Subway scenes like this one on December 24, 2021, aren't going away except uniformed cops begin using all late-night trains.
AP
On Feb. 18, Mayor Eric Adams introduced a Subway Security Plan that, he stated, would imply “no extra smoking, no extra doing medicine, no extra sleeping, no extra barbecues on the subway system, and no extra simply doing no matter you need.” However the plan will not be a crime-fighting plan; it's a homeless-control plan that expands on final month’s promise by the mayor and Gov. Hochul that a file variety of cops can be “omnipresent” underground.
The day after the plan’s announcement, 4 stabbings rocked the transit system. An assault on a homeless man confirmed that the subway will be as unsafe for the homeless themselves as for riders who view them with worry. On Saturday at 3 a.m., three males demanded cash from the 46-year-old sufferer on the Jamaica-Van Wyck station in Kew Gardens. When he resisted, he was stabbed within the buttocks and thighs earlier than the assailants fled.
About 12 hours later, a lady arguing along with her assailant on the three practice in Manhattan was stabbed 3 times and hospitalized. Then, at about 8:30 p.m. in Washington Heights, a 24-year-old man was jumped by two youngsters. Stabbed with a boxcutter (a harmful weapon underneath the New York State Penal Regulation), he retained his property when the assailants fled. Additionally in Manhattan, a 31-year-old man using south argued with a person and a lady as a result of she was smoking. He, too, was stabbed and hospitalized; the couple escaped on the 116th Avenue station.
These assaults adopted stabbings earlier within the week — one on a break-dancer onboard a practice close to the First Avenue station within the East Village, one other a slashing in Queens, one cease east of the Jamaica-Van Wyck station.
The brand new security plan would seem like complete. It touches all bases of legislation enforcement, social companies, and psychological well being, in addition to the stylish “peer involvement.” It introduces New Yorkers to a tossed salad of latest acronyms, together with joint response groups of cops and Division of Homeless Providers, Division of Well being & Psychological Hygiene, and community-based suppliers; 5 community-based homeless-outreach and transit-hub groups to focus on busy stations; a dozen mental-health neighborhood-response unit groups of medical workers, behavioral-health clinicians, and friends (left undefined); and end-of-line groups of MTA and metropolis personnel who will apparently require patrons refusing to exit to hunt shelter elsewhere.
It additionally units up a dozen cross-agency groups — combining an outreach employee, clinician, and police officer — to steer shoppers to groups of helpers who will stay on the station platforms to supply elevated engagement and care, together with shelter to these in want who've been ejected from the practice automobiles. And it creates six new joint Hearth Division & Well being + Hospital (H+H) Behavioral Well being Emergency Help Response Division (“B-HEARD”) groups, past the 11 presently present.
But the plan appears unfinished. It includes appreciable overlap and makes no point out of the Workplace of Group Psychological Well being established on the finish of 2021 by former Mayor Invoice de Blasio to formalize the $1 billion THRIVE-NYC venture run by his spouse. Certainly, the plan doesn’t element any prices, nor does it point out when some or all of those workforce members can be employed or reassigned from present actions.
Different particulars have emerged. At an earlier briefing, Hochul introduced that 10 of a doable 100 clinicians had already been assigned. Presently, the two,500 Transit Bureau cops are being augmented by a further 1,000 cops. New bureau chief Jason Wilcox has made getting officers onto trains a excessive precedence, although he hasn’t but replicated Nineteen Seventies efforts to have two uniformed officers experience all late-night trains. A weekly Enhanced Outreach Taskforce (EOT) Assembly, primarily based on the NYPD’s CompStat, will embrace representatives from every of the companies named and a quantity with no direct duties for this system.
Amid all of the speaking and assembly, authorities additionally intend to evaluation Kendra’s Regulation, which, since November 1999, has allowed for involuntary help outpatient therapy after a decide orders individuals who pose a danger to themselves or to others to endure psychiatric therapy.
I'd be amazed if Mayor Adams, a retired NYPD captain who started his profession as a transit cop, believes that every one these utilizing the subway will comply with his admonition: “Swipe your MetroCard. Journey the system. Get off at your vacation spot.”
That didn’t occur within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. Since then, the failure of town to deal with homelessness and mental-health points has led to a rising variety of riders who not solely don't have any MetroCards but additionally don't have any locations. No matter its virtues, this Subway Security Plan is unlikely to vary that dynamic.
Dorothy Moses Schulz is an adjunct fellow on the Manhattan Institute’s Policing and Public Security Initiative, emerita professor at John Jay School of Legal Justice, CUNY, and a retired MTA-Metro North Railroad Police captain. This piece initially appeared in Metropolis Journal.
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