What 'throwaway519' doesn't know, because they don't work in an NYPD precinct, is that most subway crime is not reported, and if it is reported, it is downgraded, or outright dismissed. When a crime is committed and the suspect gets a DAT, once they have completed 6 months without another offense, the crime is deleted from the reported crime numbers. How do I know this? 14 years on the job in Manhattan--and I've never seen it this bad. We get 150 complaints a day at my precinct for Subway crime. 147 crimes... What. a. joke.
We get it, all facts and figure are to be ignored. The guy on the Internet feels it in his gut (if he even lives in the area) and has some little anecdote. So just take his word it's all terrible and you should be scared of everything.
Typical response from someone who doesn't live or work in NYC. Probably lives in in MN or some other rural town. So no, I don't think you "get it."
I'm at Midtown South on 35th between 8th and 9th Aves, closer to 9th Ave. That covers the Penn Station area up to the south portion of Times Square. Compstat says we've had 15 'verified' Transit crimes YTD at my command. That's ONE of 78 precincts. But come by and see for yourself... sit in the lobby where you can see all the suspects walked in and their charges read by the patrol supervisor. Count the number of Transit suspects that come in and then compare to the BS Compstat number that says we've had 15 for the year so far.
And please, do share where you live and work.As far as how old this account is, I got it before I went to the Academy and per Dept. regulations, I never post as a MOS. Someone should make you a Det. Specialist though--you are quite a 'special' keyboard warrior/investigator. Reminds me of Shane Gillis' uncle who made the grilled cheese sandwiches.
I live in the 24th precinct and I'm sitting in my office right now a couple blocks away from you, in the midtown south precinct.
So I'm genuinely curious: if there's a constant parade of suspects coming into your building, but compstat doesn't reflect it, why the discrepancy? Are the police simply not recording these crimes?
Downgrades and straight dismissals.
If there is no weapon and you do not have ID on you, you walk.
Used to be, no ID, you went down to Central Booking, where you would be ID'd and be very unhappy with the conditions. That ended with COVID.
Patrol sup decides charges, Not AO.
Insp. gets dinged at Compstat if numbers go up, so, numbers are 'managed' -- at every command.
DAT's disappear in 6 months.
Most get a DAT.
Why do you think everyone who could leave this job, did?
> I will tell you a KPI driven org is gaslighting me
That's still just the same old issue aggregate statistics vs. a data point. They tell you something, on average, is this way, but you experienced it in another way, so you say "the statistics must be wrong".
> you know about reality
So the issue is: is your model of "reality" the correct one?
The discussion thus far has been about the incentivized manipulation of the data points as they come in. Aggerating those into statistics will produce misleading and incorrect results. Its not that an an individual data point can be different than the average, its that the flow of individual data points into the average is being 'managed' as people try to 'improve' these KPIs.
Sure, but is the data collection truly incorrect? He argues that it is because "his experience" doesn't match the data. So in the end it is about data points being different than average.
I can't say for sure one way or the other. But my experience has been that people that have KPI metrics to meet will do a lot of things to game those data points to their favor.
I don't live in NYC so I can't comment on what happens in NYC but when people point at data and blame social media for altering perceptions I find it disingenuous for my lived experiences in London.
You only truly realise how unsafe London is after you leave and live somewhere that is safe.
Crime reports are manipulated. A friend got hit in the head and NYPD refused to register it. Despite that, NYC is very safe compared to most of the US, and articles that say otherwise are just trying to manipulate you.
> A friend got hit in the head and NYPD refused to register it.
I think that's awful and hope your friend didn't get hurt too bad. I think anytime a victim (or a family member filing on behalf of a victim) makes a police report, it should be mandatory that they're provided a way to confirm the data and facts associated with it.
Also mandatory information on how to report a mistake or correction or complaint, and that process should be quick and painless, not something that takes any time at all. Because who is going to take hours out of their day to report a mistake if it already felt like a waste of time so far?
Some of the above may already exist, but without all of those components working well, it becomes dysfunctional.
I don't think the police are likely to implement something like the above in a way that works, and legislation mandating it will lack the flexibility, and only the bare minimum required will be done, if that.
