Adams vows to reevaluate deployment of police officers on subway in aftermath of deadly Q train shooting
NEW YORK -- Mayor Eric Adams says he's vowing to reevaluate the deployment of police officers on the subway.
Adams said violence on the subway has become a major setback in convincing people to come back to their New York City offices, CBS2's Marcia Kramer reported Monday.
In a city where optics are often everything, Adams took the subway to City Hall after an Upper Manhattan news conference. It was the day after a Goldman Sachs employee was murdered in cold blood on the Q train.
"Is this symbolic to show people that it's safe?" Kramer asked the mayor.
"No it's substantive that this is the mayor that is on the subway system, because I'm not gonna tell New Yorkers to do something that I'm not going to do because real leaders lead from the front," Adams said.
Whether substantive or symbolic, the mayor's subway ride came at a time when crime on the rails was apparently starting to turn a corner. Although overall subway crime is up over 57 percent since Adams took office on January 1, it was up only 8.9 percent in the week that ended on May 22.
Despite the April 12 subway mass shooting in Sunset Park, ridership was starting to inch up. It topped 3.6 million last Wednesday, 61 percent of pre-pandemic totals.
MTA head Janno Lieber called the murder, "An incredible setback for everybody's effort to put New York back on normal footing."
Which is why the mayor, who paid his fare and pointedly put on a mask, said he's going to reassess the steps he's already taken to put more cops on the subways to see if anything else can be done. After all, he started his public life as a transit cop.
"That's the uniqueness of me being here, because no other mayor understood the real deployment of police personnel like I do. So you can't come to me if you're a police official and say you're just doing 'X'," Adams said.
The mayor lamenting the subway policing policies of his predecessor, Bill de Blasio.
"For eight years, it is my belief that we have really restricted these officers from doing their job. We're moving in a new direction. We are going to have officers do their job, not ignore quality of life issues, fare evasion," Adams said. "We were ignoring all of this in the past. We're not ignoring it any more"
Adams again spoke of installing new subway weapons detections systems. He said they would be moved randomly from station to station.