What To Do (and Not To Do) About Subway Safety

In the first of a series of policy papers, Vital City is releasing recommendations on how best to reduce violent crime and disorder in New York City's subways. Built on a detailed data analysis and conversations with academics and practitioners, those recommendations follow in the document below.

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The research and analysis on which many of these recommendations are based follows here. It was produced by Aaron Chalfin, associate professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania; Paul Reeping, director of research at Vital City; and John Hall, a retired police professional and a National Institute of Justice Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science scholar.

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How can the hardest problems of urban life get solved in a sustained way?

The line from problem to solution is never a straight one. It is bent by the demands of the moment, the vagaries of politics, the availability of money and people, and more. But there is “smart money.” It comes from the long experience of people working inside government and in other institutions that shape government policy, as well as from researchers who have painstakingly examined what works and what doesn’t, and the public who has experienced it. This project aims to deliver to policymakers the best ideas, distilled into steps that can be taken now and the long-term changes that must undergird sustained achievement.

We assembled prominent researchers and practitioners to produce actionable advice on reducing subway crime and disorder in New York. Sometimes the recommendations are backed by deep data. Sometimes there is no, little or uncertain data to help untangle what to do. But policymakers have no choice but to act even if there’s no randomized controlled trial to guide them. Here we relied on what we know about the basic principles of why crime happens and how disorder can be tamed to provide some guidance. What follows is the “smart money” on what to do.

The data that underlie these recommendations can be found in our companion document, “Subway Safety: What the Data Show,” and where not in that document, we provide links. We offer these ideas, honoring the hard work of public servants who grapple with these enormously complex problems every day. Our deep gratitude goes to the many people who helped shape these recommendations through in-person convenings, one-on-one conversations, writing and analysis. Many of them are listed at the end of this document.

We also extend special thanks to Arnold Ventures and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, who are helping to support this effort.

The problem to be solved: Violent crime and disorder in the subways

While violent crime in New York City’s subways is an exceedingly rare event, each crime reverberates due to the central importance of this shared public space, its close quarters and the high likelihood that witnesses will see and cameras will capture any given offense. Although rare, the incidence of violent crime has increased significantly over the past few years, and its nature has changed. Felony and misdemeanor assaults — the shove, the punch and the life-altering attack — too frequently committed by seriously mentally ill individuals, have tripled since 2009. Over the same period, “instrumental” violence motivated by the desire for money or property has been declining.

New Yorkers’ underground jitteriness is not just caused by crime. It is amplified by a sense of disorder: erratic behavior and other conduct not necessarily rising to the level of criminal offenses, such as the unkempt and troubled panhandling or sleeping on subway cars. The dilapidation of some subway infrastructure also contributes to unease: dark and untended stations with peeling paint, dripping pipes, bad lighting and poor sightlines.

Despite the decay of some stations, these are warm and sheltered places that have often become the dwellings of people who are suffering from untold physical and mental problems. This use of the subway system for something other than transit also diminishes the sense of safety for the general commuting population.

What are the solutions? The data and expertise Vital City has synthesized point to a mix of approaches. We start with some key ideas and caveats while acknowledging how much good work is already underway by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the City and many others:

• The nature of criminal activity — rare, diffuse and hard to predict — makes it hard to address with precision policing or precision outreach. The subway system, with 4.2% of the city’s violent crime, already uses 8% of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) manpower. And it is likely that, whether they take the form of enforcement, outreach or improving the physical environment, efforts will always be overbroad because of the rarity and diffusion of the issues.
• Although subway violence is relatively rare, that does not mean that it feels rare to the traveling public. Just one violent crime has a magnifying effect as news of it travels.
• Many of the issues driving violence and fear stem from mental health and substance use challenges that people may face their entire lives. Even if the effect of an initial approach to address intersecting issues of crime and serious mental illness or homelessness — whether arrest, commitment, supportive housing, respite or something else — is temporary, the solutions must be sustained and will be expensive.
• Police, while important, will have limited effect on their own because of the layered aspects of the problems. For that effect to last, they need to be deployed according to a sustainable plan rooted in where and how crime happens — not performative surges.
• Police must be complemented by calibrated use of clinicians, social service workers and civilian outreach workers playing their part. And who plays what part and whether there exist enough people to play those parts are pieces of the puzzle.
• How people feel and how they act can be influenced by the design, look and feel of the built environment. The research is compelling that the nature of our physical surroundings and the learning from the world of behavioral science can have outsize effects on ensuring civility and compliance with rules underground.
• Success requires unified governance and coordination. Those participating in the unified command must be in constant communication, sharing data and analysis built into program design from the start, relentlessly focused on results, with clear leadership structures linking agencies, service providers, law enforcement and community organizations. Leadership and partnership among the agencies must be built into government structures, not subject to changes in political leadership over the years or fleeting reactions to spikes in crime.
• The City and the State are already investing about $700 million a year in day-to-day efforts to make the subways safe, and billions in capital improvements, according to an analysis conducted for Vital City. Our recommendations seek to use what exists with the maximum effect possible, reshape where necessary and, when part of a sustained plan with clear goals and accountability, make recommendations for investments.

