New York’s subway system, long the lifeblood of the city, has been grappling with a jump in crime and disorder that has deterred riders and to some extent defied official attempts to fix it amid the pandemic-fueled drop in ridership.
In 2021, rates of violent crime in the subway per million weekday passengers spiked almost across the board compared with 2019, before the pandemic. Felony assaults in the system rose nearly 25 percent.
The crime spike has continued even after to send hundreds of street-level patrol officers to regularly inspect subway stations and redeploy officers from desk jobs onto the trains. For January and February, felony assaults were up 10 percent over the same period last year.
A few weeks after a woman was in mid-January and a homeless man was charged with her murder, Mr. Adams announced plans to stop homeless people from sheltering on trains and platforms and to have the police evict people who are not using the trains for transportation.
Subway ridership has also been hobbled by the shift to remote work — a sea change that is looking permanent and that threatens the fiscal health of the subway system much as it does the aboveground economy of Manhattan’s business districts.
But safety remains a paramount concern for those who have yet to return to the trains. In a recent survey by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway, fear of crime and harassment was the top factor cited by former riders who have left the subways; 90 percent of them said it was an important factor in their decision whether to return.
For the third week of March — the most recent for which statistics are available — the subway averaged about 3.2 million riders per weekday, about 58 percent of the prepandemic average. That is a significant increase from the 1.8 million riders per weekday in the same week of 2021, but still a far cry from the prepandemic average of more than 5 million riders per weekday
Both YMCA’s in Park Slope, the neighborhood immediately north of Sunset Park, said that they will be closed until further notice.
The police said that the search for the suspect, who was seen with a gas mask and a construction vest, was ongoing. New York City’s emergency messaging service sent out a notice at 11 a.m. warning people to avoid the entire area, from 20th to 40th Streets between Third and Fifth Avenues, normally a bustling residential zo
The attack at a subway station in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn snarled subway lines all over the city, the authorities said, though many had picked up again by Tuesday afternoon.
The W and B subway lines were still suspended entirely, with some additional delays on the Q and the 6 lines, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Portions of the D, N and R lines were also halted, but shuttle buses were available.
Earlier reports of trains having stalled in tunnels were not accurate, the New York Police Department said in a tweet, noting that all trains had been moved into stations.
The tweet said that officers were inspecting all stations and trains as the attack at the 36th street station continued to be investigated. A spokesman for the police department said he had no additional knowledge about the investigation.
In a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Janno Lieber, chief executive officer of the M.T.A., thanked the M.T.A. workers who had whisked trains out of the station as soon as the shooting began.
“Obviously it’s a disrupted day, but a lot of the system is in fact running,” Mr. Lieber said.
Street traffic in the area near the shooting was bumper-to-bumper, residents and authorities said.
Tiffany Shiew was taking the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn on Tuesday morning. The first she heard of the news was the announcements at the subway, she said. Figuring out how to get to Brooklyn has been challenging. “I’m frustrated with the train because there is lack of communications on where people can go,” Ms. Shiew, 24, said while standing at Broadway-Lafayette station.
Brian Astacio was on his way to work from Manhattan to John F. Kennedy airport on Tuesday morning. He first heard of the attack from his employer, he said, then from a group chat from friends. He had to stop watching the videos because the images were too graphic. He was also concerned about the effect on his commute. “I was worried about that too,” Mr. Astacio said. “The trains get messed up.”
Ashley Wong contributed reporting
President Biden and Attorney General Merrick B. Garland are being regularly briefed on the investigation into the Tuesday morning shooting in Brooklyn that left numerous people injured and disrupted subway service on the country’s busiest transit system, officials said.
“President Biden has been briefed on the latest developments regarding the New York City subway shooting,” Jen Psaki, Mr. Biden’s press secretary said in a statement. “White House senior staff are in touch with Mayor Adams and Police Commissioner Sewell to offer any assistance as needed.”
Mr. Garland“has received a preliminary briefing and is monitoring the situation in Brooklyn,” his spokeswoman said in an email.
The F.B.I. and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who have expertise in tracing firearms and identifying possible explosive devices, were on the scene supporting local law enforcement, an agency spokesman said.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Twitter that he was “closely monitoring” the situation and ready to offer the city any help they needed.
While there were no early indications the shooting was connected to a wider plot, transit systems and local police departments have heightened their vigilance.
“We’re horrified by this morning’s event & continue to monitor security of our system w/heightened awareness,” officials with Washington’s transit police wrote on their official Twitter account, adding “there are currently no known credible threats” to the capital’s transit sys
Shootings in New York City rose during 2022’s first quarter compared with the same period last year, even as homicides declined, police officials said last week — the continuation of a drumbeat of violence that emerged early in the pandemic, and has not ebbed with the virus.
Shooting incidents increased from 260 to 296 in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the latest Police Department statistics, which include the first three days of April.
The trend reflects “continuing and completely unacceptable violence in our streets,” Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell said on April 6.
In the two years since the Police Department’s last full briefing on crime statistics, pockets of New York have seen upticks in shootings and murders, underscoring concern that America’s most populous city could be headed backward.
Mayor Eric Adams has made reversing that trend the central goal of his administration.
“The N.Y.P.D. will use every resource and opportunity to secure this city,” Commissioner Sewell said, but “reversing years will not take weeks.”
She credited the decrease in the homicide rates to a surge of arrests. In March alone, she said, officers made more than 4,000 felony arrests, more than double the number of those made at the same time last year.
But her remarks came as the city confronts a string of shootings that caught bystanders in crossfire. Last week, a 12-year-old was killed in Brooklyn when a barrage of bullets hit a parked car in which he was eating a meal with relatives. Days later, a 61-year-old woman was killed after she was struck by a stray bullet in the Bronx. And, last month, a 3-year-old toddler was shot in the shoulder outside a Brooklyn daycare.
Then on Tuesday, multiple people were shot on the platform of a Brooklyn subway station during the Tuesday morning rush.
As weary New Yorkers start to emerge from more than two years of pandemic limbo, a gap has opened between perceptions of crime and the realities of the city. This New York is more dangerous by some measures than the one many residents lived in at the start of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020. Yet it remains far safer than in previous years, and crime is lower than in many of the nation’s largest cities.
Gun violence hit historic lows in 2018 and 2019. Even with recent increases, rates of shootings, felony assaults and overall major crimes are similar to or below the levels of the late 2000s and early 2010s. There have been nine fewer murders this year compared with the same period last year.
This year’s first three months have also seen rises in crimes like burglaries, robberies and grand larcenies compared to the same periods in 2020 and 2021, though experts warn against short-term comparisons, particularly during the statistic-skewing pandemic.
Mass shootings in New York — attacks in which multiple people are shot — occur with some regularity. Just last week, outside a Bronx high school; one, a 16-year-old girl, died.
But an event such as Tuesday’s — a seemingly random attack targeted at passers-by, involving indiscriminate gunfire — is less common. Transit and commuter points have long been considered high-value targets for such attacks and to deter such events, especially in the busy corridors of Lower Manhattan.
Tuesday morning’s chaos was reminiscent of a string of other episodes that have struck fear into the city in recent years. In December 2017 in the Port Authority transit hub during rush hour. The attack ground the city to a halt and injured four, but killed no one. The man, inspired by the Islamic State, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison last year.
Months before that, in October 2017, on the city’s West Side Highway, killing eight and injuring 11. He is awaiting trial and has been charged with terror.