Why the National Guard can’t allay all fears about riding the subway
Last week, to immediate controversy, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she would deploy 1,000 members of the National Guard and State Police to patrol the New York City subway system in an effort to help people feel safer. Explaining her reasoning for “Morning Joe,” she said the measure would serve as both a deterrent and a way to “change the psychology around crime in the city.” That psychology tends toward pervasive fear in the aftermath of rare but dramatically violent incidents, such as the recent 3:40 a.m. attack on a train conductor in Brooklyn, who survived a cut to his neck after sticking his head out the window while driving into Rockaway . Avenue station.
“I could show you all the statistics in the world and say ‘you.’ should feel safe’ because the numbers are better,” Ms Hochul said. And essentially they are. Crime on public transport fell in 2023 compared to the previous year, even as ridership increased. Major crimes rose in January before falling in February.
“But you’re the mom on the subway with your baby in the stroller, you’re the parent putting your child on the subway to go to high school, you’re that senior citizen going to a doctor’s appointment,” she continued. ‘If you’re worried? Then I’ll be governor of New York State, and I’m worried about that.”
Of course, there are many reasons for New Yorkers to be concerned, but none of which warrant rapid and sweeping policy responses at the executive order level. The process of applying to the city’s public high schools is hellish, and last year was one of the deadliest on record for cyclists, to name just two examples. But the governor has made clear that changing perceptions about the prevalence of disorder is not her only goal. There is also a political motivation. “I’m going to show that the Democrats are fighting crime,” she also told Joe Scarborough and his team, “so this narrative that the Republicans have created and hijacked the narrative that we’re soft on crime and we’re defunding the police – no .”
It is undoubtedly true that many New Yorkers now worry about taking the subway in ways they did not before the Covid-19 pandemic, even if that concern is not always solely about crime, but rather the inconvenience that they experience when they witness so many people struggling with psychological instability on the trains.
Broad research shows that only 3 to 5 percent of violent acts are due to mental illness. But erratic behavior is highly visible on public transportation, and the death of Michelle Go, who was pushed off a platform and into the path of an oncoming train in Times Square two years ago, changed the mindset of many commuters and caused a terrifying situation. of repetitions. New habits soon formed; it is much more common these days to see people congregating in the middle of a platform, rather than at the edge, while waiting for a train. Ms Go’s attacker was ultimately deemed unfit to stand trial.
Part of Governor Hochul’s plan to calm passengers’ fears — and to lure back those who have given up on the subway altogether — includes additional security cameras and more random bag checks, as police have been doing for nearly two decades. But how that provides relief to someone who fears being thrown in front of a moving subway train by someone who may have schizophrenia, deals with drug addiction and is prone to impulsiveness is not particularly clear.
In sight of Jeffrey W Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke who studies the relationship between violence and mental illness, the idea of deploying the National Guard to the subway not only seems ineffective as a prevention tool among people who don’t necessarily make rational decisions, but would can also lead to prove to be harmful. What could seem like greater security, he noted, could also emphasize the idea that we are “living in a violent dystopia.”
The issue is “not a one-thing problem and a one-thing solution,” Professor Swanson continued. A militaristic presence could have exactly the opposite effect of what the governor intends. “If someone is in the middle of a psychotic episode, they may feel like everyone is out to get them, that they are threatened,” he says. “It could reinforce a false perception of danger.”
Twenty years ago, in the years after September 11, the existential fear that many New Yorkers carried with them on their morning commute was the prospect of a deadly terrorist bombing underground. That this never happened remains both a miracle and the product of an extensive infrastructural response that involved not only the performative presence of more law enforcement officers, but also enormous efforts from multiple government agencies.
The analogy may not be perfect, but the mental health crisis afflicting the city—a problem that is partly, but in no way entirely, responsible for the subway’s reduced ridership—could be addressed in a similar way. More “homeless services and mental health care” on the streets, in shelters and prisons and transit centers would be a more rational solution, as Avram Bornstein, professor of anthropology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, put it. “Although it would be largely invisible, in a direct sense, to the average person,” he said.