The most important recommendations, summarized

1.) Make clear that the subways are for transit

2.) Establish a unified governance system

3.) Use police more effectively

• Recalibrate staffing

• Integrate station responsibility with precinct commanders

• Provide clear guidance on quality-of-life enforcement

• Improve officer engagement and accountability

• Ensure police rapidly attend to customer complaints

• Use technology to improve response

4.) Improve response to those suffering from serious mental illness, those who are unhoused and others

• Consider establishing diversion intake hubs

• Remove from the system those who violate the rules or present risks

• Systematically track interactions

• Strengthen co-response and other outreach efforts

• Facilitate involuntary removals

• Ensure that a case, whether involving services or a crime or both, does not end at removal

5.) Incorporate both physical fixes and behavioral change campaigns into station management

• Implement design strategies that enhance rider experience and safety

• Implement behavioral interventions to increase compliance with the law

• Enhance station management and maintenance

What not to do

• Massively increase police presence underground at the expense of aboveground policing

• Invest in firearm-scanning technology for subway stations

• Rely on fare evasion enforcement as a violent-crime reduction measure

Recommendations in detail

1.) Make clear that the subways are for transit

Too often, the public views the subway system merely as a place to tolerate between points A and B. Making clear that rules of conduct exist for a reason — and building a new culture of stewardship that includes all who use the system — is imperative.

All those who run the subways and ride the trains must be committed to the common understanding that the subways are for transit. The system’s purpose is to move people safely, swiftly and efficiently from one place to another. Other socially sanctioned purposes can be allowed, but nothing that interferes with safe, pleasant and efficient public transport should be tolerated.

This is a message that the MTA has championed. But it must be embraced by riders, subway operations, law enforcement and outreach workers. It won’t happen spontaneously, at least at first. Here, the City and the State must lead with clarity, vigor and purpose to:

– Ensure the express adoption of this philosophy to orient how police, outreach workers, clinicians, tollbooth operators, conductors and the many other people who work in the subway system do their jobs. Doing this would also promote a spirit of cooperation and participation in riders.

• For police and outreach workers: Remove people who violate rules, sleep, urinate, panhandle, use drugs or use the subway as a dwelling or for something other than transit.
• For riders: Begin with basics — awareness campaigns and announcements by public officials, public service announcements and signs to make clear to all the rules of ridership and their consequences. This approach and more will help to build a culture of involved bystanders.
• For transit workers: Be in more regular contact with riders to promote compliance with the rules and maintain clear lines of reporting issues. When transit workers observe an individual or a condition that the rules require to be addressed, that worker must report through a clear chain of command. Transit workers cannot be asked to be law enforcement, but reporting issues to law enforcement should be immediate.
• For everyone: Complement this with a concerted public education campaign through statements by public officials, citywide advertising and more.

– Initiate a coordinated campaign to reestablish the clear rule that subways are for transportation.

– Launch a new citizen reporting mechanism to flag violations of the rules. All platforms and cars should be equipped with QR codes enabling riders and officials to easily identify and track the precise location of problems, flagging violations with the MTA or NYPD, as appropriate. The MTA and NYPD should share this data regularly so the public can hold the agencies accountable for addressing key issues. If there are multiple and unused routes to report problems, they must be streamlined or bundled into existing mechanisms like 311.

– Formally and consistently ban people from the system who have been serially convicted of harming MTA employees or committing sex crimes against riders, in accordance with current law, and support legislative efforts to expand bans to cover assaults on riders and MTA contractors.

