John Minchillo/AP Photo
Multiple people were injured in a mass shooting Tuesday on a subway train in Brooklyn, New York. New York’s mayor has vowed to increase police patrols.
When New York City suffered one of the worst mass shootings in its history earlier this week, the response from Mayor Eric Adams was predictable: more police. “I will say to New Yorkers we’re going to hold the day tour of the transit police officers to double the number of officers that are traditionally patrolling the system,” he said in an interview.
This kind of reaction is an underrated part of America’s culture of police impunity and high crime rate. Here we have an objectively disastrous failure on the part of the NYPD, yet not only are they escaping blame, they are probably going to get even more money. If America actually cared about crime, the agencies tasked with preventing it would get a lot less deference.
As New Yorkers were quick to point out online, the city’s subway system is already swarming with cops—some 3,500 of them, enough to keep every station in the network manned around the clock. Indeed, one of Adams’s first actions in office was to sharply increase the number of subway cops. Then, because there is nothing serious for them to do 99.9 percent of the time, they mainly just hang out playing with their phones, hassling homeless people, or dogpiling turnstile jumpers for dodging a fare of $2.75. (Odd, isn’t it, how people who don’t pay their parking meter don’t get beaten to a pulp by law enforcement?)
Sure enough, when a man in a construction vest pulled out a handgun and opened fire on the N train on Tuesday (ten people were reportedly shot, though luckily none fatally), police were quickly on the scene—only to commit a Keystone Kops–esque series of blunders. One of the first officers on the train couldn’t get his radio to work, and told bystanders to call 911 instead. The culprit somehow managed to escape past police. It then turned out that some of the security cameras in the 36th Street station (part of a surveillance network that has been installed throughout the subway system at vast expense) were broken, and that insiders had warned about poor camera maintenance practices for years.
Police did find a likely suspect (a 62-year-old man with a lengthy history of posting deranged rants online), but only because he apparently left his credit card and keys to a U-Haul on the scene. On Wednesday, the city was reduced to sending out an emergency alert to the phones of all residents, hoping he’d be spotted. He was only captured that afternoon, reportedly after a camera installer happened to spot him.
Even to a hardened cynic like myself, the fact that the NYPD is not being subjected to harsh scrutiny after this is mind-boggling. The department has a budget of almost $11 billion. By way of comparison, that’s more than the entire military budget of Ukraine—currently going punch for punch with Russia in a full-blown land war—and nearly a quarter the size of French military spending, which has significant overseas deployments and the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that doesn’t belong to the U.S. Navy.
Whatever New York cops are doing with that mountain of cash, it clearly isn’t creating a department norm of strict professionalism and efficiency.
The ensuing media debate over how to respond, outside of the knee-jerk “more cops” reaction, was possibly even more stupid. Numerous local reporters hounded Adams for hours about installing metal detectors in subway stations, and eventually on Morning Joe he said that he was looking into baseball stadium–style checkpoints. The fact that this would create gargantuan congestion during rush hour (the New York subway carries more passengers than the entire American airport system) and that massive lines would create a convenient turkey-shoot target for any would-be mass murderer, went unmentioned.
It all demonstrates that despite the hyperventilating media coverage and tough-on-crime posturing, few people in this country are capable of thinking seriously about crime. Even if we set aside the volumes of evidence that welfare benefits, social support programs, and non-police intervention programs can cut crime, and grant for the sake of argument that police departments should be carrying out their appointed role in the criminal justice system, they are manifestly falling down on the job.
According to the NYPD’s own statistics, in 2021 its murder clearance rate (cases that end in an arrest) has ranged between 86 percent in the first quarter to just 55 percent in the third quarter. Lesser crimes like motor vehicle thefts get almost total impunity; they are cleared between 14 and 17 percent of the time. And New York police are comparatively good—in Chicago, for instance, the police got their clearance up past 50 percent in 2021 only by blatantly rigging the statistics. The national murder clearance rate has been falling steadily for decades, down to an all-time low of 54 percent in 2020 (the most recent year for which numbers are available).
In the Nordic countries, by contrast, murder clearance rates range from 86 percent in Sweden to 97 percent in Denmark and Norway to 99 percent in Finland.
Indeed, all this instinctive police worship has created an objectively pro-crime incentive structure for cops. The more crime they fail to prevent, the more politicians will grovel at their feet, and the more money they will get to not do their jobs. America should expect better from people entrusted with their safety.
