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With Saturday’s mid-day murder in the tourist-packed 7th Avenue subway station at 53rd Street, the city has now seen seven transit killings since January — almost double the number over the same period last year — and the politicians plainly won’t do what’s needed to seriously reverse the trend.
That grim milestone indicts Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his movement’s anti-public-safety policies — as he all but acknowledged Monday with a long, ugly silence before claiming to be “heartbroken” over the death of Darrel Rodriguez and vague noises about addressing gun violence.
Progressives have been on a “criminal justice reform’ roll for over a decade now — starting with the disastrous “success” of getting city district attorneys to quit prosecuting fare-beating, even though such perps are regularly wanted for more serious offenses.
The state and city measures that followed — from Raise the Age and the no-bail law to How Many Stops — along with the steady shrinkage of the NYPD’s headcount have made it brutally tough for cops to fight crime.
And prog refusal to face facts about serious mental illness, especially among the homeless, further undermines public safety.
And so repeat offenders’ arrests for felony assault more than doubled from 2018 to 2026 over 2018.
Rhammell Burke, who allegedly murdered Ross Falzone at the 18th Street station in May, is a classic example: In the four previous months, he’d been arrested four times, including for another violent subway meltdown — and mere hours before the killing had been let go from Bellevue after getting picked up for erratic behavior.
Starting in 2020, the subway system has averaged eight murders a year — when from 1997 to 2019, it averaged just two.
Yes, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has worked miracles, achieving (most notably) an all-time overall murder low this year.
That transit killings are going the other way is a sign of serious trouble that the NYPD can’t readily counter.
Mamdani’s far-left pals are already furious that he’s kept Tisch in place, but he’s also gone back on his plan to add 500 police officers and continued to undermine cop morale.
Don’t expect the subway to get safer unless he opts to truly break with the left and put public safety first.