2025 Assaults are surging this year in the subway system — and critics fear it’s getting worse with overcrowding caused by congestion pricing.
Felony assaults are up 9% so far this year, going from 168 to 183 over the same period last year, according to the NYPD data. And they’re up a staggering 55% over 2019, the data show.
Of the felony assaults, 54 or about 30%, were against police officers, according to the NYPD.
2023 In 2023, for the first time in nearly two decades, the number of felony assaults in the subway system was greater than the number of robberies, according to an analysis of crime statistics by Vital City, an urban policy think tank. The change signals a rise in impulsive violence and a move away from crimes motivated by monetary gain, the report found.
It also reflected a trend in overall crime across the city, which saw a spike in the number of felony assaults in 2024, even as most other major crimes saw a decrease. Last year in the transit system, there were 561 felony assaults, a major crime category defined as an attack in which a deadly weapon is used or a serious injury results. That number was more than triple what it was in 2009, when 150 felony assaults were reported.
In 2006, robberies and assaults occurred at nearly the same rate, said Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of Vital City and a former criminal justice adviser under Mayor Bill de Blasio. But in recent years, and particularly since the pandemic, violence in the subway has increasingly been driven by animus, frayed nerves and erratic behavior, she said. “That flip is everything,” Ms. Glazer said, and it can only partly be explained by the growing homelessness and mental health crises in the city, she said. The rise reflects a national trend, said Jens Ludwig, the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “This is something we’re seeing all over the place, after the pandemic,” he said. “You used to not see tons of videos of people getting into fist fights on planes.”
Despite a low rate of incidents overall, violent crime has been sharply rising underground. From 2014 to 2024, the number of violent crimes in the subway, including misdemeanor assaults, has nearly doubled, to 2,745 from 1,445, and is up 15 percent since 2019, according to Paul Reeping, the director of research at Vital City. Still, a rider is highly unlikely to be a victim: the risk is about one per one million riders during rush hour, according to a Vital City analysis.
All the same, passengers have also been shaken by recent gruesome crimes, including the killing of Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old woman who was set on fire as she slept on a train in December. There were 10 murders in the subway in 2024, up from three in 2019.
Chris Guzman, 37, a teacher who lives in Brooklyn, said she recently saw a man on a subway platform approach a woman he didn’t know and slap her. The experience shocked her, she said, and it still plays in her mind when she rides the train.
Riders once had a perception that violent crime was mostly perpetrated by young people, but data now suggests otherwise. The average age of a person charged with a violent crime in the subway is now 32, up from 24 nearly two decades ago, said Aaron Chalfin, a professor of criminology who analyzed data for Vital City. “You worried about groups of kids robbing you, not necessarily older adults preying on you for no reason,” he said. “It really is a sea change.”
The drop in robberies predates the pandemic, Dr. Chalfin said, in part because of effective policing. But it remains unclear what mix of factors is spurring the rise of violent attacks in recent years. As the perception that the subways are dangerous lingers, the police said that crime in the system is falling so far this year, while weekday ridership is up to roughly 75 percent of prepandemic levels. Crime on the subway is down 27 percent through March 9, compared with the same time last year, according to department statistics. That number has fallen as the number of felony assaults in the city also decreased 14 percent during the same time period, the police said.
Last year, following a spike in crime and an overnight slashing attack on an A train that injured a conductor, Gov. Kathy Hochul
ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to begin patrolling the subways. About 1,250 Guard members, officers from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and state police officers now patrol the system, according to the governor’s office.
Janno Lieber, the chief executive and chair of the M.T.A., said in an interview that curbing fare evasion is vital to upholding order in the subway. But one of the biggest challenges, he said, is the release of repeat offenders who commit crimes on the subway. “You can’t have someone haul off and punch somebody, and have it be treated the same way as if it were their first time,” he said, adding that many violent offenses are considered misdemeanors, even though they can still be very serious attacks. “The criminal justice system has to take action,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/nyregion/subway-crime-nyc.html
2023. Crime on the subways has become significantly more violent since the pandemic with the number of felony assaults increasing when compared to pre-pandemic levels, an analysis by The Post revealed. The number of attacks on trains that left victims injured jumped 53% from 2023’s 570 felony assaults to the 373 reported in 2019, according to stats.
Those 200 extra felony assaults meant that attacks resulting in substantial injury accounted for 25% of 2,285 major crimes reported on trains and in stations in 2023, compared to just 15% of the 2,499 major crimes in 2019, the data show.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/24/us-news/attacks-in-nyc-transit-jump-50-as-subway-murders-surge-stats/
And felony assaults were roughly flat — from 572 in 2023 to 573 in 2024.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/01/06/afraid-of-crime-in-the-subway-its-all-in-your-head-nypd-stats-say
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