Lieber skirted around concerns over safety on the subways during a Monday morning interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance,” telling listeners: “Some of these high-profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten in people’s heads and made the whole system feel unsafe.”
“The overall stats are positive. Last year we were actually at 12 and a half percent less crime than 2019, the last year before COVID,” Lieber said.
When asked about putting up guardrails, similar to mass transit systems in other major cities like London or Tokyo, Lieber said the MTA was focused first on fare evasion post-COVID — but that walls for added safety would come later.
“We put a billion dollars in our new capital program since fare evasion and this whole phenomenon has definitely accelerated post-COVID. So we are going to start to replace all these turnstiles, which worked when I was a kid, but clearly are ineffective now for in the area that we’re living in, we got to replace them,” he said.
The MTA boss’ comments come after a series of high-profile attacks in the city’s transit system, including the shocking attack on 57-year-old Debrina Kawam who was torched to death on a Brooklyn F train in plain view of horrified commuters.
There were at least five attacks in the days after Kawam’s death, including the stabbing of an MTA staffer heading to work in The Bronx on Thursday at the Pelham Parkway station.
Four other commuters were also slashed on consecutive days in the past week alone, including a 52-year-old man knifed in the arm at the Myrtle-Wyckoff L train station in Brooklyn; a 48-year-old man slashed in the neck at the West 50th Street and Eighth Avenue station in Manhattan; and two others on New Year’s Day.
In those violent incidents, a 30-year-old man was cut in the arm during a dispute with another commuter at the 110th Street-Cathedral Parkway station in Manhattan, and a 31-year-old man was stabbed in the back at the 14th Street station in Manhattan just 15 minutes later.
Last Tuesday, music programmer Joseph Lynskey, 45, was pushed at random in front of a Manhattan No. 1 train — and miraculously survived the horrendous and apparently random attack.
Violence continued to seep into New York City subways over the weekend when a 38-year-old man was stabbed in the arm inside the Third Avenue and 138th Street No. 6 express station in Mott Haven. The victim was taken to the hospital in stable condition.
The transit chaos has prompted the Guardian Angels, a volunteer vigilante watchdog group, to resume patrols in the subways for the first time since 2020 — and at levels not seen since their inception in the late 1970s.
The group, founded by former mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, looks to provide water and assistance to homeless people on subway cars, and says they will report any issues they come across to the NYPD.
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The group, founded by former mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, looks to provide water and assistance to homeless people on subway cars, and says they will report any issues they come across to the NYPD.