Crime figures in the subway may or may not be on the rise, but the people in charge of handling the problem seem to be in lockstep with a dismissive attitude that it is the perception of crime that is the real problem. Yet, it is hard to dismiss the fact that there have been a dozen incidents in 2026 where people have been pushed onto subway tracks by someone who is emotionally or mentally disturbed- and there is still a third of the year to go. 710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning discussed how the crime and homeless issue is being dismissed by the politicians who should be fixing the problem. Curtis in particular took exception with how the homeless and mentally ill are treated on the trains, as he is one of the few people willing to address the crisis.
Curtis asked Larry to ponder what goes through the minds of the mentally unstable denizens of the rails and why a just society shouldn’t simply leave these people there untended: “They don’t take them and then commit them for psychiatric care, which would be the humane thing to do, and I can all of our listeners out there, as you know, the amount of time I spend every day in the subways, I mean, I’d go meshuggeh. But imagine if you had to spend one whole day in the subway, that was your assignment, Larry; where would you find a bathroom? Where would you find food to eat? Now, whatever psychosis you have becomes embellished that much more, and you start hearing voices, and all of sudden- you’re sane and normal most of the time, but now you react and you do things that we would say, how could you possibly do that?”
Curtis also offered a caveat that if any solution offered by Kathy Hochul, who is in charge of the MTA as Governor, is floated in the coming weeks, it might resemble the last solution she offered, when she needed safer subways to get reelected: “We need every additional police officer we can to get them in the subways, and you know what’s going to happen, Larry, like [2022], when [Lee] Zelden was running against Hochul and gaining traction. There was a tremendous increase of crime in the subway; she flooded the subway by giving Eric Admas money to send additional police officers in the subway for overtime before the mid-term elections; watch how she does it again.”
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