Mayor Adams is running for re-election this year, but a spate of violent subway crimes is tarnishing his former-cop, tough-on-crime image. His challengers on both sides of the aisle are pouncing. Does the mayor or any of these candidates have an effective plan or the political will to clean up the subways and reduce crime?

Mr. Adams’ strategy is to tout the numbers — a 5.4 percent decline in subway crime last year, he said Monday at a press conference, flanked by his new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. “The average New Yorker would believe that they’re living in a city that is out of control. That is not the reality,” Mr. Adams said. “Perception always overrides reality.”

Mr. Adams may not want to run on that campaign slogan, but he’s right about one thing: New Yorkers don’t feel safe. On New Year’s Eve, a 45-year-old music industry executive narrowly escaped death after he was shoved onto the tracks in front of an oncoming 1 train at West 18th Street.

The unprovoked attack happened amid a five-day streak of slashings and stabbings in the subway. Two of these stabbings were allegedly committed by a homeless man with a history of mental illness and 87 prior arrests for crimes including attempted murder and assault.

Two weeks earlier, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala set fire to a 57-year-old homeless woman, Debrina Kawam, as she was sleeping on a train at the end of the line at Coney Island. Video taken by a straphanger shows the woman engulfed in flames and no one coming to her aid.

There were 11 subway murders in the city in 2024, a more than 300 percent increase from 2019. Add to this the everyday subway disorder: homeless sleeping on platforms and trains; open drug use; public urination; passengers in states of obvious mental distress. The Daniel Penny case put a spotlight on these problems.

“Crime is down? Nobody believes that,” Guardian Angels founder and Republican candidate for mayor, Curtis Sliwa, tells The New York Sun. “All you have to do is talk to the police. They are discouraged from making arrests.”

“We’ve had a Mayor who has led with rhetoric rather than results,” a New York State Senator and Democratic candidate for mayor, Zellnor Myrie, said in a statement. “I ride the subway every day, and there’s no question our subways and our streets feel less safe than they did a decade ago.”

Unlike other American cities, New York is not made for cars. Except for the wealthy, everyone rides public transit and it’s nearly impossible to insulate oneself from random acts of violence. That’s what’s causing so much fear.

“There are so many things that are not enforced. It’s not the cops. It’s the laws. It’s the regulations that have been watered down or certainly not processed by district attorneys that have impacted the whole experience on the subway system,” a former NYPD commissioner, Raymond Kelly, tells the Sun. “The MTA and the City Council are both responsible for doing that, from backing off from quality-of-life concerns.”

The Blame Game

Mr. Adams and Ms. Tisch both conceded Monday that legislative changes making certain nonviolent crimes misdemeanors and the bail reform law that went into effect in 2020 have made recidivism the driving force behind a surge in numbers. Compared to 2018, the number of individuals arrested three times or more in 2024 for the same crime increased 61 percent for burglary, 64 percent for shoplifting, and 146 percent for felony assault.

“The key driving factor is the revolving door of our criminal justice system, created in large part by legislative changes that took effect in 2020,” Ms. Tisch said. “The decline to prosecute is a real issue for us, particularly as it relates to misdemeanors.”

Ms. Tisch announced that more than 200 police officers will be deployed to the subways to walk the cars and platforms. Mr. Adams says he is negotiating with Albany for changes to the bail law, though he wouldn’t provide specifics. “The other aspects of the criminal justice system must do their job,” he said. On quality-of-life concerns, Mr. Adams added, “We didn’t pass the law-making public urination illegal.”

Governor Cuomo, who is mulling a comeback campaign for mayor, signed the bail reform bill into law in 2019 that made release the default over detention and eliminated cash bail. His spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, tells the Sun “speculation about a return to public service remains premature,” but he pointed to Mr. Cuomo’s hiring of 500 additional police officers to patrol the subways in 2019 — and the governor’s feud with progressives in his party over it.  

Mr. Cuomo is branding himself a moderate centrist, and polling shows him beating Mr. Adams, who is facing federal bribery charges, a corruption scandal, and an approval rating of only 26 percent. Mr. Cuomo may now say that “defund the police are the three dumbest words ever uttered in politics,” but Mr. Adams is working to tie him to progressive criminal justice reform.

Leftwing Challenge

There are several candidates running for mayor to Mr. Adams’s left. Of this group, City Comptroller Brad Lander has raised the most money and is consolidating support in the progressive wing, including from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.

