NYC Officials Eye Subway Safety as Condition for Big Apple’s Resurgence
By: Hellen Zaboulani
On Sunday, local leaders pinpointed subway safety as a prerequisite for the Big Apple’s resurgence post-pandemic. As reported by the NY Post, with crime soaring in New York City, many say the economic recovery will hinge on the city’s ability to control crime.
Kathy Wylde, President of Partnership for New York City, told host John Catsimatidis on WABC 770’s “The Cats Roundtable” that helping commuters feel safe is an essential factor in getting white-collar workers back to their desks. “People are absolutely outraged that we’ve allowed our city to deteriorate to the point that we have,” said Wylde, who heads NYC’s largest business group. “It’s not just gun violence. We’re talking about just a general deterioration in the feeling that we are safe walking the streets, riding the subways, safe from disease and safe from harassment, from assault and worse.”
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber shared the same sentiments on the show, citing riders’ concern over safety, and the presence of mentally ill people in the stations. “We just cannot accept a situation where riders are being attacked, or even just made to feel really vulnerable in New York City subways,” Lieber told Catsimatidis. “It’s essential to our economic recovery that people feel comfortable riding the system.”
NYC has recently been besieged with a surge of subway attacks, including the January murder of Michelle Go, who was pushed in front of an oncoming train in Times Square by a homeless man with a history of mental illness. “Nowhere is the situation more serious than in mass transit in our subway,” said Wylde. “We don’t want people going to jail because they’re poor and can’t pay bail. We don’t want people going to jail because they’re sick and need mental health treatment. But we want people to behave themselves.”
Wylde pointed to state lawmakers’ criminal justice reforms which are allowing many repeat offenders to walk free. “We seem to have made some mistakes, both in legislation and an implementation on some of these policies,” she said, specifying state Legislature’s discovery laws that prosecutors say are make it hard to try cases.
Wylde ended her interview with a high note, saying the city is passed the spike in COVID-19 cases led by the Omicron variant. She said the Big Apple’s comeback “is real this time.” “We’ve had a couple of false starts,” she said. “It looks like by the end of March, we’ll have at least 50 percent of the office workers back in the office every day, and we’ll continue to build from there.”
