Tuesday, March 26

Security derailed in New York


  • Subway shooting underscores anxieties in city over escalating violence

  • Mayor Adams’ commitment to police reinforcement as a solution does not generate consensus

Only Frank James’s lack of skill with a pistol that also jammed prevented the shooting on Tuesday in a New York subway car, which left 10 gunshot wounds, from ending in a massacre. the terror and the fearhowever, are not measured solely with fatalities.

The event, without direct precedent in the history of the New York subway, has highlighted the anxieties that the city is living for the rise in violent and gun crime. The trend has been recorded since the start of the pandemic in practically all major cities in the United States and it is not more acute in New York, but in the most mediatic of the metropolises it has gained greater dimension for a series of high profile incidents.

The data and, above all, the perceptions, suggest that security is derailed in the city. It is mA far cry from the violence figures of the 80s and 90s but in a recent Quinnipiac University survey less than half of New Yorkers surveyed said they felt safe using the subway. Three-quarters of those surveyed also said crime is a very serious problem, the highest percentage since the question was included in the survey in 1999.

The data

In the first 100 days of the mandate Adams’s crimes have uploaded more than one 44% According to data from the New York Police Department: there have been almost 50% more robberies than in the same period last year, 17% more rapes and 8.4% more incidents with firearms.

In it public transport the deterioration is even more accentuated and until April 10, two days before the shooting, the incidents had already grown more than 68%. None sparked more anxiety, before Tuesday, than the case of a 40-year-old woman who died after being pushed onto the tracks by a man. homeless with mental problems.

The mayor’s actions

Just nine days before that incident Adams and New York Governor Kathy Hochul had laid out a plan to achieve the “omnipresence” of police in the subway, one of the fundamental arteries for New York life where the number of passengers is still 40% below from before the pandemic. thousand agents joined those already patrolling the 472 network stationswhere there are also installed about 10,000 security cameras (Although precisely in the shooting on Tuesday some did not work and it was no use that agents had patrolled the 36th Street station in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn).

In February, Adams and Hochul also presented another plan aimed at remove from stations and trains nearly a thousand indigents who take refuge there. And the mayor has also launched anti gun units (of which 1,800 have been seized so far) and has relaunched the fight petty crime that affect the “quality of life” in a strategy where some see echoes of the controversial “broken windows” policy that he applied in his era in the mayor’s office rudy gilliani, which was effective in reducing crime but was hampered by punishing or prosecuting with abuse and discrimination especially at minorities.

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critics

The mayor’s campaigns get the applause of people like Richard Abornpresident of the Citizen Crime Commission of the city of New York, which in a telephone interview defends that Adams is acting “in an intelligent”. But they have also been met with deep rejection by progressives, activists and groups working with the homeless.

Critics include Angel Diaz, an attorney specializing in the intersection of technology and civil rights and liberties, and a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Probably the mayor and the police are going to use the opportunity to ask for more funds but the reality is that New York is already the city with the most police of the country in terms of agents and surveillance systems Y none of that served to stop this attack”, Díaz points out in a telephone interview. “Strengthening them would have a pretty negative impact on the communities that use the subway on a daily basis.”

the same claim alex vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. “Having more agents is going to result in more massive criminalization of some of the most vulnerable populations in the city: the poor who sleep in the subway, those who enter without paying or the noisy youngsters”, warns the author of “The End of Police Control” in another telephone interview, who also assures that by uniting homeless people in his speech and violence “the mayor continues confusing topics. “The homeless on the subway do not commit violence with guns. And what Adams is doing by turning the problem over to the police is cover up mistakes of the city in its responsibilities regarding the provision of basic social services“, He says.

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The mayor defends that his plan combines the police element with community-based programs, but Vitale and Díaz denounce the abysmal budget imbalance Between both. “The 99% of resources go to the policewhich has a budget of 11,000 million dollars, and only the 1%, less than 100 million of dollars, at community strategies”, emphasizes Vitale.

Proposals are put on the table such as civilians and not armed police who make up exclusively the teams that would respond to emergencies or crises. And faced with those who question whether community solutions can work, Díaz recalls that “the reality is that have never been tested, they have never been financed in a real way”.

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