To fix something dysfunctional often takes strong leadership that few have. Combine that with the negative incentives for running for public office when conditions are "just reasonably ok". Unless the conditions reach existential threat levels, we just end up with the usual career politicians willing and able to survive the inevitable scrutiny (and slander) regarding their personal lives. Some of that scrutiny is justified and necessary, much of it is not.
I did, still have property there in fact, and hope to return someday, but no time soon. What you are saying is absolutely correct. Crime is rampant and goes completely unreported, due to some mix of people being desensitized and the feeling of futility it has. Every time you go out you’re quite likely to have or at least witness some kind “incident”. Maybe a guy lunging at an elderly Asian woman, perhaps a man riding around in circles in the middle of Houston in a stolen Citibike wielding a wooden club at people passing by, or quite possibly someone walking by drops their shoulder and tries to shove you for absolutely no reason. That’s the baseline, constant menacing, aggression of drug addled lowlifes with everyone just pretending nothing is happening. If this boils over into some kind of more significant incident maybe people will pull out their phones and record it for social media, but nobody is filing a police report.
I travel quite a lot, visiting around 20 countries a year, often staying for weeks or even months in different cities around the world. I haven’t seen this kind of behavior anywhere else outside the US or Canada. Not even in quite “dangerous” cities in Latin America (I did see one guy try to rob someone on a bus, the other passengers beat him, stripped him naked, and the driver slowed down and opened the door while they threw him out onto the street), nothing like this in Asia, and definitely not anywhere in Europe.
Something is seriously wrong in US culture. Personally I think it’s the amount of drugs Americans consume.
I was with you until you said this doesn’t happen in other countries. There are some countries (e.g. Japan, Singapore) where it doesn’t happen, but it certainly does in major European cities. There’s you way you can say London, for example, is that different from New York.
London in particular is a great example because the two cities are similar in many ways. London for sure has its share of junkies and hooligans, and I even hear people complaining about it using almost word for word identical language, but the magnitude and pervasiveness is completely different. Especially riding the tube vs the NYC subway is a completely different experience most of the time and I don’t get the feeling in London that the inmates are running the asylum that NYC has gotten over the past few years. Same story walking the streets in the west end vs lower Manhattan, sure you’ve got the phone snatchers on e-bikes now that constantly make the news and there’s random deranged people, but it’s less common for one, but more importantly it hasn’t crossed the threshold where it’s been normalized and people are desensitized, so even in these cases people are less brazen, less aggressive. London today feels more like NYC did in 2019, before it passed the tipping point. Even there I think its a lot more tranquil than NYC was back then, but at least the city hadn’t been surrendered as it is now.
I wish we could be more specific about these labels.
Whats a “complaint”?
Is that a disagreement over an empty seat or a woman getting burned to death. Are those in the same bucket?
Yes, “mentally ill man made me feel uncomfortable” is definitely underreported, but it’s hard to believe murders and assaults are underreported. And if those are down, this is a huge win.
Being "uncomfortable" does not convey a crime.
Misdemeanors or felonies only.
Jumping turnstiles and fare evasion were always a collar.
Now it's just a ticket (violation).
The technicalities of what does or doesn't convey a crime is wholly irrelevant to the voting public. Voting being both at the ballot box, and w/ their dollars towards the MTA.
It's a signal we aren't measuring and it's massively affecting rider behavior.
This may be a naive take, and I haven't been to NYC in a decade, but I think that number should ideally stay close to zero. There's a concentrated amount of surveillance, a gated entry, and limited escape options. Combine that with potentially stiff penalties for violent crime, that should be a potent deterrence.
We have access to crime data, but what about the data on failure rates of specific crime mitigation tools? Is there any way for the public to audit things such as the reliability of security cameras, or crimes that were solved with the help of surveillance footage, good samaritans, etc? If not, when was the last time someone tried to get that implemented? It probably wouldn't do much in the short term, but over time could drive optimizations.
I think it is an accumulation of small failures over time that don't seem worth mentioning individually, but in aggregate can have the most impact on the crime rate.
