As I was browsing through the upcoming MTA Board committee meeting books this evening, I came across a surprising number. After ejecting 2676 straphangers from the system in March of 2010, police officers removed just 668 folks for misbehaving. That’s a decrease of 75 percent, and at a time when arrests are up a few percentage points, this drop in ejections is surprising.
It is, in fact, so surprising that Erik Ortiz of amNew York wrote an entire article on the topic. Riders speaking to the free daily spoke anecdotally of the atmosphere underground. “It’s a problem late at night. Recently there was a man speaking loud getting close to people. You can tell he was inebriated and that makes you feel unsafe,” one rider said.
Of course, drunk, loud people seem to be the least of our worries. Homeless people inhabit subway cars, and panhandlers are supposed to be removed from the subway system. Ortiz tried to determine the cause of the decrease, but answers weren’t forthcoming. He reports:
While authorities would not speculate why there are fewer people being kicked out of the subways, the transit union yesterday said the loss of station agents is a “critical factor.”
“Passengers in stations without an agent really have nowhere to complain other than the emergency call (boxes) that most people don’t even realize is there,” said Jim Gannon, a spokesman for the Transit Workers Union 100.
The union said the MTA has about 480 fewer agents than a year ago. An MTA spokesman declined to speculate on the ejection numbers. The NYPD was unable to say why officers are booting fewer riders, even as they cuff more crooks. Transit arrests are up, and increased nearly 8 percent from 2009 to 2010.
Gannon’s point seems to be the union’s rote response, but it also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Even if a station agent placed a call to a police officer — a rare occurrence indeed — it would take more time to find the perp and remove him from the system than is worthwhile. Usually these ejections occur during cops’ routine rounds underground, and the presence of station agents shouldn’t cause a 75 percent year-to-year drop.
Furthermore, recent months suggest a pattern is emerging. As Ortiz reported, “In the first three months of 2011 compared to 2010, the number of riders being booted out of the subways dropped 66 percent, 7,794 to 2,631.” That seems fishy.
So what’s going on here? It seems to me as though the cops are scaling back their quality-of-life enforcement efforts underground. As the article notes, offenses for which one may be ejected include jumping a turnstile, panhandling, drinking or smoking, playing a radio audible to others (hah!) or carrying bulky items that interfere with subway operations. If cops are no longer patrolling for these offenses, ejections will decline.
Now someone just has to figure out why the cops aren’t on the case. After all, we’ve all seen instances undergound of ejectionable offenses, but rarely are people removed from the system. Instead, summons and arrest totals have increased, and the word “quota” somehow winds its way through my mind. After all, no one gets credit for an ejection when a ticket or arrest will do, and as NYPD staffing numbers are reduced, the quality-of-life violations undergound will likely increase.
9 comments
“Now someone just has to figure out why the cops aren’t on the case.”
Choose the answer that best fits this situation:
A. They’re too busy playing with their phones.
B. They’re focused on faking overtime as they close in on retirement in order to boost their pensions.
C. They were told not to.
D. They’re busy fighting crime.
E. They’re doing paperwork.
__
Maybe people have just become fatigued and disgusted by contriving ways to beat the system and break the rules, and just decided to be nicer. Maybe they realized that if someone else steps in their discarded chewing gum or fries-and-ketchup, that tempers will flare and nobody wins. Maybe somebody thought it would be nice to teach the world to sing and buy the world a Coke.
We can dream.
could we get the buskers out? i’ve come to hate them.
I can’t stand when they play in my operating motor. When I tell them to move along, it’s against the rules, they are astonished. I must be the only NYCT employee to do so. Would they play on a bus? Why do they think it’s OK to play on a moving train?
I urge the readers of this board to appeal to the MTA for more PD enforcement of rules. They won’t listen to employees. Hopefully the face slashing on the 3 will lead to more enforcement.
I agree with this, I dont mind them in the stations (though on the platform is debatable), but on trains its no good.
Please NYPD come on the N/Q departing from Astoria-Ditmars. Panhandlers and bad performances galore up until Times Square every afternoon.
Do the MTA board minutes give a head count of how many cops are assigned to PD’s Transit Bureau? Since the subway is #1 terrorist target you’d think some of those above ground surges would also involve surging cops into subways. Do they?
I think the combination of less calls from the departed station agents and TPOs less inclinded to eject makes this somewhat explainable.
The question is why would TPD command issue such an order?
The answer may be a visable presence at high profile stations vs regular police work.
For evidence of lack of police work refer to Utica Ave station where the local gangs are warring over the lucrative “swiper” market.
I regularly see five or six cops grouped together with machine guns pointed toward the floor at the mezzanine level of the Grand Central IRT station. Cannot remember the last time I saw a cop on the platform OR the train on any line in the city. It’s all show. Meanwhile, more panhandlers and annoying buskers than I’ve seen in 15 years.