New York will send National Guard to subways after a string of violent crimes | Hacker News Reader

New York will send National Guard to subways after a string of violent crimes

apnews.com

34 pointsgeox52 comments

This just boggles my mind. First time I heard about this was when I saw the headline on Fox News, and I initially thought it was just an hyperbole. But now I see it repeated in more reputable media orgs and I still can't understand how this is happening.

The NYPD has one of the largest police budgets in the world, they have their own intelligence division and even overseas offices, and yet they seem unable to be able to station officers on the subway and now the national guard needs to step up. How did it come to this?

I do wonder how much of this is data driven vs a combination of fear mongering by the usual suspects and reacting to fear mongering, and thus causing its own fear issues.

Granted homicide isn't the only violent crime in the world but there were the headlines a week or so ago that homicide rates were far higher in the states complaining about NYC's crime than NYC has. Is it really *that* dangerous?

No, NYC is far, far safer than other large US cities. It’s the subject of attention because NYC is always the subject of attention.

No. NYC crime is lower than almost every major city.

It's always fun when finding out someone who lives in a rural area has a higher per capita crime rate than NYC while they complain about how NYC is a crime shithole.

Per capita crime will still be more densely concentrated in areas of higher population density. So yes, NYC could have a lower crime rate than a rural area by number of people, but still have it be much more "in your face" because all those crimes are happening in a smaller geographical footprint. And crime being "in your face" as opposed to happening where you don't notice it is what makes people think "wow, this is a shithole."

The homicide rate in cities needs to be lower than primarily rural or suburban or small city states. This is because cities require citizens to be more trusting of one another due to close proximity. It takes a much lower crime rate to make a city feel unsafe compared to a less populated area.

I don't understand why this concept is still hard to grasp. If you lived in a low trust high crime society would you rather live in a tenement building or have your own acreage and gun?

That being said, yes Nyc is safer than many cities thanks to Giulianis continued policies that make new York city policing closer to a right wing fever dream than many would like to admit.

Policing issues worldwide always seem like some bizarre budgeting priority issue to me. They're happy to spend many millions upgrading their vehicle fleets and equipment each year - kit that is perfectly fit for purpose in most cases, much of it only 5 or 6 years old - yet they can't afford to get bodies on the ground or respond to crime-in-progress calls. Seems to be classic white elephant behaviour.

To be frank, the general public doesn't care about the extreme crime that most police forces concern themselves with. They just want to feel safe on the subway or walk home from work. They want to be able to have a delivery left on their doorstep and not be stolen. They want to be able to park their car without someone smashing their window to steal some spare change. Yet little funding ever seems to come together to do anything about that; it all goes into the exciting anti-terrorism unit or drug-enforcement agency and the likem which make up the tiniest fraction of actual crimes.

Much of the SWAT gear is likely military surplus. My city has part time SWAT but two huge hummers that were built for the military but never deployed.

I am not saying that police prioritize their deployment of officers properly. I’m just saying they likely don’t pay for military surplus.

Military surplus is usually auctioned off to eligible buyers at a large discount. There were a number of stories back when MRAPs coming from Afghanistan and Iraq were sold to municipalities.

And the attention is because of optics rather than reality. From the article:

> Hochul has tried to mount a more aggressive public safety messaging strategy after Republicans campaigned on crime concerns and performed well in House races around New York City in the 2022 elections.

It doesn't matter whether you have a crime wave or not if people watch Fox News and believe you have a crime wave.

I believe some part of it is that this is led by the governor, and the governor can’t deploy NYPD on her own. The subway is also a state system, so deploying a state system (National Guard) to another state system makes sense to me.

>the governor can’t deploy NYPD on her own

If this is the case, why wouldn't she just put pressure on Mayor Adams to deploy more police?

There are a decent number of NYPD officers in the subway system, but they do not seem to be utilized effectively. They almost exclusively congregate near station entrances, rather than patrolling the platforms where incidents actually occur.

And they seem to be obsessed with their personal phones.

This sounds like just sensational panic being exploited by Hochul to distract from her incompetence. The MTA is a mess, but it's a mess because of mismanagement by the state of NY.

Crime has been trending downward. There was an increase in major crime in January, but it's dropped again. Barring some strange explation otherwise, that can be chalked up to a statistical artifact against a long-term decline:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/nyregion/nyc-subway-crime...

