Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang said Thursday the 250 cops recently added to the city’s subway system should be on trains and platforms around the clock, amid what he called a “horrifying” rise in violent transit crimes.
“Those officers should be permanent and 24/7, just like our subway system,” Yang said at a press conference in the Bronx.
“Bill de Blasio recently called for 250 more officers in addition to the approximately 3,000 that are stationed on our subway platform, but those 250 unfortunately are temp, auxiliary and it’s just during rush hours,” said Yang, who appeared to conflate the auxiliary officers added on top of the 250 shifts the paid, full-time officers would conduct.
“Meanwhile, our subways run 24/7,” he said. “I’m not even sure what rush hour means right now.”
And rather than remaining near the fair gates and platforms, Yang suggested officers should conduct “visual inspections” of train cars that would give New Yorkers a ” degree of safety and security.”
“They should be actually walking the subway cars, instead of just being stationed on the platforms, so that the passengers will know that the officers have actually gone up and down and checked out the car to make sure that everything’s OK,” he said.
A mayoral spokesman snapped back at Yang, accusing him of caving to the MTA’s “political demands.”
“NYPD deploys officers based on precision policing data, not MTA political demands,” said spokesman Bill Neidhardt.
Yang’s proposal comes after de Blasio on May 17 agreed to add 250 cop patrols after months of pressure from MTA executives for the NYPD to dedicate more officers underground. But an MTA review of subway stations found most lacked any police presence in the vast majority of them, and MTA honchos have repeatedly called into question City Hall’s transparency and math about how many cops would be in the stations and when.
The 46-yer-old former test prep company executive said making public transit safe is on the minds of many Big Apple residents.
“Every New Yorker I know right now is concerned about subway safety. There have been incidents that have been horrifying for us all, people getting shoved onto subway tracks, people being slashed,” said the mayor candidate said Thursday.
“The city isn’t going to work, if people don’t feel safe riding the subway every day.”
Yang’s summer safety plan also includes increasing funding for summer youth employment and adding detectives to raise the city’s clearance rate.
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