New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, announced a plan this week that could very well have been drafted by a Republican. On Wednesday, Hochul said, in the name of public safety, she’d be deploying 750 members of the National Guard plus some state and MTA police officers to do random bag checks at select subway stations.
“They can refuse,” Hochul said of planned searches in a news conference Wednesday. “We can refuse them. They can walk.”
MTA Chair Janno Lieber poured cold water on the idea that there needs to be a show of military force in the subways to make riders feel comfortable.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t live in New York City; spoken like a person who doesn’t understand what it means that around four million people take the subway every day and rely on it to get to work, school, doctor appointments, or simply to visit a different corner of this amazing city.
MTA Chair Janno Lieber poured cold water on the idea that there needs to be a show of military force in the subways to make riders feel comfortable.
“On average, last year, we had six felony crimes a day in a ridership of 4 million,” Lieber said at an MTA board meeting Wednesday. “I’m not going to argue about the statistics. I’m just saying that we need to push back on both the reality and the perception of crime.”
The governor has admitted that her extreme move to militarize the subways is really just about vibes. “We have seen a number of crimes, and again, not statistically significant, but psychologically significant,” Hochul told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough Thursday morning. “If you feel better walking past someone in a uniform to make sure that someone doesn’t bring a knife or a gun on the subway, then that’s exactly why I did it.”
The problem with a vibes-based police state — in addition to it not being based on facts — is that it plays directly into Republican narratives about blue cities run amok. It reinforces the idea that trampling our civil rights…
Read the full article here