> In mid-2022, there was about one violent crime per one million rides on the subway, according to a New York Times analysis. Since then, the overall crime rate has fallen and ridership has increased, making the likelihood of being a victim of a violent crime even more remote. Last year, overall crime in the transit system fell nearly 3 percent compared with 2022 as the number of daily riders rose 14 percent.

> The downward trend stalled early this year, with the number of major crimes in the transit system jumping in January before dipping again in February. Through March 3, there had been three homicides in the system, compared with one in the same period last year, according to police data. Overall, major crimes, including felony assaults, burglaries and grand larcenies, have increased 13 percent so far this year, the data shows.

> This sounds like just sensational panic being exploited by Hochul to distract from her incompetence. The MTA is a mess, but it's a mess because of mismanagement by the state of NY.

This 100%. Sensationalism. She's just using high profile recent issues to _look_ like she's doing something.

"Passengers are free to refuse the searches and leave the station."

But are they free to take public transportation to work?

Also, what happens in practice if they refuse. Years ago in a different major US city, the local authorities had set up semi-random TSA style checkpoints for subway stations as a pilot project. When I was on my way home from work they were set up at the station where I'd get on the subway. I refused and left, deciding I'd rather walk home.

I got about 5 mins down the road when I realized a couple of large men were running after me. They were clearly cops, though plain clothes. As they caught up to me one pushed me so I'd stop and they blocked my path. Gave me all kinds of grief, wanting to know why I refused. There was an obvious implication that I'd done something wrong. I gave a few cursory answers to their questions, then started responding with "Am I being detained". The latter only incited them further.

Thankfully at some point they gave up instead of actually detaining me. They chewed me out, told me they were going to radio their buddies at upcoming stations so I wouldn't try to get on there either, and stormed off.

I love it. Just sitting here daydreaming how nice transit in San Diego could be if the trolley had just one or two officers per station and one on the train. The residents of mega apartments built on the stations would actually use them. The parking situation downtown could improve. The evening congestion would lighten. People would rather struggle with parking and traffic even if they live at a transit station with the trains in their current unpoliced state.

Policing is a climate issue, for those who care.

It is a really bad idea to make soldiers do police work.

They were not recruited with the kind of mental stability in mind that you need to deal with all the BS cops need to deal with.

The optics are also really, really bad. I recall putting my bags through a scanner and walking through a metal detector when I visited Beijing in 2018. My first thought was “wow, must suck to live in a police state like this, can’t even take transit without being searched.”

the optics maybe be bad but violent crime is extremely low. I've never felt fear of being mugged or attacked in China.

The more totalitarian country is the more government protects monopoly on violence.

Your perception of your own personal safety is not an objective measure of crime and should not form the basis of a policing strategy.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-bragg-new-york-manhattan-ny...

“crime across the five boroughs is nowhere near the levels seen in the 1990s, and while there was a rise in 2022, those figures are already trending down this year.”

  Your perception of your own personal safety is not an objective measure of crime

FTFY

Reported crime is not an objective measure of crime and should not form the basis of a policing strategy.

When police cease to act on reports of crime, people have no incentive to report crime (except for major property crime which might be covered by insurance, and things like murder).

This is why we can't trust the crime stats where I live (San Francisco).

Your response is logically inconsistent.

>Reported crime [...] should not form the basis of a policing strategy.

and:

>When police cease to act on reports of crime, people have no incentive to report crime.

Logically, then, reported crime should form the basis of a policing strategy, since it creates an incentive to report crime.

No. You're ignoring the time dimension.

Past policing strategy means that current crime stats are unreliable. These current crime stats should therefore not form the basis of a future policing strategy.

If we're optimizing for getting results today, policing strategy should not rely on the flawed crime stats we have today.

If we're optimizing for the long term, then sure rely on crime stats, but first make it easy to report crime.

If it's so difficult to report crimes, wouldn't that mean that the crimes that are reported represent the most egregious, since the people who reported them overcame the difficulty in reporting to report the crimes? And, therefore, current policing strategy should -- indeed -- focus on the reported crimes while making it easier to report them?

You have it backwards. The current policing strategy is the cause of the reported crimes mix.

People will report crimes that:

- they think the police will do something about, and/or

- they need to report in order to file an insurance claim

If your car window gets smashed and you're not going to report it to your insurer lest it raises your premium next year, and if you know the police aren't going to investigate, why would you report it?