– Give local companies and civic organizations the opportunity to take more ownership of stations to contribute to their beautification and maintenance.

2.) Establish a unified governance system

The MTA, a creature of the State, runs the New York City Transit system. But they do not control all the resources that are necessary to ensure a safe and efficient ride. Though MTA Police patrol a few major station hubs, the NYPD remains almost entirely responsible for policing the system’s 472 stations and thousands of platforms and trains. Various City departments, from the Department of Homeless Services to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to the NYPD, have roles in tracking, treating and, if necessary, removing unstable people with serious mental illness, drug addiction and other overlapping maladies from the system. Nonprofit providers under various contracts with the government provide key services to unsheltered or ill individuals in the transit system, with various levels of accountability for performance.

While there is much effort devoted to connecting the complicated work of all these agencies, ensuring that there is a permanent, stable and streamlined system of governance and accountability — that lives at the operational, not political level — is key to progress. The MTA and the City should establish an interconnected governance system organized around a single repository of shared data, such as daily metrics of law enforcement incidents, social service interactions and customer complaints. This governance system must also be relentless in determining the results of each effort so that the initiatives can be continued, corrected, replicated or replaced.

Because this effort will bring together many different agencies and entities, each reporting to different bosses, the governance will have to operate more as a federation with a facilitator than in a traditional command-and-control model. This approach has been enormously successful in the Gun Violence Strategy Partnership meetings which have taken place every weekday for the past three years, bringing together prosecutors, police, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Correction and others to track the cases of shooters, to enhance evidence and to strengthen prosecutions.

The facilitator of this new federation should be a career public servant, or, if a political appointee, a person agreed upon by both the City and the State who is broadly respected among the different participants and considered immune from political pressure. It must be the work of career public servants to embed the discipline of accountability into governmental structures and avoid the problem of data sharing, analysis, follow-up and continuity being subject to political fortunes. Specifically, a unified command would:

– Provide a single source of data and analytics support — collected and disseminated in as near to real time as the data sources permit — to direct deployment of resources and ensure effectiveness.

– Have a laserlike focus on the few thousand individuals in the system who most need assistance and whose removal will have the greatest impact in improving safety and quality of life for riders and improving life conditions for the individuals.

– Ensure that social workers, psychiatrists, police, MTA personnel and others tasked with helping those with needs related to mental illness or housing all have integrated and up-to-date data on their case histories and criminal arrest histories while adhering to privacy concerns and other legal restrictions.

– Receive regular reports from MTA employees charged with monitoring and improving station and train conditions.

– Publish regular public reports knitting together trends on safety and disorder from police, transit, mental health personnel and other relevant agencies — and identifying areas in need of attention.

Provide regular public assessments of the success or failure of the various initiatives.

3.) Use police more effectively

The rarity, randomness and mobility of subway crime mean that the usual police strategies that have found success on the surface — for example, hot-spot policing — will not work with the same precision underground. While a small number of hub stations that serve the largest number of customers account for an outsize share of violence in the system on a per-rider basis, the risk of violence is very diffuse. And while on the surface, offenders tend to commit crimes near where they live or spend time, people who commit crimes on the subway are by definition highly mobile.

On the surface, the majority of the most serious violence is committed by a small number of individuals. On the subways, a large share of the frequent offenders are homeless or severely mentally ill. This population is less likely to be deterred through traditional means and thus pose a unique challenge for law enforcement and others.

In the NYPD Transit Bureau today, unlike with patrol precincts, the Department doesn’t rely on a data-driven staffing model. This leads to an overreliance on temporary deployments and overtime. As a result, transit frequently operates in crisis mode, perennially running up big bills in overtime, pulling manpower from above ground and often depending on temporary staff not trained in the particulars of patrolling underground. What the “right” number of NYPD transit officers is or where they should be deployed appears very much up in the air.

We do not address here other important components of enforcement, such as effective prosecution. But with a doubling in recidivism rates, this is an important area to understand. Modernizing transit police staffing comprises a series of components:

Recalibrate staffing to ensure a properly trained, supervised and deployed force

Currently budgeted with 2,583 officers, the Bureau routinely pulls in non-transit-trained personnel to meet basic coverage needs, while racking up $150 million in overtime expenses. These surges have ranged from 200 to 1,000 officers, pulled from administrative assignments, patrol and detective squads.

