Crime and violence in New York City’s subway system have spiraled out of control and are “significantly higher” than the agency’s official numbers have publicly indicated.
The official number of arrests made in the city’s subway system rose by 45 percent this year, with more than 3,000 arrests made underground in the first two months of the year, many of them of repeat offenders. However, the publicly released data only scratch the surface of the amount of crime in the nation’s largest transit system, a law enforcement.
“The numbers they are putting out are a complete joke and everyone knows it,” the source, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said. “The sense of lawlessness (on the subway) is so bad that unless you have personal experience in the system, especially at night, it is impossible to understand.
“It’s like the Wild West.”
NYPD officers have also been incentivized to not report minor offenses in an effort to keep the numbers as low as possible, according to the source, who said pressure has come from higher-ups to maintain the narrative that crime has plateaued or is going down.
However, not even the city’s own agencies can agree on how much crime is occurring in the subway system. After Transit released figures showing that violent subway crimes went up by 13 percent this year, the mayor’s office quickly pushed back, disputing the numbers released by the agency and claiming that crime actually dropped last month.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former police chief, said that “overall crime is down.”
However, a “significant majority” of the crimes that do occur on the subway go unreported by the victims, according to the source.
“People understand that the majority of those who commit larceny or assaults are never going to be apprehended, so why go through the trouble of making a report?” the source said.