The scale of the New York City subway system is vast.
Some 472 subway stations, depending how they’re counted. Nearly 6,500 train cars. Roughly three million people crisscrossing through, 24 hours every day.
The effort to protect it has sought to be expansive, too.
Officers had already been working an extra 1,200 daily overtime shifts to patrol the system when officials roughly doubled their presence by deploying an additional 1,000 officers. Then another 1,000 National Guardsmen, State Police troopers and transit officers were added this month, and 800 more police officers this week.
But recent subway attacks have been impossible to predict. Some occurred on moving trains and others on platforms far from the center of Manhattan. Some have happened in the still of night and others during busy rush hours.
Public officials have sought to tamp fears about a string of frightening crimes in the transit network by flooding it with wave after wave of police officers, mental health workers and cameras. But after every deployment, another violent event has followed — statistically rare within the huge system, but still terrifying to individual riders.
Those episodes, the most recent on Monday, when a man was shoved off a platform into the path of a moving train by a stranger and killed, have raised questions about the effectiveness of those tactics and illustrated the impracticability of patrolling every inch of the continent’s busiest transportation network.
At least $89 million has been spent on police overtime alone during the pandemic to make New Yorkers feel safe in the subway. Another $20 million was budgeted this month for teams of mental health workers to move mentally ill homeless people out. Thousands of surveillance cameras have been installed in the past two years, adding up to a total of about 16,000.
And yet, some passengers say it’s not enough. They want more officers inside stations and train cars, as well as bigger platform barriers to block off train tracks and better surveillance at the fare gates to keep potential criminals out.
“It’s really getting dangerous,” said Neryha Guzman, 17, a high school student from the Bronx, as she waited for a train at the 191st Street Station to visit her sister in Manhattan. “What more can we do?”
Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams have made announcement after announcement about their efforts to add more officers and safety equipment. On Wednesday, Janno Lieber, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chairman and chief executive, said during a board meeting that the most recent deployment of the 800 officers, who will carry out a fare enforcement crackdown, would prevent bad actors from entering the subway, though it is unclear how often people who evade the fare commit serious crimes.
“We are not surrendering our city to anyone,” Mr. Lieber said. “Not to criminals, and not even to the people who have severe mental health issues, although we feel a ton of compassion for them.”
Law enforcement experts have said that reining in petty offenses like fare evasion minimizes disorder in the subway, and, as a result, can act as a deterrent and make riders feel less likely to be victimized.
“That kind of theory makes perfect sense in the subway because you’re in a confined area,” said Dorothy Schulz, a retired captain with the Metro-North Police Department and emeritus professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It’s easy for people to be frightened.”
Some transit advocates argue that the issue of subway safety has become politicized in a way that risks creating an outsize portrayal of violence in the system. Though some categories of crime appear to be on the rise, the chances of anyone becoming the victim of a crime are statistically remote.
There were 570 felony assaults recorded in the subway last year, which was higher than in previous years. But those occurred during the course of a billion rides. There were five homicides in the system last year, down from 10 the previous year but up from one in 2018.
Rider opinions, more than actual crime rates, have driven recent safety policies in the subway, officials have said. The cramped spaces of the subway amplify some of New York’s most intractable problems — untreated mental health issues, illegal guns, homelessness — and many riders have reported feeling unsafe.
In a survey conducted in February by the M.T.A., the state agency that operates the subway, more than 15 percent of riders said they would ride the subway more often if there were fewer people behaving erratically in the trains and stations; 10 percent said they would do so if they could see more police officers and security guards in the system.
Some riders said they wished officers would be deployed more effectively. Lou Marek, 73, who lives in California but was visiting his father at his retirement home in New York this week, said that he would like to see more officers patrolling platforms and trains instead of checking bags at the turnstiles or standing at one edge of a platform. He said that would make him feel safer than other features the M.T.A. has experimented with, like metal barriers.
“I think it’s ridiculous to have this be deterrent,” Mr. Marek said, gripping a metal barrier behind him at the 191st Street station on the No. 1 line in Manhattan, where rows of waist-high, canary-yellow screens made of perforated metal were bolted onto the platforms this year. The fences block some empty space between pillars, but leave openings in which riders could reach or be pushed onto the tracks.
At the urging of many transit advocates and riders, transit leaders have said they will put more protective platform barriers, known as platform screen doors, in a handful of stations.
Some transit and public safety advocates have urged officials to invest less on law enforcement and more on the drivers of crime, such as mental health issues and poverty.
Officials have responded by sending dozens of mental health workers to the system to help homeless people and move them from the subway, sometimes forcibly. Over the past two years, state and city officials said that workers had moved more than 1,000 homeless people out of the subways and into shelter, health care or housing.
Ms. Hochul has committed to putting more workers in the system to target some of the most severely mentally ill people in the system. In her announcement about the National Guard deployment earlier this month, she proposed sending 10 additional teams of mental health clinicians and police officers.
Transit leaders have also tried making the system feel safer and less claustrophobic by adding bright lights. The M.T.A. announced last month that it would convert all 150,000 fluorescent light fixtures in the system to LED lighting by the middle of 2026. The new fixtures will also help capture better video using the subway’s roughly 16,000 security cameras. By the end of this year, cameras will be installed inside every train car.
Still, some riders are unimpressed.
“They are not doing a good job,” said Ida Shema, 67, who was waiting for the F train at Bryant Park on Tuesday afternoon.
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
