It’s a common fear in New York City: the random subway attack, when a commuter gets assaulted, mugged or pushed on to the track. The prospect is terrifying. It’s also, statistically speaking, probably not going to happen to you, especially in 2024.
Though more transit workers are being attacked on the job nationwide (not just in New York), NYPD data shows that major felonies in the subway system were lower last year than in 2022. In January 2024, transit crime increased 46% year-over-year, then dipped in February.
But the public’s perception of danger on the subway has reached a fever pitch perhaps unseen since the bad old days of the 1980s and early 90s – when violent crime actually peaked. Last year, the Ohio congressman Jim Jordan described New York as “a city that’s lost its way”, a once great metropolis ruined by bail reform and liberal leniency. (This despite the fact that New York remains safer than Cleveland, in Jordan’s home state, according to a 2023 report.)
Kathy Hochul – the Democratic governor who, unlike Jordan, does run the state – did little to deter the image of the city as a lawless hellscape this week when she called in the national guard and state police to patrol subways and search commuters’ bags. This came after Mayor Eric Adams added 1,000 new cops to the subway in response to January’s crime spike, in which 222 transit crimes were reported.
By evening rush hour on Wednesday, guardsmen wearing fatigues and carrying assault weapons stood by turnstiles, greeting commuters just trying to go home. Hochul framed the concerning scene as a public good, saying that deploying the 1,000 guardsmen and state police would help riders feel safer – if not actually be safer. Whether their presence will deter crime on the subway is the subject of much debate.
“Rattling off statistics saying things are getting better doesn’t make you feel better, especially when you’ve just heard about someone being slashed in the throat or thrown on the subway tracks,” Hochul said in a press conference. “There’s a psychological impact. People worry they could be next. Anxiety takes hold.”
Hochul also admitted that she wasn’t interested in discussing “stats and statistics about what’s going up and what’s going down”. As the local news site Hell Gate put it, “Hochul Is Sending the National Guard Into the Subway to Search Your Bag Because of Vibes”.
This week, Adams also expanded the city’s policy of bag checks on the subway, which means that straphangers might be pulled aside and made to show the insides of their purses, backpacks, or packages. Hochul said troops and cops were looking for weapons.
There is an element of consent to these searches – a person can decline, but they won’t be allowed on the train, among the only affordable means of transportation in the city. Anyone who declines a bag check and then tries to sneak on the train is subject to arrest. Cops are checking bags in front of the turnstiles, not on train platforms.
The state senator Julia Salazar blasted the policy on X, joking: “Sorry I’m late; I needed to endure the undignified experience of having a soldier rummage through my underwear and blazers before I could swipe into the subway.”
This is not a new policy. Police have conducted bag checks on and off since 2005, when the then mayor, Michael Bloomberg, instituted the rule as a response to the 7/7 train attacks in London and Madrid, and other post-9/11 anxieties. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) challenged this rule, but a federal judge ruled it constitutional, saying the invasion of privacy was minimal to justify using it as a means to detect potential terrorist attacks.
New York subways have long been difficult to police, due to logistical challenges and department clashes. Transit cops did not have the same power and status as NYPD officers until 1947. Even after that, they were treated as a second-class force.
Mayor Robert Wagner Jr implemented the first overnight subway patrols in 1965, deploying 800 “men in blue” to deter crime. New Yorkers loved it – according to the cops. “People smiled and said they were glad to see me and that it was about time,” one told the New York Times.
“There would be an officer at every station, and one on every train between 8pm and 4am everyday,” said Andrew Sparberg, a native New Yorker who spent 49 years working in the transportation field and wrote From a Nickel to a Token, a history of New York’s mass transit system between 1940 and 1968.
In 2005, Sparberg worked for the Long Island Rail Road, which, like the subway, is overseen by the state. “I remember when the news of the bombings in London and Madrid came,” he said. “We had a meeting that very day, and various managers put into effect certain additional procedures, such as bag checks to keep an eye on things. People understood that this was necessary because of the state of the world.”
