The day after Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a plan to deploy National Guard soldiers and State Police troopers in the New York City subway system, commuters expressed mixed feelings about whether the extra vigilance would make them feel any safer.
Some people applauded the move on Thursday, while others said they were skeptical about the need for more law enforcement and concerned about having armed soldiers check their bags.
A pair of National Guard troops with rifles walked down the sloping hallway between the Fulton Street and World Trade Center subway stations in Lower Manhattan late on Thursday morning, past the gelato stand where Aileen Morales works.
Ms. Morales, 31, who travels there by subway from her home in the Bronx, said that she had developed a “poker face” for her commutes in the last two years as a form of self-protection. She welcomed the additional security in a system that feels unsafe to her.
“You don’t know who’s going to come on the train now,” Ms. Morales said. “That’s the scary part.”
Her co-worker, Jim Lozada, 29, agreed, and said that an agitated man punched him in the ribs on the subway last year after he asked the man to stop shoving other commuters.
Ms. Morales was less keen on the idea of having her bags randomly searched by troops, calling it “kind of an invasion of privacy.” But she sounded resigned to the possibility.
“I mean if that’s what it takes, so be it,” she said.
Public officials are battling a perception that the system is dangerous, even though crime rates fell in the subway last year. The number of major crimes in the transit system then jumped in January before declining again in February.
In making her announcement on Wednesday, Ms. Hochul framed the law enforcement surge as something that would help commuters and visitors feel safer. Under her plan, 750 members of the New York National Guard and an additional 250 personnel from the State Police and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will be scattered across the transit system.
They will join what is already a large force of officers from the New York Police Department stationed in the subways, where Mayor Eric Adams ordered an additional 1,000 officers last month.
Ms. Hochul said Wednesday that the National Guard would be focused in part on keeping weapons out of the subway system.
But the system is vast, with 472 stations and thousands of train cars in service at every hour of the day. The guardsmen’s presence was not immediately visible on Thursday: State officials said that they would be deployed throughout the system over the course of about a week.
As he waited for a train at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station in Brooklyn, Jeremy Sorese, a 35-year-old painter, described the plan as “a waste of resources.”
“It feels very fearmongering without actually telling us why it’s happening, this sort of specter of danger,” Mr. Sorese said.
Mr. Sorese acknowledged that dangerous incidents happen on the subway and said that he was pushed onto the tracks in 2019. But the police were not helpful when it happened, he said — it was his fellow riders who pulled him to safety.
Nate Santos, 36, of Brooklyn, said that he would avoid the soldiers to prevent a bag check.
“It’s not that I’m hiding anything,” said Mr. Santos, who works as a brand director for a finance company. “I just don’t want people going through my stuff. So I probably would change my routes or take a different means of transportation.”
Camille Baker, Liset Cruz, Eliza Fawcett, Erin Nolan and Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.
