Across New York City's boroughs, a woman was set aflame in a subway car in Brooklyn the same day that a man was stabbed to death on a train in Queens. A man was shoved in front of a train in Manhattan on New Year’s Eve and fractured his skull. As the new year began, two men were stabbed 17 minutes apart in unrelated attacks at Manhattan stations, the New York Times reports. The New York City subway system — with its confined space, deadly machinery and the frequent presence of people capable of lashing out — feels more dangerous these days. While violent crime in the subway has fluctuated in recent years, there has been a substantial increase in key categories since before the pandemic. Felony assaults are up 55 percent since 2019. Murders rose from three in 2019 to 10 in the year that just ended. People were pushed to the tracks at least 25 times — about once every two weeks — compared with 20 times in 2019.
All this is happening after the mayor and governor tried solution after solution: more police, more National Guard members, more outreach teams directing homeless riders into shelters, as well as officers and medics who move people — sometimes by force — to hospitals if they behave erratically enough. Security guard
Elijah Encarnacion, 26, has developed a safety routine: eyeballing other straphangers for threats, keeping his head on a swivel and knowing where he’s going. He says that "with all the extra policing, you’d think people would feel safe, with all the money going into this. But I don’t think it has worked.” The odds of being attacked on the subway remain remote. In 2019, the system saw 374 felony assaults. That works out to about one for every 4.5 million rides. In 2024, there were 579. There were also about 30 percent fewer rides than in 2019. That’s about one assault for every two million rides. Gov. Kathy Hochul backs a bill to make it easier to hospitalize people in psychiatric crisis involuntarily, which could help reduce attacks in the subways.
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