The city’s largest transit worker union is calling on the MTA to change the rules for end-of-line train clearing following last week’s brutal stabbing of a train operator on the No. 4 line in Brooklyn.
Transport Workers Union Local 100 — which represents all of the city’s subway workers and most of its bus workers — is calling on the MTA to have train conductors and operators work together to make sure passengers are off a subway at the end of a line. Currently, the two-person crew splits the ten-car train, each one clearing five cars of any stragglers.
But that meant veteran train operator Myran Pollack was alone when he was clearing his half of a No. 4 train last week — which is when a passenger who’d stayed aboard at the Crown Heights – Utica Ave. terminal lunged at him with a knife.
The suspected assailant, Jonathan Davalos, “kept stabbing,” Pollack said — and likely would have killed the train operator if not for the intervention of four NYPD officers on the platform. Davalos is currently facing charges of attempted murder.
At a rally outside the Crown Heights station Thursday evening, nearly 100 transit workers gathered.
“Never before in history have we faced so many assaults,” Richard Davis, the Local 100 president, told the gathered workers. “At the end of the day we want to go home to our children and our family members, and we have that right, we have the right to go home to our families.”
“Clearing out trains is not safe. Our co-workers are getting attacked,” said Canella Gomez, head of subways for the union. “We don’t want to hear anything about the operational budget or the cost of manpower — if the MTA can spend millions of dollars on trains, millions of dollars on facilities, millions of dollars on staircases, they can spend money to help protect their workforce.”
“We’re not asking for them to do a better job anymore, we’re demanding that they do a better job — we have contractual rights that the MTA is responsible for our safety and our protection,” he added.
Local 100 officials said they are also demanding that MTA police — a separate force from the NYPD’s transit bureau — be deployed at subway terminals to support train crews at the end of the line.
Demetrius Crichlow, head of New York City Transit — the MTA division that runs the subways and buses — did not respond directly to the demands that the MTA change its end-of-line policies.
“Before his heinous assault on a train operator, Jonathan Davalos had on different days attacked another subway employee and a rider,” Crichlow said in a statement. “This recidivist behavior is why the MTA has fought in Albany for harsher penalties for crimes occurring in the transit system, and why we push for the most aggressive possible prosecutions when employees, customers and police are assaulted.”
“We are happy to have TWU Local 100 join that effort, and to have their support for the NYPD and the district attorneys, as they work to ensure that maximum possible consequences are imposed,” he added.