Chair Feliz on subway crime statistics and rider safety

Okay, moving on to subway crime.

This information is generally posted by the MTA, right?

The subway assaults and the murders every three to four months.

Well, I'm not sure about what the MTA does, but we certainly put out as part of our monthly press releases, we include transit.

Crime data on Comstat 2.0, and that includes transit crime, and that's coming out, that's available to the public at all times, and it includes, was it weekly, 28-day, and year-to-date data for transit.

And then, of course, we have the quarterly data we put on open data for the public to review.

That all should include transit crime data.

Yeah, I think.

It's not as specific in terms of murders in our subways versus outside of our subways, but we could chat about that offline.

Talk to us about subway crime, the numbers related to subway crime, murders, assaults this year versus last year.

What have been some of our safest years on that issue, and how does this year compare to those years?

So transit, the transit system, I'm just going to start with the transit system.

It's very vast.

There's many stations.

It's linear.

So just to put it in perspective, there's 472 stations, there's 36 lines, and there's about 250 miles of actual track.

That's just how vast and complex the system is.

And like I said, it's linear.

So transit crime is down for the year.

And the NYPD delivered low violent crime in subway systems, zero shootings, zero shooting victims, zero murders, and zero rapes for the entire month of August.

You know, this is due to our strategy of placing cops on the platforms and on the trains where they need to be, because that's where about 75% of our crime is occurring.

So when a person gets on a train, when they get off a train, they see a cop on the platform.

The cops are positioned strategically in the middle of the platform.

So keep in mind the MTA sites about 4 million rides per day in the subway system on a weekday.

We have about six index crimes per day.

Very, very, very small percentage.

We want to make sure that people feel safe.

Omnipresence, uniformed cops on those platforms and on those trains.

And an independent survey from the MTA.

shows that people do.

About 79% of customers feel safe on the last trip, about 76% feel safe in the station during the last trip, and about 71% feel safe in the system entirely.

Transit has a lot of different types of crimes, and you asked about murders, and murders are slightly up, five versus three.

Five too many, but five versus three.

Felony assaults are up about 27% and robberies are up about 18%.

Shootings, four versus two.

Four too many, but four versus two.

That is all year to date, right?

That's all year to date, yes.

So if you look at transit the last few years, it's been steady, steady transit crime.

Looking at transit, a lot of our crime is nonviolent in nature.

It's grand larcenies, and these grand larcenies come in many different ways.

So I'm going to break down the grand larcenies just in layman's terms.

So there's grand larcenies that are people sleeping on the train.

They're resting on the way home from work, and as they're sleeping, someone takes their property.

There's a teenager on their phone like most of them are.

They're studying, they're looking at something on their phone, they're texting their parents, and someone snatches their phone.

That's a real victim.

And someone's phone being taken from them, especially a teenager or an elderly person, you know, that can disrupt their whole life.

There's also, you know, pickpockets and people dipping into bags.

Sometimes they're victimizing elderly people or someone who's unaware of a crime even happening.

They're working in deception.

So a lot of challenges.

in transit crime and you know we are working at it and men and women of the transit bureau are doing a fantastic job