‘There is no overnight fix’: New York relied on police to stop transit violence. Should Toronto?

NEW YORK CITY—Two weeks after Mayor Eric Adams took office — an office he won promising to make New York safer — a woman was fatally shoved in front of a moving subway.

Michelle Go, 40, was waiting for a train on a Saturday morning when a homeless man with schizophrenia pushed her, police said.

Go’s death was an early test for the Democratic mayor, a former transit police officer himself. The city’s public transit system had become a focal point for Adams’s promise to restore public safety, following several high-profile attacks on trains and in stations, including slashings, stabbings and shovings. The next month, Adams would announce a plan to clear unsheltered people from the subway system.

“No more just doing whatever you want,” Adams said in February 2022. “Those days are over. Swipe your MetroCard, ride the system, get off at your destination. That’s what this administration is saying.”

Adams had already added 1,000 more NYPD officers to the system on top of its 2,500 transit police — a record high for the city. Those officers were to crack down on so-called “quality of life” offences, enforcing the subway’s rules against sleeping, creating an unsanitary environment and lingering, among other things. In October, Adams added more cops to the transit system. The next month, he announced a new push to have mentally ill people living on streets and subways hospitalized against their will.

Cities across North America are grappling with how to manage people who shelter on subways, a population that’s become more visible since the pandemic, as transit systems battle rising crime and lagging ridership. At the heart of the debate over how to keep public transit safe, while treating vulnerable people with compassion, is the role of police. Advocates argue police-forward approaches like New York’s wrongly target homeless people, while ignoring the underlying causes of crime. Still, many riders feel safer with police.

Killing of teen fuels concerns about TTC violence

In Toronto, the killing of 16-year-old Gabriel Magalhaes on March 25 has reignited concerns about transit violence, with some Toronto mayoral hopefuls calling for more police. The city added 80 overtime officers to the TTC in January following a spate of high-profile attacks, at a cost of around $1.7 million per month, but pulled those officers on March 13. Last week, city council approved increasing TTC CEO Rick Leary’s emergency spending authority to $15 million to support safety measures like security guards and outreach workers on the system.

“This is a wicked problem that requires a multi-faceted solution,” said Dr. Andrew Boozary, executive director of social medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network, and professor at New York’s Columbia University.

“We have to have bold goals on addressing both the safety, but also the human right to housing and universal access to mental health care,” said Boozary. “And if that doesn’t happen in tandem, these are virtually ineffective proposals and will continue to fail people on every shot.”

One year later, Adams’s plan is working, by some metrics at least. Transit crime in New York is down roughly 19 per cent so far this year compared to last, police said in March. But despite a push to move homeless people into shelters, hundreds turn to the city’s trains and stations for refuge, even as it becomes an increasingly hostile environment.

Helping homeless people in New York’s transit system

On a recent Friday afternoon, Bryan Mealer and Christopher Joyner meandered through Pennsylvania Station, wearing purple baseball caps and carrying backpacks stuffed with snacks, socks and MetroCards. The sickest people tend to stay in Penn Station, New York’s main intercity rail hub, because it’s easier than navigating the city’s sprawling network of trains, stations and buses, where police are more present, Mealer said.

Mealer and Joyner work for the Bridge, an organization that helps people find housing, as well as recover from substance abuse and mental illness. They find people in need, offer them services and support, and if all goes to plan, enrol them as clients. On any given day, Mealer and Joyner might accompany one of their clients to the bank or to their immigration appointment. Often, they’ll meet up to chat over a warm meal.

Their approach is that it takes individualized, ongoing support to help get someone into long-term housing, especially if that person struggles with mental illness.

“There is no overnight fix to this,” said Mealer, a tall, salt-and-pepper-haired mental health clinician and chaplain who recently spent a year working at Bellevue, a storied New York hospital that cares for the city’s poor. “You want to fix homelessness, you’ve gotta go back to childhood interventions.”

Mealer and Joyner’s work is funded by the state, through a program called SOS, standing for Safe Options Support. It’s an initiative that was launched in tandem with the police increase, though with just a handful of teams, outreach is secondary to enforcement. Joyner, about a head shorter but with Mealer’s same compassionate demeanour, explained they work on the “front line” against homelessness in the city. “My motivation is to get to you before the police do,” he added.

New York transit killing sparks renewed security push

When the pandemic hit New York, ridership drained from its transit system as it did in Toronto’s, leaving behind mostly essential workers and homeless people. As ridership dropped in New York, so did overall crime, except the most violent crimes, murders and rapes, which doubled or more in 2020 from the year before. In 2022, crime on the system shot up to near 2019 levels, despite roughly two-thirds of the riders.

Go’s killing marked the beginning of a crusade focused on removing unsheltered people from New York’s streets and subways. But random violent transit attacks continued into last spring, scaring riders. In April, a gunman fired more than 30 shots on a crowded train in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, wounding 10 riders. There were 10 killings on the subway last year, compared to an average of two a year in the five years before the pandemic, the New York Times reported.

Statistically speaking, New York’s transit system, which carries more than three million riders per day, was safe then, and is now. But perceived safety influences riders’ personal risk calculations more than actual safety.

“People are always more frightened, have always been more frightened, on public transportation even than in the city’s streets, because the sense is that you’re trapped,” said Dorothy Schulz, an emerita professor at CUNY’s school of criminal justice, and a retired transit police captain, who has advised transit agencies across the country on safety.