Though the NYPD and the city insisted in 2005 that bag checks did not target anyone based on their race, ethnicity or religion, the NYCLU filed a federal suit against the department, alleging profiling.
In 2008, a native New Yorker of Kashmiri descent named J Sultan alleged that he had been stopped and searched 21 times by officers in the three years since the policy came into effect. A statistician found that if NYPD’s bag checks were indeed random, the odds of Sultan being stopped that often in three years was about one in 165m.
Sultan allegedly twice offered to abandon the suit if the city would take steps to monitor checkpoints for racial profiling, but the NYPD rejected this offer. In 2009, a judge granted Sultan a $10,000 settlement.
Almost 20 years after the policy was initiated, many New Yorkers believe that bag checks are unhelpful and racist. “Whenever I teach students about this law, my students who are Arab or Muslim always say that they’re singled out by cops every time they pass a bag check,” said Bennett Capers, a law professor and director of the Center on Race, Law and Justice at Fordham University.
The NYPD does not keep demographical data on the people selected for bag checks, though that data could reveal profiling: during the height of stop-and-frisk, data obtained from the NYPD showed that people of color were most likely to be stopped, which led to a judge ruling the practice unconstitutional in 2013. (The NYPD still makes pedestrian stops under a new policy, a practice that has increased under Adams.)
The fourth amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, requiring police officers obtain a warrant in nearly all instances. But there are exceptions, said Susan Herman, a professor at Brooklyn Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“There is a 1979 supreme court case, Delaware v Prouse, where the state was going to start random driver’s license checks,” Herman said. “The court said that it couldn’t be random, because that gives too much discretion to the individual officer to decide who to stop and who not to stop. Therefore, there is too great a danger that there will be arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement.”
But police can conduct these searches if they follow a system. “That could be, they stop every 10th car, or they only stop red cars on Tuesdays and black cars on Wednesdays,” Herman said. Along with that, a search must be “reasonable”, which means it is based on a balance between the level of intrusion and the amount of need.
The NYPD has not shared its system for whom it chooses to bag check. “The catch-22 here is that of course they don’t want to tell you what the system is, because if they do publicize it, it would be pretty easy to avoid the search,” said Herman. “That means we don’t know what the criteria [for bag checks] are.
Adams addressed concerns of racial profiling during an interview with WPIX-11. “We’re not profiling, we’re random based on the count, a number,” he said. “And people who don’t want their bag checked can turn around and not enter the system. You don’t have to come through and do the bag checks, but they are random.”
In an email, Charles Lutvak, deputy press secretary for Adams, told the Guardian that bag checks were not a legal issue since those were deemed constitutional in 2005, and they were therefore acceptable for the police to conduct.
Capers is skeptical that these checks do anything to deter crime. “You have to be a pretty stupid criminal not to realize that if you don’t want to be checked, you can simply leave and go to another station,” he said. “Also, I would imagine people who are coming in to the subway station hoping to cause harm might not even be carrying a bag – they could have something in their pockets.”
On Morning Joe, Hochul said the searches were a “thought-out process” that would not profile New Yorkers. The national guard does not have the jurisdiction to arrest anyone, but might assist police officers who do if they believe there is an imminent threat.
This policy could be seen as a Band-Aid placed over greater problems: a lack of support for people with mental illnesses, a citywide housing and homelessness emergency, fallout from the “war on drugs” and the national opioid crisis. “Like most people, I wish the city would redirect these resources elsewhere, to actually help the drivers of crime rather than this kind of stuff,” Capers said.
To people who are victimized by racist or biased policing, seeing more cops is the opposite of an assuring scene. “I don’t think it’s acceptable if some of us feel safer at the expense of other people’s rights and liberty,” Herman said. “Are we sacrificing some people’s freedom and security in order to make other people feel more secure?”
