Judges fail to back Adams’ drive to curb big crime with crackdown on small subway offenses
May 16, 2022 7
NYPD cops are starting to once again enforce subway rules, to make
riders feel safe. However it will take some help from judges
The sun still rises in the east, and, equally as shocking, quality-of-life policing in the subways still works, now that we’re trying it again. Mayor Eric Adams’ push to prevent big crime in the subways by stopping small crime yielded several quality arrests last week — but these “successes” point up a failure: The arrestees are often right back on the streets again.
What proved true in the early 1990s, when transit-police chief Bill Bratton cut the annual number of murders on the subways from 26 to one or two, continues to prove true today. Stop a guy jumping the turnstile, and you don’t just save the MTA $2.75: You often prevent a violent crime.
Last Monday, police spotted 22-year-old James Williams jumping the turnstile at Sterling Street in Brooklyn. He also happened, they allege, to be carrying a loaded and defaced gun. (If he was too poor to afford the subway, he could have turned in his gun to the police for a $200 reward.) A Brooklyn judge immediately released him with no conditions.
This in the same week that a similar case came to a sad end. Police shot and killed 25-year-old Rameek Smith in The Bronx, after he shot at them.
Smith was free, awaiting sentencing on an earlier gun charge, after he was caught with a gun beating the fare in Brooklyn in March 2020. It took nearly two years for him to plead guilty in December.
Rameek Smith was shot and killed by police, after he shot at them
If Smith had already been serving his time for that case, he’d be alive today.
In fact, what people concerned about police shootings miss is that such shootings were far higher in soft-on-crime days, which makes sense: Suspects or convicts free to shoot police get shot themselves. In 1971, the NYPD shot and killed 93 people. By 2013, the figure had fallen by more than 90%, to eight each year for three years running. In 2015, it was five.
Here is where the people who see nothing wrong with how New York’s justice system is working, or not working, pipe up and say, Gotcha: The judge could have set bail for both Smith and Williams.
Smith died at 25-years old
The chance of stopping someone from jumping a turnstile, could reduce violent crimes on the subway
No one is saying that Williams should languish at Rikers while his case slowly winds its way through the system. As The City reported in March, more than half of the city’s 3,000 gun cases are more than six months old — which is part of the problem.
But setting no bail sends a message to young men, including people tempted (misguidedly) to carry for their own self-defense: Carrying a loaded, defaced firearm into the subway is not a serious crime but more like stealing.
Speaking of stealing, observant transit police also caught a suspected thief last week, someone snatching belongings off unsuspecting passengers. But it turns out it wasn’t the 18-year-old suspect’s first arrest in the subway system for felony theft this month — or his second or his third. It was his fourth.
Police shootings are far higher in soft-on-crime days
Police can do the hard work of finding and studying video and still images and spotting a face in a crowd — but if the suspect is immediately released, they just have to find the same person again. (At least he’ll be easier to recognize the fifth time around.)
Same goes for another subway suspect police arrested last Tuesday,
responding quickly just after he robbed a female passenger. It wasn’t
the alleged robber’s first interaction with police this year: He already
faced charges for robbery and shoplifting (both outside of the subway). Just a week earlier, he had won no-bail release on the robbery charge.
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