Subway Violence Stumps the Times

The Times, meaning New York’s liberal establishment, is exasperated as “subway violence stubbornly defies all efforts to quell it,” as a dispatch today puts it. The litany of horrors — a woman set on fire on an F train at Coney Island, a man shoved in front of an I.R.T. local at Chelsea — comes after years of public officials having “tried solution after solution,” the Times laments. One option is yet to be attempted, though: Reviving Broken Windows policing.That, in other words, would mean restoring the policies pioneered by Mayor Giuliani and police commissioners like Bill Bratton and Raymond Kelly. They tamed crime in the city some years ago. Broken-windows policing was based on the idea, long ignored by liberal academics who came to dominate criminal justice policymaking, that quality-of-life offenses — like vandalism, graffiti, and, yes, turnstile jumping — were a public policy problem.The logic behind “Broken Windows” was articulated in 1982 in the pages of the Atlantic by two Harvard academics, James Wilson and George Kelling. Low-level public disorder wasn’t just a nuisance that made city life unpleasant, they argued. These petty crimes were often the precursor to more serious offenses. So by nabbing criminals who, say, jumped a turnstile, police were often able to solve other crimes, or prevent them from happening at all.Wilson and Kelling urged Broken Windows policing as a means to combat the “urban decay” that had taken root in cities across America. When it was launched in New York City in 1993, the impact was remarkable, NYPD statistics show. A city in which more than 2,000 people were regularly murdered each year saw annual homicides decline by more than 80 percent. The same was true for robbery and burglary. Rapes fell by more than half.Despite Broken Windows policing’s success, liberals never liked the approach. Some critics said enforcing quality of life laws was “discriminatory, used as a tool to target minorities,” Messrs. Kelling and Bratton once noted. Or critics depicted the policy as an attempt “to impose a white middle-class morality on urban populations.” Other critics pointed to “demographic and economic causes” to explain away crime’s fall, Messrs. Kelling and Bratton marked.Under Mayor De Blasio — and to a lesser degree, Mayor Adams — these critics of Broken Windows gained sway and the benefits of enforcing quality of life offenses were lost. In 2018, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., said his office would stop prosecuting turnstile jumpers. That lax approach was expanded by his successor, Alvin Bragg. It didn’t help that the Attorney General, Letitia James, called it racist to enforce the laws against fare evasion.This shift in policy has led to predictable outcomes. Jumping the turnstiles has become routine, and it now annually costs the Metropolitan Transportation Authority some $700 million — an amount it’s trying to recoup with congestion tolls. Some 47 percent of bus riders dodge the farebox. This breakdown in law and order is reflected in surging crime rates. Felony assaults in the city transit system are up 55 percent since 2019, the Times reports.There were 10 murders in the system in 2024, the Times ended, versus just three in 2019. There’s been a troubling rise in incidents like shoving riders onto the tracks, too. No wonder riding the subway “feels more dangerous these days,” as the Times reports. It points to the “substantial increase in major categories” of crime “since before the coronavirus pandemic.” Yet the Grey Lady seems oblivious as to the explanation.After all, the Times adds, “All this is happening after years in which the mayor and governor” have tried so many fixes, like, say, “more police, more National Guard members, more outreach teams directing more homeless riders into shelters,” and even “officers and medics who move people — sometimes by force — to hospitals if they behave erratically enough.” They’ve tried everything, that is, except what would work: Restoring Broken Windows policing.

Subway Violence Stumps the Times

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