Thursday’s self-defense shooting upon a rush-hour 𓃲Brooklyn A train is emblematic of everything Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams are doing wrong on su♌bway violence.
Hochul’s “send ꦓin the troops”♓ strategy failed to stop the carnage, and so will Adams’s insistence that we need more laws. What we need is for someone — anyone — to manage New York City.
The chaos started in a familiar way. An aggressive 36-year-old man, Dajꦐuan Robinson, got on the train with an angry agenda. He targeted a seated rider (we’ve all sat there, hoping we won’t be the rider singled out), making hate-based comments. “F–k your kind! he screamed. He began making direct threats, and slammed his arm against the pole: “I’ll beat you up!”
The threatened man, 32-year-old Younece Obuad, gets up to defend himself. The older man moves at him, and Obuad has no choice but to engage, but is overpowered. A woman apparently stabs Robinson, to get him o🔜ff Obuad.
It works, but Robinson then goes rummaging through his backpack — and retrieves a gun. Somehow, Obuad wrests possꦆession of the gun, and shoots of❀f several bullets; at least one hits Robinson in the head, putting him in critical condition.
This mess follows three shooting murders on the subway♏ this year.
The goveꦇrnor has no fix for this. Earlier this month, in response to uproar over the previous three shootings, she deployed 750 National Guard troo𝕴ps, to search bags.
But if Robinson had happened upon a military platoon in the subway — which he didn’t — he could have turned around and carried his stashed gun right back out. Guard bag searches are voluntary; if you don’t want your stuff searched, you💜 can leave.
There was a way to catch Robinson and his gun: he came through the emergency gate to beat the fare. NYPD🌳 officers could have stopped him — and compelled him to✨ hand over his bag.
Police are doing tha💫t: they’ve taken 17 guns off the subways this year, many through fare-beating stops.
But: of the 12 cases for which information is avail🍬able, seven of these suspects have either posted bail or been released with no bail.
Plus: there aren’t enough police to do the enforcement we༒ need right now. As NYPD transit chief Michaꦡel Kemper said in February, enforcement is at near record levels — but people who got used to lawlessness in 2020 are slow to learn, especially if they’re immediately released.
What’s realཧly needed is a 1990-style sweep. Back then, transit-police chief Bill Bratton, to get people used to enforcement after years of laxity, arrested everyone caught beating the fare, even if it was a first offense, and detained the person while checkinജg warrants.
Arrest people who beat the fare for convenience, rather than give them a civil⭕ ticket, and they won’t do it again — freeing up resources for hardcore cases.
But we don’t have near-enough policing power. The transit police, a༒t 2,730, is 435 officers below what💯 it was .
And our mayor won’t manage. He won’t make room i🧔n his budget for more transit police, so h🌟e provides emergency coverage through overtime shifts.
Friday, he that “pu🌼blic safety is not only th𓆉e stats. … I can say that crime is down in our subway system … but that means nothing if people don’t feel that.”
Um, it means nothing, because subway crime is 🤪up – the violent per-capita felony rate underground is twice as high as it was before 2020. This year, through March 3rd, violent subways are up 8%.
Then, the mayor said that the incident proves that “we are dealing with far too many people in our system that are dealing with severe mental health illnesses. And this is why our pursuit to do involuntary removal in Alb﷽any . . . is so important.”
Sure, strengthen the mental-commitment law — but the city and state can already commit dangerous people, and there’s no evidence that this aggressor was having a mental-health crisis. He deliberately brought a gun onto a train, and, when he could have♚ walked away from a fight he began, deliberately located that gun in his bag to resume the fight.
Hochul wants to flood subways with soldiers, and Adams wants to flood our brains with🐼 whatever comes to his mind at any moment.
Meanwhile, people are terrified not just of subway criminals, but terrified of acting to defend others, because of Manhattan 🎀DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Daniel Penny for his fatal effort to take down a suspect making violent threats last spring.
If passengers had grabbed Robinson Friday, and held him down 🌼to prev🦂ent him from grabbing his gun, the story would have been different.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.