Mr. Lander tells the Sun he supports police patrolling trains and thinks fare gates and platform barriers should be installed to prevent turnstile jumping and passengers from being pushed on the tracks. On crime and homelessness, he offers boilerplate Park Slope progressive solutions. He supports “housing first” initiatives to deal with homelessness and criticizes the Adams administration’s “failed approaches,” including “ineffective homeless sweeps.”

“We can be serious about safety without returning to the days of discriminatory stop-and-frisk,” Mr. Lander tells the Sun in a statement. “But no amount of policing will effectively connect homeless people to housing, address mental health or drug addiction, keep kids from skipping school, or help people get good jobs.”

Endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is running even farther to the left. He is proposing a rent freeze on all stabilized apartments, city-owned grocery stores, free childcare, and free buses citywide — a surefire way to eliminate fare evasion.

“In the coming weeks, I will be announcing a policy platform to prevent crime before it happens through a comprehensive public health approach,” Mr. Mamdani tells the Sun. “This will include initiatives that directly address mental health crises and violence in the subway.”

A John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor, Peter Moskos, a self-described lefty, tells the Sun that these holistic, fix-the-root-cause-first approaches are misguided. “Anytime people try to talk about subways, we get a lot of people that say, ‘Well, we have to fix society, this is about housing.’ And no, it’s not. It’s about the subway,” he says. “We really did have a recipe for success, and then we threw it out in the name of equity and social justice and racial disparities.”

‘Broken Windows’

The successful recipe for crime reduction, Mr. Moskos says, was introduced to the New York Police Department by its former commissioner, William Bratton, in the 1990s. It’s called “broken windows” policing, though Mr. Moskos says it will likely need a rebrand for its association with the more aggressive and less discriminatory stop-and-frisk policies of the Bloomberg years.

The “broken windows” criminological theory is that if police focus on maintaining public order and policing quality-of-life crimes like public urination, open drug use, and turnstile jumping, this will prevent more serious crimes from occurring. If a building has a broken window that’s not repaired, the theory goes, then other windows there are more likely to get smashed.

Mr. Bratton first applied “broken windows” theory to the subways as head of the Transit Police, and then newly elected mayor, Rudy Giuliani, hired him as police commissioner in 1994. There were nearly 2,000 murders at New York City in 1993. Over the next seven years, Mr. Bratton oversaw a 65 percent reduction in both homicides and robberies. The subways got cleaner. The harassing squeegee men disappeared from the entrances to the tunnels and FDR Drive. It worked.

“One of the reasons why New York and other cities like San Francisco and Chicago are such a mess is because of the failure to basically deal with the quality-of-life crime, the stuff people see every day. And it’s often described as victimless crime — prostitution, drinking in public — but it’s not victimless. The victim is the neighborhood,” Mr. Bratton previously told The New York Sun.

“Broken windows” is not stop-in-frisk, Mr. Bratton says. A “broken windows” stop is predicated on probable cause, where a police officer sees an illegal behavior occurring and then uses his discretion about whether to stop the person. He says policing turnstile jumping in the subways helped curb crime by arresting those with weapons or warrants. A person with neither would get a ticket and go on his way.

“It’s not zero tolerance,” Mr. Moskos says, and he warns that the practice requires restraint, police discretion, and good leadership to work without becoming excessive. He says incarceration rates went down in the 1990s, Giuliani cut social spending programs, and still crime declined.

“There’s no alternative to actual law enforcement. It’s just a question of severity and making sure it’s legal and constitutional,” Mr. Moskos says. “But there will always be issues of racial disparity because America has issues with racial disparity and broken windows runs into problems at that level too.”

“If you look at 311 calls, which are usually quality-of-life, broken windows type calls, where are the bulk of those calls coming from? Minority neighborhoods,” Mr. Bratton says, addressing his criminal justice reform detractors. “So in effectively trying to correct the terrible injustices of the past, we’re creating a whole new series of injustices to the people living in the present.”

Looking Forward

Mr. Adams is facing a criminal trial in April, and federal prosecutors announced Tuesday that they have uncovered “additional criminal conduct.” Mr. Sliwa calls Mr. Adams the “swagger man with no plan,” says Ms. Tisch has “drunk the Adams’ Kool-Aid,” and predicts that this tough talk will go nowhere. Mr. Sliwa may be enjoying more favorable coverage since he revived Guardian Angels patrols of the subway, but his campaign for mayor is a longshot.

“Just put your foot down and say to the Assembly and say to the City Council and say to the State Senate, I’m going to enforce the laws the way they should be enforced — and if you don’t like it, sue me,” a former Republican candidate for mayor, Jon Catsimatidis, who says he hasn’t ruled out another run, tells the New York Sun.

“I think it would have to get much worse to elect a Giuliani,” Mr. Moskos says.