The unique policing environment in the subway system requires specialized safety training, including knowledge of the third rail and other train operations.

A staffing plan should not be boom-and-bust. Most needs are knowable. Just as the police anticipate summer spikes in shootings above ground and adjust deployments accordingly, the police should also plan for increased underground activity in winter, ensuring adequate presence. Working together with the unified command, this approach would also permit effective staffing of co-response teams as well.

To build a more effective and less reactive transit staffing plan, the NYPD should:

• Undertake a zero-based staffing analysis to build a personnel plan based on needs and crime levels.
• Build a data-driven, seasonally sensitive staffing model. Rather than continuing to rely on historical staffing levels or arbitrary percentages of total Department strength, a new model should follow the proven success of the Police Department’s summer deployment strategy for gun violence, tailored to the subways’ seasonal needs: anticipating increased underground activity in colder months and adjusting resources accordingly, including boosting academy recruit allocations to meet seasonal demands.
• Convert excessive overtime costs into additional permanent positions filled by properly trained transit officers.
• Base deployment decisions first on violent crime patterns, then on disorder and quality-of-life complaints. Since violent crime is relatively rare, its concentration drops off sharply after the highest-risk stations. Quality-of-life complaints are numerous enough to guide additional station deployments.
• Dedicate personnel to address specific problems in specific places, with focused coverage of hub stations based on violent crime data, complemented by quality-of-life enforcement informed by MTA customer complaints in other locations.
• Enhance de-escalation training. Given transit officers’ frequent encounters with special populations in confined spaces, they should be prioritized for comprehensive de-escalation training.

Integrate responsibility for stations with the local precinct commander

• Make aboveground precinct commanders operationally responsible for nonhub stations, enabling them to tailor crime reduction strategies to each station’s specific crime conditions and to ensure seamless integration in combating neighborhood crime.

Provide officers with clear guidance to address quality-of-life issues and appropriate training to effect the guidance

Transit officers need precise, actionable guidance for addressing quality-of-life violations

in the subway system.

• Police should implement a graduated response model, not a zero tolerance model. This should begin with first evaluating an individual’s need for medical intervention, move to removing disruptive individuals from the system when necessary and reserve arrest for cases of persistent or egregious violations.
• For certain predetermined transit-disruptive violations, officers must, at a minimum, remove the individual from the system. Examples of New York City Transit rules and regulations that, if violated, can be highly disruptive include: unauthorized access to tracks; lying on floors, platforms, stairways or conveyances; and interfering with train operations. If officers recognize signs of behavioral health issues, they should follow specialized protocols. This ensures that while maintaining subway safety and order, officers respond appropriately to individuals who may need mental health support rather than enforcement action.
• The NYPD and MTA must establish and communicate to officers, riders and others the list of “must-engage” offenses that mandate officer response, particularly targeting behavior that disrupts transit operations or poses risks to users. Training must minimize ambiguity in decision-making, ensuring officers understand exactly when and how to engage with transit rule violators based on these defined priorities.

Improve officer engagement and accountability

The heavy reliance on overtime to staff police deployments brings officers to the subway who are often unfamiliar with the environment, assigned to temporary posts, not directly accountable to transit bureau leadership and otherwise distracted. Effective rule enforcement and strategic engagement require officers to be actively involved in their work, with a clear sense of purpose and well-defined deployment directives when not responding to quality-of-life complaints. To foster this level of engagement:

• Assign specific responsibilities to transit posts, as designated by the commanding officer, including Transit Order Maintenance Sweeps, platform patrols, train rides and addressing persistent quality-of-life conditions.
• Conduct regular oversight of assignments through frontline supervision to ensure compliance with directives and NYPD policies, including regulations on cellphone use and professional conduct while in uniform.

Ensure police swiftly attend to customer complaints, whether the complaints relate to conditions or crime

Current data reveal a troubling trend: In 2024, officers dismissed two-thirds of all 311 complaints in the subway system as unfounded, unnecessary or “condition gone on arrival,” reflecting a broader pattern seen across other 311 response categories. The Police Department must prioritize responding to quality-of-life complaints in the subway, with supervisors regularly auditing response times, follow-up actions and officer conduct to ensure accountability. Specifically:

• Installing QR codes in every subway car, with information uniquely identifying the car, would create an accessible, direct channel for riders to report issues, complementing the existing 311 and customer complaint systems and demonstrating the MTA’s commitment to passenger engagement and system improvement.
• Regular audits, real-time performance monitoring and transparent reporting mechanisms can strengthen accountability and reinforce best practices.

