If you’d like to visit a New York City public library on a Sunday, you’re out of luck, thanks to recent city budget cuts. But if you’d like to see a subway station crawling with cops (including the PR-friendly robot variety), the possibilities are bountiful. This is life in Eric Adams’ New York.
The outrageous increase in funding resulted in a minuscule improvement in crime rates.
In 2022, amid concerns about rising crime in the city’s transit system, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams took the idea of “defund the police” and flipped it on its head. They dreamed up a strategy of “the three Cs” — “Cops, Cameras, Care” — which Hochul announced in October last year. What if, they imagined, we added more than a thousand uniformed police officers to patrol the subway every day and paid them much more — millions more? Now, one year later, city records show it led to a $151 million increase in NYPD overtime pay, a negligible decrease in crime and a vast increase in fare evasion tickets and arrests of people of color.
From 2021 to 2022, the city’s subways saw an almost 40% increase in reported felonies. The dramatic rise was due to vastly decreased ridership during the peak of the pandemic, and yet it was still overall lower than pre-pandemic crime rates. But that didn’t stop hysteria from seizing city residents and tabloid covers, after a number of high-profile incidents, including the death of Jordan Neely and several incidents of women being pushed onto the subway tracks in separate attacks. And thus Hochul and Adams’ more cops, less crime plan was hatched.
But the outrageous increase in funding resulted in a minuscule improvement in crime rates and, in some categories, increases. The stats, obtained by Gothamist, found that there were 48 fewer serious crimes (such as murder, rape and robbery) overall in the city’s subways this year. Despite that drop, assaults increased by 5%, with 26 more than last year….
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