Schulz said New York has been right to add more police officers, contrary to the approach of other cities, like Philadelphia, which has turned to social workers to make systems safer, along with cops.

“There’s so many systems that are replacing the few police officers they have with these unarmed — what they call ambassadors or things — and they’re not in a position to provide the kind of reassurance that a lot of riders are looking for,” Schulz said, of American cities that have prioritized other specialists over police.

More police on transit serve a political purpose

It’s tough to miss the NYPD when riding the subway in New York. The force’s presence at stations is now announced by conductors as the train pulls in. After the first police surge failed to dent crime, last fall, Adams, with help from the state, added about 1,200 more overtime officers to the subway system per day. There have been 40 per cent more station inspections by police so far this year compared to the same period in 2021, police said in March.

Beyond simply addressing crime, police on the subways serve a political purpose. “There’s been an enormous amount of demagoguery around the issue of crime in the subway,” said Danny Pearlstein, who is policy and communications director for Riders Alliance, an organization that fights for better transit for New Yorkers.

While the heightened police presence in New York has been “broadly popular” among riders, Pearlstein said, it’s also resulted in police cracking down on people who pose no threat, like buskers, mango sellers and homeless people. Arrests for fare evasion in the fourth quarter of 2022, after the overtime police officers were added, were 26 per cent higher than in the third, and 134 per cent higher than in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to police data.

Homeless population balloons in New York City

Meanwhile, the city’s homeless population has ballooned, partly due to the influx of tens of thousands of migrants sent north by Texas’s Republican governor in a political statement. About 72,500 people were living in New York’s homeless shelters in January, including nearly 23,000 children, according to data from the Coalition for the Homeless. Thousands more are unsheltered, though it’s difficult to pin down how many. An annual state survey, which is widely considered to be a vast undercount, counted more than 3,400 people sleeping on the streets and subways in January 2022.

“When you treat homeless people with a police response, what that communicates to everybody watching at home is that that person is a criminal,” said Josiah Haken, CEO of City Relief, a mobile outreach offering services to people experiencing poverty and homelessness.

Haken likened Adams to a “one-tooled contractor” with only a hammer. “So the hammer happens to be the NYPD,” he said.

In November, the mayor announced a push to involuntarily commit more people who are mentally ill, encouraging first responders to hospitalize not just people who are outwardly threatening to themselves or others, but also those who cannot meet their “basic human needs,” like food or shelter.

The move has been contentious, especially for its reliance on police to make difficult calls related to mental illness. Mental health advocates challenged the policy in court, arguing that it “imperiled” the rights of homeless people, but a judge upheld it. Opponents have also warned that New York’s mental health care system cannot support an influx of patients.

Mealer and Joyner said hospitalizing people can work, but only if they actually get the help they need. It can also leave scars down the line.

“You’re put in four point restraints. You’re hit with Haldol (an antipsychotic drug). You’re screaming. It’s scary,” said Mealer. “You want to be very careful about how you traumatize people, and only do it if you can help them.”

There is little data on the effect of the policy so far, but city officials said 42 people were removed from the streets in December under the mental health plan, according to reporting from NY1.

According to the TTC’s Rick Leary, there is no clear plan to deal with people who shelter on Toronto’s system — a population of more than 100 per day at the height of winter. As part of its safety response, the TTC added additional homeless outreach workers, and recently announced a partnership with a community organization to help more vulnerable people.

The main reason people take refuge on the TTC is because they have nowhere else to go. In February, city shelters turned away about the same number of people per day as they let in. In January, just half the people seeking shelter each day got a spot.

Leary told city council last week the TTC has no intention of pushing people out, but when the overtime police were added in January, people sheltering on the TTC told the Star they had to jump from station to station to avoid getting ticketed. Streetcar and bus operators say they are told not to disturb people sleeping on their vehicles during the day, but are required to clear them at the end of the night.

In New York, everyone has a “right to shelter.” That means the city is required by law to give a bed to every person who asks for one. But “the reputation of the shelter system among the homeless population is so negative that the idea of trying to persuade people to get indoors by going in a shelter is just a non-starter,” Haken said.

Mealer and Joyner, the outreach workers, said people who suffer from PTSD or other severe mental illness have a particularly hard time in crowded shelters. The city has expanded access to a new kind of shelter called safe havens, which have private or semi-private rooms, providing a calmer environment.

Gaining trust of homeless people takes time

Back on the subways, most of the people Mealer and Joyner approach decline help. Some accept snacks but stop short of agreeing to shelter. It can take multiple engagements to build trust among people who have continuously fallen through the cracks, they explain.

Later in the afternoon, Mealer and Joyner emerged from Penn Station to meet up with Bakary, who was waiting on 34th Street. Mealer first enrolled Bakary as a client more than a year ago, after he was discharged from a psychiatric hospital.

Since then, he’s been in and out of shelters, disappearing for days on end but always resurfacing and getting in touch with Mealer, whose number Bakary knows by heart. The Star is not reporting Bakary’s last name because he is undocumented.

It was the first time the two had seen each other in a couple months. Mealer bought Bakary a burger and promised to be in touch. Bakary’s mental illness means he suffers from hallucinations that make shelter living untenable for him. Mealer hopes to be able to get him a single room soon.

It used to stress Mealer when Bakary went dark, but now he knows to meet him where he’s at.

“He always finds me when he needs me,” Mealer said. In the meantime, he searches for him in the subways.

Lex Harvey is a Toronto-based transportation reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @lexharvs