Why the time has come for New Yorkers to trust the subway again

On back-to-back nights last week, I bumped into two New Yorkers made famous by the subway: Lenore Skenazy and Daniel Penny.

Skenazy rose to prominence in 2008 as “America’s Worst Mom” for letting her 9-year-old son ride the 6 train alone; Penny in 2023 for restraining Jordan Neely, a repeat offender menacing other passengers, in a headlock that would lead to Neely’s death.

Skenazy’s and Penny’s incidents took place 15 years apart, but are united by a perennial question: Is the subway safe enough for New York’s most vulnerable?

Back in the oughts, Skenazy argued that the real threat to kids wasn’t dangerous riders, but overprotective parents who never let them develop the skill of independence.

The subway, in theory, is the ultimate liberator for kids and parents alike. I’m raising my kids in the suburbs, and the biggest pullback to city life isn’t the arts or the restaurants — it’s the chance for my kids to grow in confidence and be exposed to the world without my hand-holding. 

City life for kids, though, requires trust in public order. When Skenazy made a name for herself by sending little Izzy into the subway alone, the city’s trust was peaking.

Just months before, MTA had announced that ridership was at a 50-year high, and subway crime was at a record low.

Thanks to the leadership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his successor, Michael Bloomberg, New Yorkers were safer than they had been in generations. The secret sauce those mayors used was “broken windows” policing, targeting disorder and low-level crime to maintain public peace and confidence in public spaces.

The way scholars George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson saw it, if you tolerate broken windows, graffiti, fare evasion, and low-level lawlessness, you signal that no one is in charge and you invite bigger crimes to follow. But when you enforce the basics, you stop that spiral before it metastasizes.

With a focus on the small stuff, NYPD was able to keep a lid on the big stuff, build trust in the system, and prevent recurrences of the mayhem of the 1970s and 1980s that spawned Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” on the silver screen and, in real life, Bernie Goetz, the so-called Subway Vigilante.

Disastrously, however, the city’s voters turned away from that center-right consensus on crime and handed the keys to Gracie Mansion to Bill de Blasio.

Following de Blasio’s election in 2014, the city slashed proactive policing, ended stop-question-and-frisk, and sent the clear message that low-level crimes would go unenforced. The result: more fare evasion, more disorder, and more violence.

According to research from Aaron Chalfin, associate professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, felony assaults in the subway system tripled from 2009 to 2023, even while ridership fell by 20%.

With Big Bill’s “compassionate” policing approach put into practice, it was only a matter of time before crime surged and a modern subway defender was forced to rise to the occasion. That man was Daniel Penny.

On May 1, 2023, Jordan Neely — already arrested more than 40 times, including for punching a 67-year-old woman in the face and breaking her nose — boarded an F train in Manhattan. According to witnesses, Neely raged at passengers, yelling that someone was going to die and that he wasn’t afraid of prison. Penny stepped in and ended the threat.

Daniel Penny’s act is one that no New Yorker should ever have to take. But these days, we need brave men like Daniel Penny on board because city leadership has failed to create the conditions that let parents feel as confident as Skenazy did in the Bloomberg era.

Thankfully, though, the tide is turning in favor of order. Following the horrific burning of a woman on the F train in December, the NYPD launched a new Quality-of-Life Division last month to crack down on low-level offenses, just like the broken windows playbook calls for. Summonses and arrests are up, and crime numbers are looking better.

As the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual told me, “progress is being made — in part because more resources are being devoted to the subways.” 

Mangual added, however, “disorder that doesn’t make it into official stats is still what riders experience every day.” And parents like me can still feel that. If New York is going to be a place for kids to range free again, like Lenore Skenazy did 17 years ago, we need a full return to the public safety principles that made it possible.

Jordan McGillis (@jordanmcgillis) is the economics editor at City Journal.