Last year was among the safest on the subway in over a decade, according to data presented by the MTA’s head of security Wednesday — the latest salvo in a war of facts and apparent disinformation with the subway system’s federal funding at stake.
Michael Kemper, the transit agency’s security honcho and former chief of the NYPD’s transit bureau, said Wednesday that major crimes in the subway system have fallen by 64% since 1997, when the police department first started keeping separate records for the transit system.
“If you exclude the COVID years, 2020 and 2021, when ridership was way down and the system was virtually shut down,” he said, “[In] 2024 there were the lowest number of felonies recorded in the subway system in 15 years.”
The system averaged 17 major felonies — murders, rapes, assaults, robberies, burglaries or grand larcenies — per day in 1997, the ex-transit cop said, versus six major felonies per day in 2024.
This year — in which Gov. Hochul has been funding additional overtime for overnight transit cop patrols — has seen a further reduction, with an average of 4.4 major crimes a day for January and February.
“Crime in the subway system is trending downward,” Kemper said.
The most recently available data from the NYPD shows that, as of Monday, major crimes are down 20.1% compared to this time last year. Compared to the pre-pandemic benchmark of 2019, major crimes are down 18.4%.
Kemper’s presentation comes less than a week after President Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, first threatened to pull federal funding from the MTA, alleging a “trend of violent crime, homelessness, and other threats to public safety,” despite data to the contrary.
Duffy doubled down in a Friday appearance on the Eternal World Television Network, a right-wing Catholic network, calling the subways “dirty” and “dangerous.”
“Crime incidents are 56% higher now than it was in 2019,” Duffy claimed without citation during the appearance.
“Crime’s not going down,” he continued, “it’s going up.”
MTA’s head of external relations, John McCarthy, scoffed at Duffy’s false figure at Wednesday’s board meeting.
“We’re playing a game of whack-a-mole when it comes to the misinformation,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s intentional or not.”
Duffy appears to have been misrepresenting one crime stat in particular: felony assaults, which so far this year are, in fact, up exactly 56% from 2019 as of Monday — and down 4.4% from last year.
Kemper said part of the uptick was related to other enforcement operations — specifically people picked up for other crimes then attacking the arresting officers, an automatic felony.
“Contributing to the rise in felony assaults is the disturbing and unacceptable dramatic increase in the number of NYPD cops being assaulted, all while proactively patrolling the subway system, focusing on and enforcing fare evasion, quality of life offenses [and] other offenses,” Kemper said.
The security head said 31% of all felony assaults in the system last year were on cops.
“This is directly connected to, as I mentioned, increased enforcement,” he said, “and transit arrests are up 160% in just the last two years.”
In 2019 71 cops were assaulted in the subway system, he said, while in 2024 179 cops were assaulted.
Part of Duffy’s funding threat was a demand for precisely the kinds of crime trends and data Kemper presented Wednesday. McCarthy said the MTA would be responding to the feds in writing with all the relevant information by Duffy’s March 31 deadline.
Asked Wednesday if he thought the response would satisfy Duffy and keep funding on tap for the system that moves millions of New Yorkers each day, MTA CEO Janno Lieber said, “I don’t know.”
“I guess I’m appealing to all of us to respect the tradition that dialogue between states and localities and the federal government on an issue of this seriousness is not handled as a war of words,” Lieber said, “but rather in response to serious analysis, data and facts.”