By Nicole Gelinas 

During Mayor Eric Adams’s first seven weeks in office, soaring violent crime in New York City’s subway system dominated the local news. Public fear and frustration peaked in mid-January, with the murder of 40-year-old Michelle Go, who was shoved from a Times Square subway platform onto the tracks in the middle of the day. Go’s alleged killer, an apparently mentally ill and homeless man who had repeatedly violated parole for a 2017 violent felony conviction, was yet another example of the city and state’s failure to treat and supervise violent mentally ill people, or to incarcerate violent offenders. Go’s death was a tragic instance of a now nearly two-year-old phenomenon. When subway ridership fell precipitously in March 2020, to as low as 6.5% of the pre-Covid normal level of 5.6 million riders each weekday, violent felonies did not fall with passenger numbers. Violent felonies rose sharply, not only on a per-rider basis but in absolute numbers. A beneficial “safety in numbers” effect, supplemented by the legacy of decades of proactive policing, had disappeared. Now the full data for 2021 are in, and a new, longer-term trend persistent through the second year of Covid has become clear. As ridership has gradually returned, to an average of 59% of normal from early November until Christmas Eve 2021, violent crime has not gradually declined in tandem. Violent crime, both per passenger and, in some categories, in raw numbers, has remained persistently higher than it was in 2019. Where there was safety in numbers before Covid and grave peril in desolation beginning in March 2020, there now exists an unhappy medium. Modest-size crowds—though larger than those in 2020—are not by themselves helping to deter violent crime. This stagnation of both crowd size and public safety is unlikely to fix itself: as people fear taking trains because of violent crime, they keep crowd levels low, thus enabling violent crime to persist at elevated levels. At the same time, the NYPD and prosecutors have not stepped in to fill the vacuum. Preventive policing, in terms of arrests and civil summonses for alleged low-level law violations, remains far below pre-Covid levels. In January 2022, before Go’s murder, new Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul announced a joint state-city plan to secure the subways. (The city-run NYPD is generally responsible for public safety in the subways, not the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the trains.) As of mid-March 2022, however, the plan has not yet achieved results: for the year through March 13, transit crime was up 80.3% compared with the same period in 2021. To restore order on the subways, the city must go beyond the improved mental-health treatment that the plan promises. Rather, police have to return to proactive and preventive policing and deterrence—and prosecutors need to follow through on these cases. In 2019, New York City and tristate residents depended on mass transit for three-fourths of their daily commutes into Manhattan. Without safe transit, Manhattan and the city cannot recover economically from Covid.4 

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2022. 17p.