Posted on 07/24/2023 8:42:25 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The subways of New York City have been in the news even more than usual over the past few years and not for the reasons the Mass Transit Authority might wish. The tunnels have become epicenters for crimes of all types, and we’re not just talking about people hopping over the turnstiles to avoid paying the fare. There have been shootings, stabbings, and people being pushed onto the tracks. Robberies are common. And if the random common criminals and gang bangers aren’t enough, there are still armies of homeless people (though somewhat fewer during the summer months when many go above ground) mixed in with drug addicts shooting up on the platforms. At the New York Post, Steve Cuozzo appears to throw his arms up in despair and declares that Gotham’s subway system is now “an insane asylum on wheels” and something must be done about it.
It’s time to drag the mentally ill off by force and move them to where they can’t harm anyone. If we don’t, the underground madhouse will soon reverse the recent increase in ridership — and kiss the city’s nascent recovery goodbye.
Oh, I forgot — laws don’t allow us to do that. Silly me!
I’ve ridden the subways for 50 years. I’ve never seen so many deranged individuals — schizophrenic, otherwise demented and/or drugged to the point of unpredictable potential violence.
As Steve points out, Mayor Eric Adams launched two ambitious plans to improve conditions in the subway last year. One would have cleared the homeless out of the tunnels, along with anyone who behaved in an “unsafe” manner. The other would have expanded the NYPD presence. So what happened to those plans?
They started moving the homeless out, but they quickly ran out of places to put them now that the shelters are all overflowing with illegal migrants. As for the police, they do what they can, but there simply wasn’t enough of a budget for the number of cops that would be required to really change things on the trains or in the tunnels. Both ideas were “quietly abandoned” without any official announcement.
The sad reality is that this situation simply may not be fixable. A variety of municipal and national movements altered the way we deal with the mentally ill. Mental hospitals are looked at with suspicion and locking people up to give them treatment without their consent is considered barbaric. Throwing people in jail for the types of “minor crimes” you primarily see on the subways has fallen out of fashion. And the scope of the problem expanded so rapidly that the city is overwhelmed. You allowed the clowns to start running the circus and now they vastly outnumber the ringmasters.
I consider myself to be rather fortunate in this regard. I began limiting my trips to New York City as much as possible more than a decade ago. And when I do have to travel there, I call an Uber to get around. I don’t think I’ve been down into the subways in New York for at least fifteen years. But I understand that not everyone is so lucky and many people simply can’t avoid it.
It’s the city’s responsibility to keep those subway riders safe and secure as much as possible. It’s the “as possible” part that is the most worrisome because I no longer know what if anything can possibly be done. But the fact that I don’t see a solution to readily address the problem doesn’t change that fact. I didn’t run for Mayor or a spot on the City Council. The people who did asked for this mess and it’s their job to address it.
My first year of college was spent at CCNY in Manhattan. I took the subway every day to get to class. This was back in the early 70s. Even then it was risky. You definitely needed to hone your situational awareness skills.
You never, NEVER stood near the edge of the platform waiting for the train. Even back then there were people getting pushed onto the tracks.
The subways are just the street level filth moved underground. The only thing worse than the subterranean human rats are the democrat scum that run the city and their voters.
If he hasn’t ridden the subways in 15 years, why is he writing about it? I was just there for 10 days. Rode the suways a lot, east and westside of Manhattan, and Queens. Much better than two years ago. More people, that’s for sure. Some down-and-outers and riffraff, but more so on the streets.
Sounds great! Everyone should go and take their children.
However, the Ken Kesey book (and later movie) "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" pretty much destroyed the mental hospital system in America. Their image became one of stern Nurse Ratchets force-feeding pills to patients to keep them calm and compliant.
Now these people are out on the streets. Still taking drugs but not so calm and compliant anymore.
The mental instituation industry was a large one. My hometown of Newtown, CT still has a large section of abandoned brick buildings that attest to that.
Put them all on a dump scow and tow them out to the dump grounds and dump, return for next load.
It’s ridiculous that the finger pointing game continues. The City just says the subway is governed by the State so there’s nothing we can do. Meanwhile the people who actually need to get back and forth to work suffer.
Pretty sure that one of us, talking out loud.. How else do you explain Biden?
Yeah, and he’d carry his target rifle on the school bus on practice days and put it in his locker. After school the team went to the range which was in the basement of the school to shoot. He couldn’t afford a rifle bag and carried it openly.
When I was in Tokyo several years back, everyone was so sickening polite. Everyone would line up on these yellow strips and when the train pulled in, the car doors would line up exactly one those strips. The only time there was any sort of pushing and shoving was during rush hour and they had these men in uniform as pushers to push folks into the cars, rather like jamming them in. Too funny. I never went to the city during that time.
Ha
Bronx 1940s
Same problem on a smaller scale in Chicago. It’s not just the homeless and mentally ill though. They’ve always been using the trains as a second home. The real change, here at least, is that during COVID, when the schools closed, all the “teens” started hanging out on the subway all day long, drinking, smoking, smoking weed, etc. It became a moving party (for them) and a much more dangerous place for everyone else.
Some of them left when the schools re-opened but I’d estimate about 1/4 of them didn’t. I’ve even seen drug dealers now openly walking up and down the train cars advertising that they have cocaine for sale. Never seen that before in my life.
“to go hunting?”
Just because they were carrying hunting rifles doesn’t mean they were going hunting. Many schools used to have their own shooting clubs, and kids would bring their rifles to school with them.
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