Edited By: Fern Sidman

New York City and state officials announced over the weekend that new efforts to curb violence and other crimes on the city’s subway system were  being enacted, including increased police patrols, cameras and mental health help for those in need, as was reported by the Associated Press.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, and other officials disclosed the new measures in the wake of more disturbing attacks in the system, including the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old boy on an A train in Queens earlier this month and the death of a man pushed in front of another Queens train during a dispute on Monday, the AP reported.

Adams said that while crime in the city is down 4% since 2019, and down 17% from 10 years ago, many in the public don’t feel safer, as was reported by the AP. He said the new efforts complement the subway safety plan he announced at the beginning of the year.

“We can give you stats all day,” he said, the AP reported. “The question is, how do New Yorkers feel? We must match the actual impacts with how New Yorkers feel on the streets and in the subway system.”

Adams and Hochul said police with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will be taking primary responsibility for patrolling subway stations adjacent and linked to the four major commuter rail hubs — Penn Station and Grand Central Station in Manhattan, Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn and Sutphin-Archer Station in Queens, the AP reported. That will free up about 100 New York Police Department officers and allow for increased patrols at additional subway stations, they said.

Hochul said the state will provide funds for additional police overtime pay. The New York Police Department plans to increase the police presence in the subway system by adding 1,200 overtime shifts per day, or about 10,000 overtime hours daily, the report indicated.

The AP reported that the officials said that will allow NYPD officers to patrol platforms in at least 300 stations during peak hours and transit officers to ride hundreds of additional trains per day, also during peak hours.

Hochul said the state also will help to open two new units at psychiatric care centers, with 50 total beds, to help people on the streets and in the subway system who are experiencing homelessness and severe mental illness, according to the AP report.

The MTA also will have conductors announce to riders when they are entering stations with police officers present.

Patrick Lynch, president of the City of New York Police Benevolent Association, the union representing rank-and-file officers, in a statement Saturday called the plan to add overtime shifts “unsustainable,” as was reported by the AP.

“We have 12.45% fewer rank-and-file cops permanently assigned to the subways than we did in 2020,” he said, the AP reported. “The increased workload is crushing the cops who remain. The answer is not to squeeze them for more forced OT. Our city must immediately boost pay and improve working conditions in order to recruit and retain enough police officers.”

Last month, Hochul announced that the MTA had received about $5.5 million in state and federal funding to purchase and install security cameras on all of the city’s nearly 6,400 subway cars, the AP report indicated. The installation is expected to be completed sometime in 2025. The subway system already has more than 10,000 existing security cameras in its 472 stations.

The New York Post reported on Tuesday that Hochul said New Yorkers senses are working overtime when it comes to crime.

On Monday, she became the latest Democratic politician to downplay New Yorkers’ worries over subway and street crime amid a surge in violent attacks — chalking it up to a few “high-profile” crimes that have “created a sense of fear in people’s minds,” the Post reported.

Her comments on crime in the nation’s largest city came on the heels of Mayor Adams’ characterization of the crime explosion as a  “perception” problem.

“And what I can do is my New York Transit, MTA transit police — I can bring them in and have them be fortifying our main transit hubs,” Hochul said in response to a reporter who asked about the “Cops, Cameras, Care” subway-safety program that was announced over the weekend, the Post reported.

“All it is is a cooperative effort to respond to, you know, the high-profile instances which have created a sense of fear in people’s minds,” she said, according to the Post report. “I think that’s going to make people feel a lot better when they see that.”

For his part, Adams tried to lay the blame of the fear that grips New Yorkers over the ever looming possibility that they too will be victims of violent criminals on the extensive coverage by the media of almost daily subway assaults and attacks. The Post reported that the mayor said that such coverage was creating a “perception of fear” amongst regular subway riders.

The Post released a chilling video of a murder last week of  15-year-old Jayjon Burnett was fatally shot on October 14th during a wild melee on an A train in Far Rockaway, Queens.

To show support for everyday commuters on the city’s subway system, Adams took to the 6 train on Monday to work. The Post reported that he was spotted clutching what appeared to be an iPad and his trademark smoothie as he made his way to City Hall.

The mayor’s MTA ride comes as he’s faced mounting pressure to act on soaring transit crime plaguing the city, the Post reported.

The mayor was accused of not doing enough to curb the spike in crime rates by none other than the grieving mom of a straphanger who was randomly shoved onto Brooklyn subway tracks and was left traumatized to the point of being suicidal, according to the Post report.

Rep. Lee Zeldin, the GOP candidate in the upcoming New York gubernatorial race has spent much of the year railing against a streak of shootings and other violent crimes, including a series of unprovoked attacks on New York City subways, according to an AP report. He relayed stories of stabbings, people being shoved onto the tracks by strangers and a bizarre incident near Times Square in which several women in neon green leotards attacked and robbed two women on a train, the report indicated.

