(AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Virus Outbreak New York Subways
NEW YORK, NEW YORK AP- After a woman was pushed to her death in front of a New York City subway train beneath Times Square over the weekend, Mayor Eric Adams acknowledged to reporters Tuesday that even he didn’t feel entirely safe riding the rails.
“We’re going to drive down crime and we’re going to make sure New Yorkers feel safe in our subway system, and they don’t feel that way now. I don’t feel that way when I take the train every day or when I’m moving throughout our transportation system,” Adams told reporters Tuesday.
The Democrat recounted when he rode the train on Jan. 1, not long after taking the oath of office, he called 911 to report a fight near a subway station, encountered a yelling passenger and another passenger sleeping on a train.
“On day one, I took the subway system, I felt unsafe. I saw homeless everywhere. People were yelling on the trains. There was a feeling of disorder. So as we deal with the crime problem, we also have to deal with the fact people feel unsafe,” he said.
Adams, who has been in office for just over two weeks, is an avowed fan of the system, which became infamous for grime, graffiti and crime in the 1980s, but made a remarkable turnaround in recent decades that had mostly erased its bad reputation.
After Saturday’s apparently unprovoked attack, Adams initially stressed that, overall, the system is safe.
“When you have an incident like this, the perception is what we’re fighting against. This is a safe system,” Adams said in a news conference hours after the attack.
But even before the killing, his administration had announced plans to boost the presence of police officers in the subway and reach out to homeless people riding trains as part of a mission to combat both “actual crime” and “the perception of crime.”
Janno Lieber, the acting chair and CEO of Metropolitan Transportation Authority that runs the subway, said he thought the mayor’s declaration of feeling unsafe was Adams “showing that he gets it” even if statistics show the chances of being a victim of a crime on the subway are low.
“The mayor is showing he gets it and he is sensitive to the way New Yorkers are feeling,” Lieber said. “People don’t feel based on statistics. They feel based on their personal experience and what they’re hearing.”
Police charged a 61-year-old man, Simon Martial, with second-degree murder in Saturday’s killing. The woman who was killed, Michelle Alyssa Go, was of Asian descent and police said they were investigating whether her death was a hate crime, though police said Martial, who was homeless, had a history of “emotionally disturbed encounters.”
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