If you’d like to visit a New York City public library on a Sunday, you’re out of luck, thanks to recent city budget cuts. But if you’d like to see a subway station crawling with cops (including the PR-friendly robot variety), the possibilities are bountiful. This is life in Eric Adams’ New York.
The outrageous increase in funding resulted in a minuscule improvement in crime rates.
In 2022, amid concerns about rising crime in the city’s transit system, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams took the idea of “defund the police” and flipped it on its head. They dreamed up a strategy of “the three Cs” — “Cops, Cameras, Care” — which Hochul announced in October last year. What if, they imagined, we added more than a thousand uniformed police officers to patrol the subway every day and paid them much more — millions more? Now, one year later, city records show it led to a $151 million increase in NYPD overtime pay, a negligible decrease in crime and a vast increase in fare evasion tickets and arrests of people of color.
From 2021 to 2022, the city’s subways saw an almost 40% increase in reported felonies. The dramatic rise was due to vastly decreased ridership during the peak of the pandemic, and yet it was still overall lower than pre-pandemic crime rates. But that didn’t stop hysteria from seizing city residents and tabloid covers, after a number of high-profile incidents, including the death of Jordan Neely and several incidents of women being pushed onto the subway tracks in separate attacks. And thus Hochul and Adams’ more cops, less crime plan was hatched.
But the outrageous increase in funding resulted in a minuscule improvement in crime rates and, in some categories, increases. The stats, obtained by Gothamist, found that there were 48 fewer serious crimes (such as murder, rape and robbery) overall in the city’s subways this year. Despite that drop, assaults increased by 5%, with 26 more than last year. (The mayor and the governor didn’t respond to Gothamist's requests for comment.) To say we’re not getting our $155 million worth appears to be an understatement.
Most disturbing of all, however, is the focus on fare evasion. According to the city’s stats, 82% of those ticketed for fare evasion and 92% of those arrested were people of color. On top of being racist, these interventions do nothing to actually reduce fare evasion. A report issued in June found that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority lost $690 million in 2022 trying to fight fare evasion, despite an already beefed-up crackdown. A 2018 analysis of fare evasion enforcement in Seattle, meanwhile, found that it actually cost more to enforce and prosecute than it cost simply to lose the revenue from the lost fares. (NYPD Chief of Transit Michael Kemper told Gothamist that "targeting fare jumpers saves the MTA money and brings 'order' to the underground.")
In practice, it’s not the job of police to prevent and fight crime.
“You have people who genuinely cannot afford the cost of transit because they cannot afford the cost of living in New York City,” Molly Griffard, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, told The New York Times in June. “There’s this sort of kneejerk reaction to just rely on policing our way out of a problem that police can’t solve.”
If we zoom out, we can see that the Cops, Cameras, Care program hasn’t actually achieved its stated purpose. It has actually made subway riding more perilous for Black and brown New Yorkers.
It also reminds us that, in practice, it’s not the job of police to prevent and fight crime. Reuters, reporting on a 2022 analysis of county budgets and policing data by Catalyst California and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, noted that its conclusions contribute “to a growing line of research showing that police departments don’t solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives.”
And yet those narratives go a long way toward frothing up public fears over crime, making people believe that a $151 million increase in overtime for cops is ultimately worth it to create the illusion of safety.
“The media dramatically over-cover low-level crime by the poor,” civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis told Prism last year. “And so you see local news media every single day all across the country, in the national media as well, constantly talking about shoplifting, robbery, carjacking, shootings, things like that. When you compare them to the leading causes of suffering and death in the U.S., [low-level offenders are] minuscule contributors.”
Adams’ desire to bloat police earning potential comes at the cost of city budget cuts that have led to, among other things, public library branch closures on Sundays. Last week, the City Council voted overwhelmingly to pass a police transparency bill, which aims to “check racially biased policing by requiring police to report demographic information about people they stop, including their perceived race and ethnicity.” But before its passage, Adams reportedly offered at least one council member restoration of budget cuts in areas important to that member in exchange for a no vote on the bill. (A spokesman for the mayor told Gothamist that "the mayor did not offer to a councilmember to restore any budget cuts in exchange for a vote on Intro 586-A.")
It’s a dark reflection on this city when the mayor would use public resources as bargaining chips to help cops avoid accountability. Families having a free educational space to spend a Sunday is a building block of a healthy society; vastly overpaying law enforcement to be bad at its job is not.