The news trickled out little by little. At first on Tuesday stories started appearing online that agents with NYPD at subway stations would start checking bags and backpacks more frequently. Then on Wednesday morning…bang…breaking news: National Guard and State Police Will Patrol the Subways and Check Bags.
That’s huge. The measure, announced by Governor Kathy Hochul, is an implicit admission that things have gotten out of control. People like me who live in New York and depend on the subway service on a daily basis have a pretty clear sense of what has changed in New York in the last couple of years, following the pandemic.
But I wonder how the news of National Guard and State Police will land on people in the rest of the United States and abroad. Will they think that New York has become a police state?
So it happens that early this week I had a conversation with a young Italian woman living in Milan who expressed in no uncertain terms her love for New York. “La mia cittá preferita al mondo,” she wrote to me in a text message. Shortly thereafter I spoke to her on the phone and asked her how often she had visited “her favorite city in the world.” Many times. Most recently, she was in New York in August 2023 and her previous visit was a couple of years earlier.
Elisabetta was in town as a tourist just for a few days and during our conversation she did not pretend to be an expert on New York; nor did she feel qualified to make a sophisticated assessment of the city. But she simply expressed the impression she had by walking around Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn.
“I felt less safe, something that I had never felt in New York before,” she said. She also felt surprised to see so many more homeless people and she observed how many people walking the streets seem to be mentally disturbed. It did not go unnoticed to Elisabetta how many storefronts were empty and boarded up.
We’ve all been hearing plenty of stories about violence, homelessness and mental problems; therefore, Elisabetta’s observations don’t add anything to a well-known story of New York post-pandemic. But perhaps what is worth underlining is that the sense of lack of safety is perceived even by a tourist madly in love with NYC.
Now, let’s imagine Elisabetta in New York as soon as the thousand members of the State Police and National Guard are deployed to the transit system. Imagine 750 members of the National Guard side by side with 250 men and women in uniform with the State Police, assisting one thousand NYPD officers that Mayor Eric Adams deployed in the subways last February. All of a sudden, tourists like Elisabetta will visit New York and possibly be of two minds: On one hand they will feel safer because of so many officers in uniform patrolling the city. On the other hand, they will feel less safe because the simple need for more police will convey a sense of looming danger.
We in New York always felt that our city was special. We always felt that eight million people as diverse as New Yorkers managed to find a remarkably civilized way of getting along, despite our different cultures, languages, habits, and expectations. But the police presence is sending a different message. We are no longer immune from the ills that seem to affect so many areas of the country. We were always welcoming of new immigrants. Not anymore. Now, we see the massive new arrivals as destabilizing. We thought we could handle the plight of homelessness with organized compassion. Not anymore. We thought we could contain violence to remote areas of the urban territory. Not anymore.
What has changed is that we cannot look away and pretend we cannot see what is going on. Now it takes a bigger effort to look the other way and believe that New York is back where it was some years back. Statistics are in front of everyone’s eyes. Crime in January spiked 45% compared to the same month a year ago. Between the beginning of the year and March 3, there have been 388 violent crimes reported in the city. And we are not talking about petty crime. We are talking about violent actions, such as the slashing in the neck of a public transit worker last week, or the pushing onto the subway tracks of a 64-year-old postal worker a few days ago.
Even Mayor Adams — a Black Democrat — is in favor of more police, more random checking of passengers in the subway, and a tougher stand when it comes to crimes committed by new migrants. He claims that random searches will not be based on racial profiling, but I bet we are not going to see many National Guards and State Policemen searching bags of white middle-class passengers. The focus will be on minorities and the youth. The same National Guard that several governors have sent to the Southern border of the US to help keep illegal migrants out is now used to keep crime under control in the New York subway. It is the same National Guard that had to intervene in California trying to contain wildfires. It is the same National Guard that has just suspended bonuses for reenlistment because of lack of funding. Ranks are down and needs are up. The country needs to maintain 36,000 National Guards but has a hard time keeping up with deployment needs.
But here is the irony: crime is a matter of perception. Crime in the public transit system is actually down 3% compared to before the pandemic, in 2019. Why all the fuss then? Because if people feel unsafe, that’s all that matters. If tourists like Elisabetta feel more danger, that’s what authorities are reacting to.
In the end, it is all about money, because safety is what drives people to move out of the city, delay the return to the office, or choose a different travel destination. The ultimate crime is an assault on New York’s gigantic economic machine.
