NYC set to bolster police presence in the subway system in effort to crack down on transit crime
NEW YORK (AP) – In the Bronx, the subway will be safer for workers, thanks to tougher policing during New Year’s Eve.
In Brooklyn, police are trying to ensure a safer neighborhood by beefing up security measures, and in Queens by placing more officers in heavily traveled areas.
In all of them, officials are trying to improve service and decrease crimes such as fare evasion and bag snatching.
They hope New Year’s Eve will end in joy. But New Yorkers are still worried.
“We’re having more robberies now than we did the first year we had the fireworks,” said Joseph Hoey, president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police, which oversees the NYPD.
“You don’t know if there’s going to be a fare evader or not. So people are taking the subway just to be safe.”
He said he has been asked to increase the police officers’ presence in subway stations to help with crime. In the past two weekends, he said, police have been told to keep an extra patrol in station areas, where the vast majority of robberies are committed.
“The reality is that we can’t prevent all of our crimes in New York, and we’re trying to help the riders,” he said. “We’re trying to make the system more safer.”
While the crimes will be on every New Yorker’s mind, they will be even more of a focus in Manhattan after the recent mass shooting at the offices of the New York Daily News.
There have been more shootings in the Big Apple since December 1 than there have been in any other part of the country, according to a recent report by the Washington Post.
That included two men who were killed and five others hurt when an assailant fired a gun inside the newspaper’s offices in Manhattan.
“This is the most active and dangerous neighborhood in the country,” said Daniel Correia, deputy chief of police for the NYPD.
“It’s a dangerous
