Published Dec. 29, 2024, 6:08 a.m. ET
NY Gov. Kathy Hochul holds a press conference on subway safety on Dec. 12, 2024.Matthew McDermott
If progressives don’t want people acting in self-defense or defending others on the subway, then the state has to keep us safe — but Gov. Hochul still won’t protect us from the deadliest subway environment in three decades.
It’s reasonable for New Yorkers to fear that Good Samaritans will be less likely to act, even after the acquittal of Daniel Penny on a criminal negligence charge for the death of Jordan Neely, who had threatened other subway passengers.
Who wants to sit at the defense table for eight weeks?
Hochul’s response to the horrific murder by fire of a still-unidentified woman on a moving F train Dec. 22 was beyond caricature: Her office bragged on X about about her March “action” to deploy the National Guard to the trains.
“Crime is going down,” the post boasted.
Her follow-up was hardly better: Thanks to “brand-new security cameras,” Hochul noted, police had arrested a suspect in the arson murder, and added a caveat: “Make no mistake: any crime is one too many, even with subway crime going down.”
Which subway crimes are down?
The crime people most worry about — homicide — is breaking decades-long records.
This year, 12 people have lost their lives to violence on the subway, and most of the incidents have been unprovoked stranger-on-stranger killings.
The victims began with grandfather Richard Henderson, killed in January on a Brooklyn train as he tried to calm a dispute over music, and end (so far) with the Coney Island conflagration.
That makes 43 people killed on the subways since March 2020, when three murders within weeks — with few people even on the subway in those early pandemic days — ushered in a disorienting surge of violence.
Astonishingly enough, one of those 2020 murders — that of subway motorman Garrett Goble — was also arson.
This year’s dozen killings smashed the post-2020 record of 11 in 2022 — a year during which concern about subway violence propelled GOP gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin to a near-win over Hochul.
For decades prior to 2020, after having stomped out underground violence beginning in 1990 by stopping small crimes before they escalated to big ones, New York clocked one or two subway murders a year.
Before 2020, it took 20 years — going back to the new millennium — to tally 43 subway killings.
This is so bad, it doesn’t matter if other crimes are “down.”
Anyway, other subway crimes aren’t down — at least, not anywhere close to the pre-2020 normal.
This year, through November, subway passengers and workers have suffered 947 violent felonies. Yes, that’s 9.5% below last year — but it’s also 14.1% above 2019’s figures.
Adjust for lower post-COVID ridership, and the per-ride rate of violence is higher, up by almost two-thirds.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/29/opinion/hochul-claims-subway-safetybut-violent-deaths-rose-in-2024/
Comments1
Every lead poisoning was and is preventable.
Why worst genocide EVER? Every lead poisoning was and is preventable.