Use technology to improve police response

Stations are spread across the city, many desolate at night and lacking the natural observation present at street level. Tunnels are not internet-connected, further complicating communications. Technology can alleviate these problems. While we recognize this is a longer-term goal, achieving it would further rationalize resources and boost efficiency and effectiveness:

– The NYPD and MTA should work to establish a dedicated real-time crime center building on the MTA’s existing camera network and enhanced by AI-powered behavior-detection technology.

• The center would serve as a force multiplier for the distributed transit police force, providing continuous monitoring for unusual behavior patterns across the system and enabling rapid response coordination for in-progress incidents. The technology would expand response capabilities, particularly in remote or isolated areas where maintaining consistent police presence is challenging.
• The center should be staffed for 24/7 monitoring, with clear protocols for coordinating with transit officers and regular evaluations of the technology’s effectiveness. This investment would significantly enhance the Department’s ability to prevent and solve transit crimes.

4.) Improve the response to those suffering from serious mental illness, those who are unhoused and others

Of all the hard problems that policymakers want to solve, one stands out for its humbling complexity: People with often-overlapping behavioral health concerns such as serious mental illness and substance use, who may also be unhoused, comprise the most persistent and high-profile challenges to order and safety on the subway. According to an NYPD analysis, two-thirds of individuals with the most subway arrests in 2022-2023 had documented histories of homelessness or mental illness. This percentage increased to 89% among those also arrested for subway violence.

Of course, a tiny percentage of those who struggle with serious maladies commit crimes or present a threat to others. Indeed, those suffering with serious mental illness and substance abuse and who lack housing are often themselves victims of crimes.

Because of the complexity of these issues, Vital City is working with a second group of expert practitioners and researchers to forge practical and humane solutions to the challenges that many of this population present with respect both to crime and disorder.

Here, we sketch a direction and some principles — and will return in the late spring with more detailed recommendations.

Here are the principles we are focusing on:

• The subway’s fundamental purpose is to provide safe and efficient transportation, and any behaviors compromising this purpose require focused action and adequate resources.
• The State, the City and nonprofits must coordinate across systems to ensure the subways are for transit, share data and results, and recalibrate as results are understood. This is what the recommendation for a unified command would produce.
• Any wholesale strategy to address those living underground must find the balance between policing and services. This means enforcement should not happen without concrete offers for help appropriate to the individual, including transport to that service.
• If and when a service is refused, then enforcement must proceed. Much here could be learned from the intensive efforts by the City in joint response and at the end of subway lines, where many who are both without shelter and suffering from severe mental illness congregate in the evenings.
• Any sustainable approach must seek to address behavioral health needs through effective treatment, services and interventions when conditions lead to disruptive behaviors, implementing evidence-based approaches that reduce future disruptions by meeting these underlying needs. The “intervention” cannot end at “removal,” but rather must continue with a sustained commitment of City services for the duration of the person’s needs.
• Where a person suffering from severe mental illness commits a crime, a different track through the criminal justice system must be similarly sustained and must care for the person’s illness.

With these principles in mind, we are exploring the following policy steps, noting again how much focus and creativity the MTA and the City are bringing to this issue:

Consider establishing diversion intake hubs

• Many cities have had success in creating all-in-one centers where police and outreach workers can routinely bring individuals either to follow through with enforcement actions or connect them with mental health help, substance-use treatment, housing and other services. New York City should explore this model as a means of diverting individuals from the criminal justice system toward appropriate treatment and support.

Remove from the system those who violate the rules or present risks

• Those who break MTA rules in ways that interfere with the operations of the subway system and inhibit the ability of commuters to travel should at a bare minimum be removed from the system. If in the course of executing such a removal they can be connected with services, this should be a parallel priority.

Systematically track interactions

• Contacts between people with serious mental illness, people with substance use issues and unhoused people and social service providers, police officers or MTA employees are not seamlessly shared in real time. They must be.

