Safer that it seems?
Adams vows to remove subway’s ‘perception of fear’
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Mayor Eric Adams vowed
on Jan. 16 that the
city’s subways remain
safe even after a man shoved a
woman in front of a Q train at
Times Square the day before.
Adams said that his plan to
make police offi cers an “omnipresence”
in the transit system
was working, but that more
resources were needed to deploy
enough mental health
support workers.
“This is a horrifi c incident.
We lost a New Yorker, but we
don’t see how many lives we
save because of a proper plan
like that and we’re going to
continue to expand on it and
evolve it,” Adams told reporters
after an unrelated press
conference in Brooklyn on
Jan. 16.
The mayor noted that crime
in the subways only makes
up 1.7% of the city’s overall
fi gures, citing a fi gure NYPD
Transit Bureau Chief Kathleen
O’Reilly told MTA offi cials at
a board meeting last month.
“Think about that for a moment,”
Adams said. “We have
a safe subway system. Transit
police offi cers, they have done
their job.”
The mayor stressed the need
for more homeless and mental
health social workers to get
to the scene faster — something
LOCAL NEWS
Simon Martial, 61, was charged with second degree murder.
Governor Kathy Hochul
promised to send funding toward
starting later this year.
“When we see a person
on the subway station, right
now, it could take anywhere
from two hours to get that
local community based organization
to come down
and remove them off,” he
said. “We don’t want that, we
want a faster turnaround and
PHOTO BY DEAN MOSES
that caused a better deployment
of personnel and had a
great conversation with the
governor about that.”
Homeless man Simon
Martial, 61, turned himself
in for allegedly pushing the
woman onto the tracks on
the afternoon of Jan. 15, and
police have charged him with
second-degree murder.
The victim, 40-year-old
Michelle Go, was Asian, fueling
fears that the her deadly
attack was part of a surge in
anti-Asian hate crimes in the
subway system.
“What we must do is remove
the perception of
fear. Cases like this aggravate
the perception of fear,”
Adams said.
Hizzoner echoed Metropolitan
Transportation Authority
offi cials who have repeatedly
called for more police to make
straphangers feel comfortable
and lure back more commuters
to the transit system to
help the agency recover from
the pandemic ridership slump.
“Perception is reality to a lot
of people and if people don’t
feel safe, they’re not going to
go into the system,” said Lisa
Daglian, executive director of
the MTA’s in-house rider advocacy
council, the Permanent
Citizens Advisory Committee.
Recent police statistics
show there were 166 transit
crimes over the last 28-
day period, up from 101
the same time last year, or a
64.4% increase.
Longer-term trends, however,
show that crime in the subway
system has been decreasing
over the past years and
decades, with a rate of 4.73
major felonies per day from
January through November of
2021, the lowest of that time
period since 1997, according
to a report the Transit Bureau
provided to MTA board members
in December.
Composting options for Lower Manhattan
DOWNTOWN ALLIANCE
As this summer’s IPCC reports
and our super-warm December
weather reminded us — climate
change is real, and it’s here. And while
coordinated global government action
is crucial to mitigating rising sea levels
and temperatures, individual action
matters, too.
Recycling, transitioning to solar power,
and taking public transit or carpooling
are all ways to cut down on your
own carbon footprint. Another great
way to help the planet? Composting.
To help Downtown New Yorkers up
their compost game, the Downtown
Alliance has teamed up with the NYC
Department of Sanitation, environmental
technology company emz and
Brookfi eld Properties to launch a new
public composting pilot program that’ll
make depositing your food scraps
accessible and easy.
There are 10 compost bins located
south of Chambers Street — meaning
that 90% of the neighborhood can fi nd
a bin within a fi ve-minute walk. The
bins are accessible through the mobile
app eGate Digi, which allows users to
unlock specifi c receptacles through a
Bluetooth connection. You can access
these bins 24-hours a day, seven days
a week.
So if you’ve got food scraps or a dying
houseplant that you just can’t revive
no matter how many humidifi ers you’ve
set up in your apartment — you just
take it on a little stroll with you to one
of the bins, use your phone to unlock it
and deposit your waste. Later, DSNY
will pick it up and bring it to local and
regional composting facilities, where
it’ll either be composted and brought
back to use in NYC parks and gardens,
or made into renewable energy through
anaerobic digestion.
It’s an exciting new program and we
hope you’ll help make it a success, one
that inspires other neighborhoods, cities
and municipalities to their composting
game, too. The planet needs a little
boost. Let’s show our home we’re here
for it.
PROVIDED
A composting bin.
6 January 20, 2022 Schneps Media