up by 35.2% as of Sunday when contrasted to the same time period in 2021, per the Post. Murders and burglaries are the only major crimes that haven’t gone up.
The Daily Wire previously reported that hate crimes in the city have also increased by a staggering 100% compared with last year. The majority of the targeted groups are Asian or Jewish.