New York City will deploy 250 additional police officers to the subway system, after days of pressure from Governor Andrew Cuomo and MTA leaders, who blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio for a series of violent attacks on trains. At a press conference on Monday, the mayor said the new "special deployment" would be "in the right places at the right time, particularly at peak times of ridership."
The 250 officers will come on top of the 500 officers added to patrol the system in February, and in addition to the 2,500 existing officers assigned to transit, according to de Blasio. Their combined numbers will make up "the largest NYPD Transit Force in over 25 years," the mayor said.
In the days and hours leading up to the mayor's press conference, both MTA Chairman Patrick Foye and NYC Transit Interim President Sarah Feinberg made repeated media appearances accusing de Blasio of not putting enough of an NYPD presence in the subway system.
“City Hall cannot continue to bury its head in the sand any longer," Foye said on Friday; Feinberg echoed the sentiment on Sunday, telling WABC-7's Bill Ritter: "My concern is I don't feel heard by the mayor. And I feel like he is desperate to have a political fight about this." (An MTA statement attributed to Feinberg last week also included a list of mayoral candidates who'd committed to adding more subway cops, and was widely seen as a political endorsement).
Following the mayor's announcement on Monday, the transit leaders held a press conference celebrating the decision. “We need a commitment from City Hall that these patrols will remain dedicated to the transit system as we recover,” Foye said, adding that his cause "was right and righteous."
"When you’re pulling into a station, I want people to feel a presence," Feinberg added. "I want people to know that if they don’t see a police officer on that platform they’re likely to see one at the next station."
Monday also marked the return of 24-hour subway service; ridership is currently at around 2 million daily riders — significantly lower than the approximately 5 million daily subway commuters before the pandemic.
De Blasio also called on the transit agency, which is run by the state, to step up its commitment to hiring more MTA police officers. On Monday, MTA leaders said that they'd hired 400 of the promised 500 MTA police officers — though not all of them will be tasked with policing the subway.
Police data shows that overall transit crime is down by nearly half since last year, though certain crimes, including felony assaults, have increased.
During his own press briefing, Governor Andrew Cuomo spoke at length about the MTA's "main problem" of crime. He blamed the "defund police movement" for opposition to his proposal to hire 500 more police officers to crack down on fare evasion and homelessness, and pointed out that police staffing had fallen inside the transit system in recent decades.
Prior to its dissolution in 1995, the city's Transit Police Department had close to 4,500 uniformed and civilian officers — and were tasked with patrolling a system with significantly higher rates of crime.
"I think we have been under-policed for quite some time," Cuomo said. "You go back and look at staffing rates in the subways in the mid-'90s, we're below that."