Take my ideas with a grain of salt though, I'm only a layman on the subject.
what do you mean "gated entry" and "limited escape options"? Like that if a crime happens, police should be able to stop the perpetrator immediately as they come out of any subway station? Sounds pretty optimistic to me.
I used the word “deterrence” though to close the thought :) people looking to do crime should find an easier place. But maybe it’s harder to get away with it on the streets of manhattan than on the subway, I’d have to ask a cop or a criminal to really know I suppose… I also heard sentences have been light in NYC, so maybe repeat offenders are everywhere and expect to eventually get caught anyway.
There’s no absolute need to guarantee or even catch the majority of them for a deterrence to be effective. But if it’s not effective (cameras broken, etc) then word will get around fast. That is the idea anyway.
But yeah I don’t have much confidence in government to do a great job there, unless the victim is a Fortune 500 CEO.
Should I expect better from commenters on this site than professional "influence campaigns"? Yes. I use a spam filter on my email too, is that holding people emailing me to too high a standard?
I think the sarcasm flew over your head. He is calling out the OP as a liar. Obviously a liar being paid to lie can use the reply button, but you can't game the up votes as easily when you are a reply.
Edit: The account is old but every single post going back over a year is political. Someone else can look into how far back the account was bought if it was ever real. I only went back two pages but nothing in their post history shows any evidence of having any knowledge of the MTA or even being near NYC. People in NYC love talking about NYC
Obviously there's some sampling bias in your response.
That aside, we can assume that the ratio of crimes to reports remained constant - because there's no reason to think otherwise. So if the ratio of reports to daily riders is now lower, even if there are billions of un-reported crimes as long as the ratio improved it did become safer on a per-ride basis.
Note that also you have a roughly 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident in the United States and your risk of dying on a train rounds to zero. So on balance, I strongly suspect you're safer even if there's a lot of unreported petty crime.
My understanding is that per person-hour, the subway doesn't get much more crime than any other outdoor public space.
I think this happens in London too. Crime is so normalised that both the residents and police see a creep in their threshold for what is a "serious" crime.
My apartment block sees package theft almost daily and there was a parking spot that was getting hit by smash and grabs almost daily at one point. We have up reporting them because the police were pretty nonchalant about doing anything about it. The only reason I think most crime at this level ever gets filed is for insurance claims. But if people are so squeezed they don't have insurance they wouldn't report them
So is this a new approach for 2025? Since they're just comparing it to last year's data, to invalidate the thesis that crime is down there'd need to be some significant change. If you could link to any actual source rather than just anecdotes that would be helpful.
As a fellow Manhattan resident, personally the subway (as well as the city in general) feel quite safe to me. I have experienced more issues with crime in SF and Seattle than here.
What you say doesn't in and of itself, have any effect on this. If what you say is true then it's always the case that crime is underreported, always the case that crime is deleted from reported crime numbers, always the case that crimes get downgraded...
So given that this is a consistent property of reported crime, you still need to explain why the number of reported crimes is lower now than before.
The subway has millions of riders in a day. One hundred and fifty complaints per precinct (which is a generous estimation) is nothing, and the NYPD is a failure of an organization that pays over half a hundred million dollars a year on misconduct lawsuits. NYPD officers have a higher crime rate than the people of New York.
I would assume its not the "real" number as you pointed out. But as a proxy it still has value and still speaks to the safety of the NYC subway system.
The trend is what is important. Crime is dropping - and it was already fairly safe before and is only improving.
Crime is not dropping.
Follow Sam Antar on X.
He's a forensic accountant and (proud) former felon.
He unpacks all the crime numbers and all the fu*kery from the city and dept.
What 'throwaway519' doesn't know, because they don't work in an NYPD precinct, is that most subway crime is not reported, and if it is reported, it is downgraded, or outright dismissed. When a crime is committed and the suspect gets a DAT, once they have completed 6 months without another offense, the crime is deleted from the reported crime numbers. How do I know this? 14 years on the job in Manhattan--and I've never seen it this bad. We get 150 complaints a day at my precinct for Subway crime. 147 crimes... What. a. joke.