Strengthen co-response and other outreach efforts

• Innovative teams created by the City and MTA that combine police with nurses and other social service practitioners, like the Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams (SCOUT) and Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness (PATH), are an essential tool for engaging individuals in crisis and connecting them to the services they need to stabilize, including hospital treatment. But New York City must attend relentlessly to what is effective and what is not. Here there is much to learn from the City’s own experience, as well as other cities, as to deployment: when and where to deploy, what kinds of teams and at what level of clinical expertise, and how the service-offer and the enforcement are coordinated. Before expansion, some of these basic questions about efficacy must be answered, then tracked in real time.

Facilitate involuntary removals

• State law currently lacks clear guidelines for involuntary removal from the subway system, leaving too much room for interpretation. The law should be amended to give police and others clearer authority to intervene and remove individuals when they are at substantial risk of harm due to their inability to meet basic needs like food, shelter or medical care.

Ensure that a case, whether involving services or a crime or both, does not end at removal.

• Attention must continue to be paid to the person and their welfare.

5.) Incorporate both physical fixes and behavioral change campaigns into station management

The subway system’s physical environment and rider behavior significantly influence both actual safety and perceptions of safety. Research shows that environmental design and behavioral interventions can effectively reduce crime and disorder without relying solely on enforcement. Among the many attractions of this approach is that it has a “neighborhood effect”; that is, physical changes have a wholesale impact on the behavior of all the individuals within their ambit, while enforcement proceeds person by person. Evidence from transit systems worldwide demonstrates that thoughtful modifications to physical spaces and targeted behavioral strategies can create lasting improvements in safety and compliance. International examples offer valuable lessons, as do standout domestic cases. The Metro system in Washington, D.C., for instance, maintained significantly lower crime rates than peer systems through integrated design features like resistant materials, controlled access points and enhanced sightlines. Studies in European transit systems suggest that strategic deployment of staff and targeted behavioral interventions can reduce fare evasion and improve compliance with system rules. The MTA has been particularly active and innovative in thinking about both physical design and behavior change. These recommendations build on those ideas.

Implement design strategies that enhance rider experience and safety

Incorporating good design principles into planned renovations can improve security without requiring stand-alone security-focused capital projects. Natural surveillance should be the foundation of this approach. Specifically:

• Integrated into the MTA’s organized analysis of the physical condition of subway stations, platforms, mezzanines and passageways should be an assessment of the role that physical changes might play in reducing crime and disorder. Different stations may be attracting different types of crimes, and doing a more thorough analysis — one that makes note of various design characteristics that may be facilitating crime — would be helpful in informing station-specific changes.
• Station layouts should be designed or modified to maximize open sightlines and minimize visual obstructions on platforms and in corridors.
• Eliminate shadows and dark areas with improved lighting systems, and position station booths and customer service areas to maximize staff visibility.
• The MTA should create consistent design standards across new and renovated stations to establish system identity, installing clear and well-placed wayfinding signage to reduce passenger confusion. Clear boundaries between public and restricted areas help define appropriate uses of space.
• Physical infrastructure improvements should focus on durability and security. This means installing vandalism-resistant materials for surfaces and fixtures, designing seating and waiting areas that discourage extended loitering, creating sufficient space around fare barriers to prevent crowding and positioning emergency exits to be visible but not vulnerable to misuse.
• Station management facilities should be integrated into these designs, with staff areas positioned to maximize natural surveillance of high-risk areas and clear sightlines between station booths and critical areas.

Implement behavioral interventions to increase compliance with the law

The MTA has taken a promising step with its current solicitation seeking behavioral science expertise to address fare evasion. It is an important issue not only because of hundreds of millions in lost revenue but because of the signal it sends about the toleration of lower-level disorder. Enforcement alone cannot reverse what has become a significant shift in social norms around fare payment. The solicitation focuses on developing detailed rider personas and testing multiple intervention strategies. Going forward, the MTA should:

• Ensure the selected behavioral interventions are tested through rigorous pilot programs
• Develop clear metrics for evaluating both compliance improvements and cost-effectiveness using validated measures of fare evasion
• Create a framework for rapidly scaling successful interventions systemwide
• Integrate behavioral strategies with physical improvements to fare-control areas
• Maintain complementary enforcement strategies while behavioral interventions are implemented

