ALBANY, New York — Gov. Kathy Hochul is placing an NYPD officer on every train throughout the city’s sprawling subway system each night.
The governor, who runs the MTA, announced the plan during her State of the State address Tuesday. She used the speech to double down on voters’ concerns about crime.
“We cannot allow our subway to be a rolling homeless shelter,” she said during the address.
The move follows a string of high-profile crimes in the subway system that have terrorized New Yorkers. In the last three weeks, a woman was burned to death inside a Brooklyn subway car, a man was randomly shoved into the path of an oncoming subway car, a kitchen knife-wielding assailant stabbed two passengers and other violent incidents have placed increased pressure on Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams to act.
“This is the game plan: More police where they’re needed, safety infrastructure, and critical interventions to help the homeless and mentally ill get the help they need instead of languishing on trains and frightening commuters,” Hochul said.
“The chaos must end,” she added.
The uniformed officers will be on patrol from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. over the next six months, and the state will pay for the cost, Hochul said — though her spokespeople would not reveal the estimated cost. The initiative starts in the next few days.
Mayor Eric Adams endorsed the plan, and his police commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement two police officers will be added to every overnight train. In the last year, the Adams administration has added 1,200 cops into the city’s subway system.
“We have done the job of bringing down crime, now we have to make people feel safe,” Adams, a former transit cop and police captain, said. “Nothing does it better than the omnipresence of that blue uniform.”
New Yorkers continue to cite public safety as a top concern, and the issue has bedeviled Democrats here and nationally. Adams, who is battling federal corruption charges, plans to run on combating crime during his reelection this year.
Hochul deployed the state’s National Guard into the subway system last year, but earlier this month she said the soldiers were extremely limited in their ability to protect subway riders.
“They’re not allowed to put their hands on people,” Hochul said. “They’re not a policing agency. They’re there as a deterrent and provide assistance.”
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie indicated their support for the plan.
“The visibility of police is never a bad thing; I think it will help the message that we’re serious about wanting people to feel safe in the subways,” Heastie said.
“If people will feel safer seeing someone uniformed, I certainly would not be opposed to it,” Stewart-Cousins told reporters.
Hochul also announced the expansion of hospitals’ ability to involuntarily commit mentally ill homeless individuals who can’t care for themselves — a policy increasingly embraced by the left wing of the Democratic Party that had bashed it two years ago.
Even as concerns about subway crime remain paramount among voters, major felonies have gone down. Earlier this month, Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced major transit crimes decreased by 5.4 percent between 2023 and 2024, bringing those infractions to roughly 13 percent below pre-pandemic levels.
“I want to be very clear. The subways will always be a bellwether for the perception of public safety in New York City,” she said. “Declining crime numbers are significant, but we still must do more because people don’t feel safe in our subways.”
Homelessness advocates and some lawmakers to the left of Hochul blasted the policy.
“That sounds pretty ludicrous to me,” said Brooklyn Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, a democratic socialist. “We saw in the video of the woman set on fire that police officers were there and they didn’t help her. We know that police presence does nothing for public safety and it’s been proven time and again the more police we have the more taxpayer money we’re spending, but things aren’t getting any safer.”
The Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group, also blasted the idea.
“The Governor’s proposals are wholly insufficient to help those sleeping on the streets, in subways, and in shelters,” the coalition said in a statement. “The only solution to homelessness is housing, paired with supportive mental health services for those who need it. Flooding the subways with police and forcefully removing people – a policy driven more by lurid headlines than by any actual intent to help those in need – is ridiculous when we don’t have the mental health services to offer people when they are removed.”
Joe Anuta, Nick Reisman and Bill Mahoney contributed to this report.