Mayor Adams on Thursday touted the results of a program aimed at getting homeless people out of the subway system.
Launched in fall 2023, the Subway Co-Response Outreach, or SCOUT, program employs “co-response” teams of police officers, nurses and social workers. The teams have had 11,000 interactions with people on the trains, with 3,000 of those encounters resulting in connections to temporary housing, food, clothes, medical care and removals from the system, the mayor said at a press conference at the 34th St.-Herald Square station.
Police also removed about 900 people from the system and issued 290 summonses, he said.
“This is making sure people can ride the train safely day or night,” Adams said. “And so we want to be clear on this. We’re not saying those who are unhoused and in need of support are the primary source of crime in our subways. We don’t want that to be the interpretation. It adds to the feeling of [being] unsafe. We’ve driven down crime, but we hear New Yorkers say over and over again, they feel unsafe.”
The mayor emphasized numbers showing a 28% year-to-date decrease in subway crime — which comes after President Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened in a letter Tuesday to withhold or redirect federal funding from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority unless it can prove it’s reducing violent crime and homelessness in the subway system.
“We continue to make progress on our goal of bringing down crime,” Adams said, “and have achieved record achievements for subway safety in recent months.”
But mayoral challenger state Sen. Zellnor Myrie said the mayor’s not doing enough, arguing that transit felony assaults are still up 65% from before the pandemic.
“I take the train every day,” Myrie said, “and as any of my fellow straphangers know, our transit system is not as safe as [it] needs to be. Now is not the time for Mayor Adams to be applauding himself for half measures.”