And in a personal twist, two teenagers were injured in a drive-by shooting outside his home earlier this month.

“I’ll tell you what: A lot of people are telling me that they’re keeping their head on a swivel more than ever before,” Zeldin said outside a subway station in Queens days after a subway rider was pushed onto the tracks, the AP reported. “People are walking these streets in a way like they’re in a combat zone.”

Ahead of the November 8th election, Republicans around the country are closing with a message that follows closely to what Zeldin has argued much of the year, the AP reported. In recent debates from Georgia to Michigan and Wisconsin, GOP contenders have blasted Democrats as inattentive to crime. And in New York, there are signs that the crime message is resonating as the race between Zeldin, a four-term Long Island congressman, and the Democratic party incumbent Hochul tightens somewhat in the final stretch.

Speaking to the AP, Democratic strategist Jon Reinish said, “New Yorkers in cities are very, very frustrated by several years of a visible and palpable spike in crime and erosion in quality of life. There are voters on the table who would normally be off the table.”

Zeldin and Hochul faced off on Tuesday evening for their one debate before the general election.

The Post reported that a relative of an innocent elderly woman who was struck by a stray bullet in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon slammed the city as an “out of control” haven for career criminals.

Marilyn Hunte, 70, was shot in the thigh in Bedford-Stuyvesant just after 2:15 p.m. when two men got into a fight nearby and opened fire, cops said, as was reported by the Post.

Hunte was on her way to Food Town supermarket when she was struck by a bullet, her cousin, Laurice Johnson, told The Post.

“You hope for the best, but things have gotten really out of control in the city,” Johnson, also 70, said Monday night outside of Hunte’s Bed-Stuy home, the Post reported.

Johnson said courts need to lock up career criminals and repeat offenders.

“How do they keep letting people go? That’s the definition of crazy to expect a different result,” Johnson said.

The longtime New Yorker said shootings have been a common occurrence since she was a child but recent violence rocking the city has surged to insanity, as was reported by the Post.

Between the rising crime rate and the growing movement to defund the police, it appears that morale amongst police officers in New York City is also significantly plummeting.

According to data obtained by the New York Post, the NYPD is on pace to see more than 4,000 cops retire or resign this year – the most since the post-9/11 exodus.

Pension fund figures reveal 3,054 officers have filed to leave the department so far this year — 42% more than the 2,155 who exited at the same time last year through September 30th, the Post reported.

This essentially translates into the NYPD losing 4,072 police officers this year alone is the pace continues as it has been. The Post reported that this figure is surpasses the number of cops who left the force in 2002. At that time, the police force suffered substantial reductions as 3,846 officers left the force following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, where 24 cops were killed, the Post reported.

The mass exodus of police personnel has constituted a “staffing emergency” according to leaders of the police union, the report indicated.

According to figures released by the Independent Budget Office, the current amount of New York police officers numbers 34,000 which marks a substantial decrease from the 40,200 cops on the job in the Big Apple in 2000, the Post reported. In an attempt to keep more cops on the street in a city that is ridden by an escalating crime rate, the Post reported that the NYPD in on pace to shell out $600 million in overtime payments for uniformed officers in the new fiscal year that began in July.

The monetary increase in overtime payments amounts to 61% percent more than the $372 million budgeted for overtime, the Post reported, based on the findings of the Independent Budget Office.

NYPD overtime spending had already skyrocketed to $670 million in fiscal year 2022, which ended June 30 — up 57% from the $426 million spent the year before, when Covid caused the cancellation of many police-heavy public events, the Post reported.

In the spring of 2020 when the George Floyd riots broke out across the country and in New York City, police overtime totaled $721 million, the report indicated, The Post reported that prior to that, in fiscal year 2018 and 2019, over time spending for uniformed officers was $589 million and $599 million, respectively.

Speaking to the Post, Michael Alcazar, a retired NYPD detective and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said,  “New York has become Dodge City — and those who can are getting out of Dodge. And not just the cops.”

A 30-year-old Queens cop quit his “dream job” this summer and hasn’t looked back. He took a private-sector gig after only seven years on the force, the Post reported.

Speaking to the publication, he said. “I have no regrets about leaving. From what I hear from the many officers I still speak to, the NYPD has actually somehow become worse in just the few months I’ve been gone. I didn’t even know that was possible. The job has become unsustainable for a lot of people — financially, mentally, everything about it.”

He added that, “Officers want to have pride in what we do, but pride only goes so far when you’re constantly being beat down and treated like a child by the department’s incompetent and ignorant leaders and disrespected by the public on a daily basis. When the whole system is working against you, when you can’t cover your bills, and never see your family, you start to ask ‘Why am I doing this anymore?’”

The bulk of those officers seeking to leave the force in New York City began in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing by a Minnesota police officer in May of 2020, the Post reported.