Camouflage doesn’t blend in with subway tile so New Yorkers are noticing the National Guard on duty at several “high traffic” transit stops while law enforcement searches bags. No, the city’s rats haven’t declared war—the stationed guardsmen stem from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s subway safety plan, announced last Wednesday, March 6.
“We’ll be having 750 members of the New York National Guard, as well as another 250 personnel from State and MTA police,” said Hochul.“You’ll start seeing them at the tables, making sure that weapons are not being brought in, working in concert with our New York State Police, as well as our NYPD because no one heading to their job or to visit family or to go to a doctor appointment should worry that the person sitting next to them possesses a deadly weapon.
“They shouldn’t worry about whether someone’s going to brandish a knife or gun. That’s what we’re going to do at these checkpoints,” she added.
Subway riders can refuse searches, says Columbia Law professor Jeffrey Fagan. The right is protected constitutionally under the Fourth Amendment.
“You can consent to search, that is up to you as a citizen, but you don’t have to consent and you can say no,” said Fagan. “Now, the Governor has said that people who refuse to consent to the search will be disallowed from entering the subway. The legality of that is very much in question.
It remains to be seen whether denying subway service to someone exercising the right to refuse a voluntary search is constitutional. There’s also the question of whether individuals with serious mental illness, who are often a target of transit-related public safety initiatives, can voluntarily consent to a bag search.
Malcom X Grassroots Movement organizer Sala Cyril told the AmNews she was “horrified” by Hochul’s announcement. She pointed to the militarization of enforcement, along with plugging and playing outside uniforms with little experience engaging with the city’s Black, brown, and unhoused population as major concerns.
“I can positively say that the Black experience in New York is not made more safe by deeper surveillance and more police and National Guard,” she said in a phone interview. “Even if there was no profiling, even if they treated everyone with respect, even if they gave all of the cultural competence that we don’t think that they will, the level of terror that their presence exudes alone is enough to make people [feel] unsafe, because it changes their own behavior.”
Brooklyn Assemblymember Latrice Walker also expressed concerns in her statement over “flooding the subway system with law enforcement and 750 members of the National Guard” for a “a veiled return to the stop-and-frisk era during which Black and brown people were disproportionately targeted.”
Fagan, whose findings on NYPD stop-and-frisk tactics were central to the 2013 Floyd v. City of New York class action lawsuit, said there’s reason for New Yorkers to be anxious, especially with the influx of external uniformed personnel with limited experience dealing with nonwhite populations and public transit. However, he believes the bag searches intend to deter crime in the station and on the trains more than to actually find weapons. Instead, Fagan sees mental health episodes by Black and brown New Yorkers on the subway as the key concern regarding race and policing, pointing to officers often misconstruing general outbursts by nonwhite individuals as signs of violent behavior.
While the National Guard’s deployment headlined Hochul’s announcement, the subway safety plan also boasted a non-carceral approach with subway safety regarding mental illness.
“We’re expanding the joint MTA and New York City run pilot program…called SCOUT [standing for] Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams,” said Hochul. “These are led by mental health clinicians, but…these teams are also backed up by the police. They have police officers along for backup and they only deal with individuals having the most severe mental health crises, those that our SOS mental health teams cannot safely approach without police support. These are literally the people who could pose danger to themselves or to others, and it is evident.”
Three other points in her safety plan accelerate camera installation on trains; facilitate collaborations between law enforcement, local prosecutors, and transit officials; and introduce a bill banning those convicted of assault against an MTA commuter from using the transit system.
The MTA did not issue a statement, opting to defer to the Governor’s Office and the NYPD for comment. The NYPD pointed towards Chief of Transit Michael Kemper’s interview with Pix11 where he argued subway crime perceptions stem from quality of life concerns like “fare evasion, people smoking, people laying down on the floor, or acting disorderly.” He also mentioned media coverage of high profile incidents as another factor to anxieties despite the city’s general reduction in crime.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor Daniel Feldman acknowledged the lower rates of per capita crime in the city compared to the country’s average. The decision to overtly station armed soldiers at major subway stops baffles him.
“My first reaction is why on earth are we feeding this misperception?” said Feldman. “Even if there were a spate of murders in the subway, millions of people ride the subway everyday that percentage chances are miniscule. I’m not saying we shouldn’t address subway crime, but I wish we would do it in a way that doesn’t perpetrate this misperception that New York is unsafe.”
Gov. Hochul referred to several high profile incidents of recent subway violence in her announcement, including the Brooklyn slashing of MTA conductor Alton Scott. Last month, a subway shooting in the Bronx killed one person and injured five others.
But Fagan pointed out that such incidents rarely occur in the major transportation hubs where searches are conducted.
“These incidents are really random,” he said. “They don’t follow a predictable pattern…so essentially subway crime is a bit like a needle in a haystack and even having a thousand police officers there to try and be present when an incident happens is asking an awful lot of an algorithm to allocate officers to particular situations or places.”
Beyond the high profile incidents, those quality of life concerns described by Kemper are not necessarily within the wheelhouse of the National Guard, a state-based military reserve force. And the NYPD boasts in-house measures to address the few subway attacks needing a militarized response, like the 2022 mass shooting on a subway going through Brooklyn’s Sunset Park that injured 29 people.
Feldman, a former Brooklyn Assemblymember, said politicians frequently respond to perception, especially for governors and mayors who are more vulnerable at the polls than state lawmakers.
“Ordinary rational human beings think reality drives perception,” said Feldman. “In politics, so often perception drives reality. Politicians who feel themselves to be vulnerable—and as a group, politicians tend to be very paranoid so they think they’re vulnerable even when they’re not—will respond to perception. People think there’s a big crime wave so we better do something to show that we’re tough on crime.
“In a sense, I can understand why they respond to perception this way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make [for] optimal government, but the characteristics that make you a good candidate are dramatically different from those that make you a good public servant.”
While Hochul won the 2022 gubernatorial election, her Republican opponent Lee Zeldin overperformed while running on a tough-on-crime platform.
So what are other solutions?
“Things like affordable housing, and just the overall mental health care are parts of a safety plan for a city that considers more things than just to criminalize ‘who was doing what,’” said Cyril.”We know that the safest places are the resourced places.”Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.