The National Guard is in the subway — now what?

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has sent the National Guard into the NYC subway system. 750 guardsmen to check bags. And, according to the Governor, to be "physical deterrents.” She’s also sent 250 state troopers and transit cops, who join the thousands of NYPD officers already down there. 

None of this is new: Eric Adams started 2022 by sending 3,500 cops into the subway system, to push for what he lovingly called police “omnipresence.” As New Yorkers know, the NYPD mostly proceeded to stand around diddling on their phones. They also occasionally attack people for not paying the fare and remove homeless folks from the subway with little care for where they go next.

Before this push, crime on the subway was relatively low. After this push, crime was still relatively low. As the Vera Institute for Justice says: “The subway represents the city’s safest form of transportation.” And the impact of thousands of cops standing around is hard to discern, other than a dramatic rise in fare evasion tickets. Last year the NYPD handed out a stunning 100,000 of these $100 tickets to working class New Yorkers for failing to pay $2.90.

The justification for all of this from Eric Adams was crime “skyrocketing” on the subway. That, of course, never happened. But when Adams ran he, as a former cop himself, benefited from the increasing crime panic generated by mass media, conservatives, and of course his own talking points. The truth is that the onset pandemic majorly disrupted life in New York, and when the social safety net that was strengthened at the beginning of Covid went away, the number of homeless and displaced people increased. Rent prices have also shot back up, further increasing the number of unhoused people in the subway system.

But that does not mean crime on the subway is up. Kathy Hochul admitted as much in an interview yesterday. Right off the bat she said something quite shocking for someone who has just sent the National Guard into the subway. She began, “Statistically crime is down but I'm not going to talk about statistics." Now that caught my attention. She proceeded to explain how even though crime isn’t up there have been several “major incidents” and “people don’t feel safe.” Let’s unpack that, as they say.

You know what might make people feel safer than having to walk through a gauntlet of machine guns to get to work every day? Stable housing. Mental health counseling. Long-term housing for people struggling with addiction or mental illness. Both the Democratic Mayor and the Democratic Governor of New York readily admit that people whose lives are unstable due to mental health struggles, or struggles with drug use, can act erratic and contribute to a perceived lack of safety on the subways even when they aren't harming anyone, yet both politicians have emphasized policing and criminalizing these vulnerable people instead of helping them.

We also know that working class Black and brown people are the most likely to be hurt by this, to have their bags “randomly” searched, to wind up arrested, or late to work, or worse. We know because New York City has seen this before. We’ve seen stop and frisk and we’ve seen the aftermath of 9/11 and we’ve seen who gets hurt by checkpoints and searches and over-policing. As the NYCLU says: “This kind of heavy-handed approach will, much like stop-and-frisk, be used to accost and profile Black and Brown New Yorkers.”

And who benefits from this? Not the people of New York City, who foot the bill, get their bags rummaged through, and don’t get to see any real solution to the actual issues of homelessness or the lack of mental health care. Not Democrats, who lose during crime panics, like New York Democrats lost multiple seats in Congress. It’s Republicans and police. And very possibly Donald Trump specifically.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the riots and protests of 2020, Donald Trump brought the National Guard to DC, in addition to other militarized forces, sometimes of unknown origin. Making the people of New York City more accustomed to the presence of armed forces, and normalizing this sort of governmental overreach because people are “feeling unsafe” is a potentially catastrophic misstep leading up to the 2024 election. It’s an atrocious move regardless, in that we should not be deploying these tactics and we should not allow ourselves to grow accustomed to men with machine guns being the response to a lack of orderly behavior, on the subway or anywhere else. Fascistic tactics like this have no place in a truly democratic society, especially from the party that claims to be working against fascism.

We’re at a pivotal moment. In numerous ways we’re at a decisive point in deciding what sort of society we want to have, to live in. Endless policing and fear-mongering mean more mass incarceration, more fractured families, and more political repression. And they mean less of the good things in life. Fewer freedoms, fewer resources invested in people, in communities, in human flourishing.

Right now multiple cities and states are headed in a frightening direction. The rich and powerful launched a relentless backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. They began to push forward numerous cop cities, or massive police repression training centers. Researcher Renee Johnston recently mapped 69 proposals for these facilities across the country. DC just passed a sweeping crime bill, LA passed a bill allowing police to access camera feeds across the city, including private ones, and both parties appear determined to scapegoat migrants at all costs. The determination of the powerful to fund oppression rather than concede that the policing system, and the capitalist system which puts profits above life itself, might be fundamentally flawed seems to know no bounds.

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash

At this moment they’re winning. Punitive forces are winning, often over the will of the people. In Atlanta the mayor and city council are using every trick in the book to keep the nation’s most well-known Cop City project off the ballot. They are sacrificing the democratic process at the altar of policing. In New York, this security theater will both hurt people and hurt democracy at large. It threatens to render a low-grade military occupation of public space normal, it threatens to make us accustomed to ceding our liberties to armed forces, and it threatens to do this as the country teeters on the precipice of overt fascism.

None of this is new, but Hochul’s act is fascistic, dangerous, and completely misguided. It pushes us further and further in a dark and dangerous direction. And it pushes us further from the light, further from a future where we collectively care for one another, where we are empowered both individually and as a whole, and where our freedom and safety and happiness are prioritized above repression and obedience. We have everything we need to build actual safety. Not only is New York already safer than most cities, it has far more resources than most cities to build on that success, to provide everyone with their basic needs and then some. This entire country and world have those resources in abundance.

And people are seeing that. People are organizing their communities and workplaces to build a better society that distributes the wealth of the world more equally, that stewards this planet rather than exploits it, that simply cares for life itself. It’ll take a lot more work, a lot of fighting against this dangerous game, but we can do it. We can replace this world of military occupation and policing and violence and in its place build the world we know is possible. Get plugged in, because we need you to join the rising tide pushing back and building something new.