Mayor Eric Adams: Big step toward subway safety is getting cops to take their eyes off their iPhones
NEW YORK -- Tuesday marked two weeks since the mass subway shooting in Brooklyn, and on Monday a man died when he was shot inside a Queens station.
Subway safety took center stage as Mayor Eric Adams delivered his first state of the city address.
CBS2's Lisa Rozner joined commuters on the train and Adams echoed some of their concerns Tuesday. He's disappointed with the deployment of transit police and he actually wants New Yorkers to contact him when they see cops standing around on their phones.
The mayor said he's seeing situations like this far too often.
"You see five transit officers standing at the booth looking at their phones. You just can't continue to do that," Adams said. "And so we are going to start taking very aggressive actions to make sure police are patrolling our subway system and not patrolling their iPhone."
He wants New Yorkers to tweet him photos of it and claimed he'll go to the station the next day.
"I think it's a great enforcement. I barely see them," said Kim Bonilla of Jamaica, Queens. "They're usually just standing there talking to each other."
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And that's what Rozner saw a few hours later at the 34th Street station.
Bonilla, who was heading home, gets off just one stop before the Jamaica Center/Parsons Boulevard station, where a man was fatally shot Monday afternoon following a dispute.
"I was just very in shock and I was very scared, not just for me but for my family, my friends who also take transportation," Bonilla said.
But she said she has no choice but to take the train seven days a week to Manhattan for two different jobs.
Angela Christensen travels between Dyker Heights and Herald Square every day for her job as a tour guide.
"I rode the subway in the the '80s when it was more dangerous than it is now, but I felt safer because there was police on every train. Now, there are not," Christensen said.
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And getting more cops on the trains is another priority for Adams, who rode the train as a cop.
"That's when you had an officer that rode the train from the first stop to the last stop. What it does is it presents a plausible deterrent," said Darrin Porcher, a former NYPD Transit officer.
Earlier, CBS2 saw people jumping the turnstile at the Jamaica Center station at around the same time the MTA announced a new panel will look at ways to approach fare evasion, a potential move Adams said he supports.
"We're going to identify those locations where you have rampant fare evasion and even if the choice is not to prosecute, we're going to arrest," Adams said.