Enhance station management and maintenance

The MTA’s recently launched Re-NEW-Vation Program, enhanced by Gov. Hochul’s commitment to systemwide LED lighting upgrades, provides a foundation for improving station conditions. Improved lighting has been shown to reduce crime above ground. Early customer feedback suggests promising results; this momentum should be leveraged to create a comprehensive approach to station management that recognizes the connection between maintenance, disorder and crime. Building on this, the MTA should:

• Establish clear metrics that evaluate both maintenance standards and security outcomes
• Create rapid-response policies for graffiti and vandalism removal
• Develop regular auditing procedures that assess physical conditions alongside quality-of-life concerns
• Coordinate existing LED lighting installation with other station improvements to enhance overall effectiveness
• Rigorously evaluate the Re-NEW-Vation Program’s impact on both station conditions and security outcomes, including specific assessments of how improved lighting affects crime and disorder. Lessons learned from this assessment can inform the expansion of successful elements systemwide, creating a sustainable model for integrated station management that enhances both the passenger experience and system security.

What not to do

DO NOT reactively surge nontransit police officers on the subways. If the subways accounted for the biggest crime hot spots in the city, concentrating more police in the subway system might make sense — but this is not the case. Approximately 4% of the city’s violent crime occurs in the subway system, and the data suggest that on a per person-hour basis, the streets are still probably more dangerous than the subways. Taking patrol officers off their regular beats in high-crime neighborhoods and taking highly trained detectives away from criminal investigations to patrol the subway likely yields some problematic trade-offs.

DO NOT invest in new technology that allows law enforcement to scan for individuals who are carrying firearms into a subway station. While such technology may have its uses in certain situations, very few subway crimes are committed using a firearm. Investments in gun-scanning technology are costly and logistically difficult; those resources are better spent on police manpower or mental health services.

DO NOT rely on fare evasion enforcement as a violent-crime reduction measure. Fare beating is a real problem to be solved, and we support the rollout of new turnstiles that are more impervious to cheating. But one recurring suggestion for how to promote safety within the subway system is to concentrate significantly more police enforcement at the turnstiles. While this idea fades in and out of fashion (now out), it is persistent and worth underscoring that it is an inefficient way to promote safety:

• Individuals arrested for fare beating represent only 7% of all fare beaters identified by law enforcement — a highly selected subset. These individuals typically have less serious criminal histories than those arrested for violent or disorderly conduct in the transit system, and even less serious criminal backgrounds than the average citywide arrestee.
• Moreover, the MTA estimates that approximately 10%-14% of riders fare beat, amounting to around 150 million fare-beaten rides each year. This underscores that even the 7% of identified fare beaters who are arrested represent an extremely small fraction of all those who evade fares.
• Deploying police to monitor turnstiles wastes valuable resources, as most violence occurs on trains and platforms. Reassigning officers to these higher-risk areas would significantly improve public safety and security effectiveness.

Advisors

We are grateful to a core group of people, some of whom are listed below, who generously gave their time and wisdom in meeting as a group and individually, in writing and in conversation as Vital City worked through the recommendations.

The recommendations are Vital City’s and do not necessarily reflect the positions of any person or institution listed below. Any errors are our own.

Bridget G. Brennan, New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor

Ken Corey, University of Chicago Crime Lab; former chief of department, New York City Police Department

Aaron Chalfin, associate professor of criminology, University of Pennsylvania

Vishaan Chakrabarti, architect, urbanist and author based in New York City

Jeremy Feigelson, special counsel, Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Sarah Feinberg, founder, Feinberg Strategies LLC; former president and CEO, New York City Transit

Linda Gibbs, former deputy mayor of health and human services, City of New York

Francia Henry, president, MION Consulting; former deputy chief of plans and programs for police, security and safety, Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Nancy La Vigne, dean, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice; former director, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice

John Macdonald, professor of criminology and sociology, University of Pennsylvania

Brandon del Pozo, assistant professor, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University

Jerry Ratcliffe, professor, Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University

Meg Reiss, first assistant district attorney, New York County

Marcos Soler, deputy secretary for public safety, New York State

Claire Weisz, founding partner, WXY architecture + urban design

There are many other people in New York State and New York City government who shared their knowledge of how things actually work, not just on paper. A partial list of the agencies and offices they represent includes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the New York City Mayor’s Office, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, the New York City Police Department, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and NYC Health + Hospitals. We are deeply grateful for their time and advice, and their service to New York City.