MTA officials touted a “historic” dip in Big Apple subway crime in a glowing announcement Sunday — just hours after a straphanger was slashed and another shoved onto the tracks by a muttering maniac.
The transit agency said July produced the lowest transit-crime stats since the data was first collected in 1995, with an 8% drop in felonies in the subways last month — including a 16.7% plummet in robberies and a 9.3% decrease in felony assaults compared to the same month last year.
“It’s clear the efforts to increase overnight patrols, deploy thousands more security cameras and expand mental health outreach are having real positive impacts,” MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in a statement.
“By working closely with Gov. [Kathy] Hochul and the NYPD, we’re making sure the transit system not only is safe, but feels safe for our six million daily riders,” Lieber said.
But try telling that to some of this month’s victims — including an ER pediatrician at Harlem Hospital who just feels “happy he’s still alive” after his brush with death on the rails over the weekend.
The 44-year-old doctor was heading home from work and waiting for a No. 1 train in Manhattan around 8 p.m. Saturday — a few hours before the MTA’s crowing press release — when a screaming vagrant randomly shoved him onto the tracks.
The banged-up doc was able to scramble back up onto the platform with help from other straphangers before a train was set to barrel into the station fewer than 4 minutes later. His assailant fled the station and remains on the loose.
About an hour after that attack, another subway rider was slashed in the neck and armpit after getting into a spat with a knife-wielding nut at an East Village station.
That attacker also fled the station and remains on the loose, while his victim was taken to Bellevue Hospital and treated for his injuries, according to police.
The back-to-back transit assaults came after another attack Wednesday, when a masked thug slashed a 29-year-old woman multiple times after she refused to surrender her bag at the Wall Street station.
The crook demanded the woman’s bag aboard a northbound No. 3 train around 11:10 p.m. when he attacked her, according to police and law enforcement sources.
Still, according to MTA statistics, subway crimes are not only down month-over-month from last year, but also year-to-date, “led by a drop in overall assaults, even as more riders return to the system,” the transit agency’s chief security officer, Michael Kemper, said in the statement.
When The Post reached out to the MTA for comment over the timing of its press release Sunday, its public-information department said to contact the NYPD’s press office.
Read the full article here
