The Mayor of New York Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul laid out a slew of measures to attend to safety apprehensions on the subways of New York City after 8 violent incidents within a space of 48 hours. The measures focus on preventing the homeless from a shelter in inside the system, even though only a single attack was linked to a homeless man.
The incidents were isolated and there was no pattern in it. Police said the attacks started on Friday evening as a man was attacked and suffered stab injuries to his left forearm at Morningside Heights.
The incident occurred inside a southbound train in Manhattan and the attacker was a man who the victim asked not to smoke. The last of the incidents ended Monday morning and involved a woman, aged 30, who was struck with a metal pipe on the face in the Bronx.
There were no fatalities and took place across the system which covers hundreds of miles of tracks used by millions each week.
Eric Adams Has Made A Safe Subway One Of His Priority
Eric Adams has focused on the subways after he took over and he, along with the Governor, released safety plans to install police officers along with health officials to remove over 1,000 of the homeless people who have made the subway their home. The teams went to work this Monday.
Questions have been raised over the unwarranted focus on the homeless when only one attacker was a homeless man. One of the eight victims was also a homeless man.
Eric Adams strongly condemned the attacks and cautioned that they should not be a sweeping generalization about it. A spokesperson for the mayor said that the two issues of mental illness and the subway attacks shouldn’t be mixed up.
In a debate, Eric Adams suggested that a police officer should be deployed in each train. An additional 1,000 officers have been added to the subway system.
Detractors of the move to evict the homeless argue that evicting the homeless would not solve the problem. They argued that only one of the recent attackers was a homeless man, and he was mentally ill.