And if the past is any indication, they'll be deployed without any ammunition. To avoid people bringing some spare bullets, they also remove the bolts from the rifles. It's a good safety precaution, but I wonder what will happen if the violent criminals discover this.

Well ok that is good at least the commanders share my risk assessment. I don't think criminals will try to steal rifles from the guardsmen. The officers might wield pistols too.

> They were not recruited with the kind of mental stability in mind that you need to deal with all the BS cops need to deal with

I honestly can't tell if this is meant to be serious or in jest.

I agree with the sentiment, but the reality is neither are cops.

It can't be serious. Soldiers have far stricter rules of engagement than police in the U.S., with significantly more penalties for violations.

I am serious. Ye, well, I'd argue the type of person that really can't "take shit" wont survive very long as a cop. Either litteraly or by being fired.

Among soldiers that type is way more common as they are not being filtered out since they are not exposed to it. (The NCO:s being mean in boot camp is not the same thing since the soldier is a subordinate.)

Are you speaking from experience in both services or based on media portrayals? I ask because your take does not accord with my (non-experiential) understanding.

I've been a NCO, infantry. Not in the US though, so my claim (i.e. cops are way better at handling civilians than soldiers due to fewer "bad apples") might be inaccurate if there is a big difference.

My main point is that people seem to severely underestimate what the police deal with. I would not think that soldiers as a group would cause more problem than say Walmart clerks (lets pretend they would get proper training) if given weapons and power to patrol subways.

I've made this argument a lot of times with friends. I hyperbolically claim that the average police is a better person than a Walmart clerk, and I got a lot of shit each time. There is this saying that "power corrupts" but I rather believe that "power gives the ability to show that you are corrupt".

Among Walmart clerks there are probably people that really really can't "take shit" that would never pass basic training of soldiers due to anger management issues. So like, the claim could probably be 'cops > soldiers > Walmart clerks' in handling civilians without bad outcomes.

US cops in particular are trained to violently respond to pretty much anything that moves. They are way way worse at handling civilians than US soldiers.

I would estimate that U.S. soldiers, are enormously more disciplined on average than U.S. police. More training, stricter rules of engagement, more significant and immediate consequences for violating those rules, better discipline, tighter command structure. There's no comparison whatsoever.

Complete ignorance of who military members are, how they are screened and recruited, and how they think is sadly the rule in the civilian world, not the exception.

In addition to having to pass a medical records screen, most US servicemembers come from the middle three socioeconomic quintiles of the population. It is literally a middle-class institution. Yet the trope lives on of the supposedly stupid military member who only joined because they had no options.

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." — Commander William Adama

We've crossed that particular bridge a long time ago. The police are effectively a paramilitary force at this point.

These are national guard, not full time military. One weekend a month, two weeks a year. Citizen soldier.

I would guess, on average, that they're more mentally stable than, on average, police considering that many go into national guard service to fund their college aspirations.

All the enforcement won’t matter if the DA continues to release repeat offenders. A tiny minority of people commit a significant proportion of crime in the city, whether they’re detained at the end of a glock or an M4 doesn’t change the long term outcome if they’re back on the streets the next day.

https://notthebee.com/article/crime-is-down-but-new-york-is-...

This is quite the backdoor to bring back stop and frisk[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...

I would think increased police presence on the trains and platforms would be a more effective use of resources, and would also deter other (much more common) problems on the train that don't involve guns and knives. MTA commuters will be inconvenienced without feeling much safer, and the narrative that NYC is some crime infested hole that needs to have the military sent in to establish martial law will continue. NYC is incredibly safe, so much safer than where I live now in the NY capital region. Seems like a weird move on the part of Governor Hochul, I'm not sure what constituency it's supposed to play to.

Uber and Lyft shareholders rejoice?

As a New Yorker, let me just say that the idea that there has been an increase in crime on the subways is overblown. There have been some "high profile" incidents, but by the raw numbers the crime on the subway has been down year over year. WAY fewer people use the subway/transit daily than did 5 years ago. Even percentage-wise the numbers are down.

Why Jordan Neely then?

Jordan Neely

Sometimes it seems like violence is the only solution modern american politicians can conceive of, even if it's an insane waste of both money and human effort and doesn't work.

How can this do anything but embarrass the city?

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