How safe is Times Square? It depends on who you ask.

On a recent Sunday morning, Asiff Hossai was manning a sunglasses display in a Times Square tourist shop when a man suddenly walked in, grabbed a pair of shades, and slammed them to the ground.

They broke apart instantly. Hossai and his coworker exchanged a look.

“This is just the way things are here,” he said quietly, sighing as he bent down to pick them up. The man had already left as Hossai struggled to place the broken lenses back in the frame.

Hossai says he’s uneasy about Times Square because he thinks it's getting more dangerous and more chaotic. Complaints about crime, homelessness and sanitation in Times Square have reached levels not seen in over a decade.

Between Jan. 1, 2022 and May 1, 2025, more than 2,800 sanitation-related complaints were made to 311 about the ZIP code 10036, which includes Times Square — more than a 200% increase from the pre-pandemic tally of around 880 during a similar time period, from Jan. 1, 2016 to May 1, 2019. Complaints via 311 made to the Department of Homeless Services have jumped 92% and complaints to the NYPD, which include noise, encampments, drug activity, panhandling, graffiti and “non-emergency police matters,” have risen 73% compared to that same time period.

Concerns about trash, homelessness and crime are not unique to Times Square – they’re also up citywide, according to data from 311. But Times Square, long seen as the symbolic heart of New York, has become a “barometer” for the city’s overall condition, according to Manhattan borough historian Robert Snyder. It’s a place where many of the city’s triumphs and growing pains are visible all at once in the area that includes Broadway theaters, corporate headquarters, hotels and more. The Times Square Alliance defines Times Square as the area between 7th and 9th Avenue and between 40th to 53rd street.

And while many of Times Square’s business leaders, the Broadway League, and homicide statistics suggest the area’s the safest it has been in years, over a dozen people working in Times Square and interviewed for this story say they feel increasingly uneasy in the neighborhood.

Criminologists suspect the cause may be a phenomenon called "disorder," or the idea that visible signs of unlawful, alarming or desperate behavior can create a sense of fear. Local employees across the area, from hot dog vendors to retail workers, say they believe Times Square is becoming dirtier, seedier or more unsafe. They say they’re seeing more garbage, drug use, petty crime and homelessness.

Some criminologists and historians say that this disorder is due to policies that have shifted over the last decade, such as decriminalizing some forms of public drug use. But others say these perceptions of disorder are fueled by implicit biases and influenced by a slow post-pandemic recovery and Trump-era politics.

‘You can never trust Times Square, anything can happen here’

Hossai said he switched to the morning shift in March after he heard about a man who was doused with gasoline and lit on fire in Times Square.

“When I worked the night shift, we all had to clock out together, at 1:30 a.m., and travel as a group to the subway,” said Hossai, 34, who moved from Bangladesh two years ago to pursue a master’s degree in information systems at Baruch College.

Hossai said that it wasn’t just the high-profile violent crime that left him uneasy at night. He felt uncomfortable entering the subway because he physically had trouble stepping over homeless people sleeping underground.

“It’s a horrible situation,” he said. “When I visited in 2019, I didn’t see so many. But it’s all gone downhill since then.” Other incidents have rattled him, too: He grew upset when remembering how a man tried to pickpocket his wallet last month.

“You can never trust Times Square, anything can happen here,” he added.

Rifat Nabil, 28, who also works at a nearby tourist shop, described a “night and day difference” between 2018, when he first visited the city, and today. In the last two years since working in the area, he said he’s seen a rise in visible mental health crises on the street.

Bronx-born Debbie Rodriguez, 32, said she’s worried about walking through the area at night when she clocks out at Old Navy. She said she’s heard about instances of pickpocketing nearby in the last few years.

Peter Nyango, 50, who works with the hop-on hop-off bus tours, has observed more litter since the pre-pandemic era.

“It’s just getting dirtier,” said Nyango, gesturing to trash scattered across the sidewalk.

“There’s a lack of enforcement of laws,” said Brendan O’Shea, 36, adding that he saw more people causing “chaos” who law enforcement officers rarely asked to leave.

“Look at these costume characters,” said Anthony Camacho, 27, a lifelong New Yorker who works at the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe. He pointed to a few people dressed as Mickey Mouse, hoping to charge money for a photo op. Camacho said he believed many of the characters were pressuring parents into taking a photo.

Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, the neighborhood’s business improvement district, said he understood these concerns. But he noted that actual levels of homelessness and crime have declined in the Times Square area over the last decade.

Times Square benefits from a dedicated police presence, and over 50 public safety officers are specifically assigned to the area. Violent crime there — which includes murder, rape, robbery and assault — has gone down in Times Square compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to Times Square Alliance reports based on NYPD data, with the amount of violent crime in 2024 almost half what it was in 2015.

Despite all these efforts, Times Square has made headlines for a series of violent crimes: gunmen shooting local food vendors, several people getting slashed and bitten on the street overnight, and the man getting set on fire, which especially frightened Hossai. In May, a video of teenagers brawling with and beating police officers went viral, and Mayor Eric Adams said they were members of an offshoot of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. A 2023 article in the New York Post called Times Square a “s—hole.”

While many New Yorkers have long avoided Times Square, due to its crowds and tourist-centric activities, the coverage around the area is a far cry from 2017, when news outlets celebrated its $55 million transformation into a pedestrian-only space.

‘People assume the worst things can happen, and they grow fearful’

Harris speculated that the decriminalization of some behaviors — most famously cannabis usage and, more recently, the use of hypodermic needles — might play a role in people's perceptions of Times Square.

“I don’t know that everyone has realized that [having] hypodermic needles used to be illegal. Now it is not,” he said. “We get some complaints of hypodermic needles on the ground…especially on the fringes of Times Square between Eighth and Ninth avenue.”

But it’s not just open drug use that has alarmed people who live and work there. Several local workers interviewed said they were uncomfortable when they heard somebody screaming on the street. Others described seeing what looked like human feces in the subway station, or stairs covered with litter near an entrance to the 2 train.

More than a dozen people interviewed for this story described seeing more trash, more visible drug use, and more individuals appearing to be struggling with mental health issues – all adding up to what criminologists call “disorder.”

Andrew Karmen, who has been a sociologist and criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice since 1978, acknowledges that disorder caused by what some see as unpleasant public behaviors can have a powerful psychological effect — even if violent crime is not increasing.

“Sometimes that’s what drives people away, rather than gunshots,” he said. “There’s no doubt that open drug use can create this sense of disorder. But it's hard to document. It just becomes background noise.”

“When people are walking around high and acting out of character, people assume the worst things can happen, and they grow fearful,” said Karmen.

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who is also a criminal justice professor at John Jay, says that crime stats don’t tell the whole story. Crime isn’t necessarily down, he said. Reported crime is down.

Nationally, he said, over half of crime goes unreported. Locally, he believes just as many people are dialing 311 rather than filing police reports. Some of these complaints are solely based on a “gut feeling,” he said, about people who appear dangerous.

“When you’re passing somebody that looks like they’re twitching and angry, that usually goes unreported,” said Moskos. “But that fear is real. And it shouldn’t be ignored.”

Moskos blames this sense of rising “disorder” on policy shifts that have taken place in the last decade but have especially manifested post-pandemic. They include bail reform, legal public drug use, open container leniency, and less enforcement of minor infractions like fare evasion, noise complaints and jaywalking.

“It’s not just about the violation itself,” he said. “It’s about the environment it creates.”

He said public drug use is especially becoming more visible in Times Square.

“Today, the cops aren’t policing public drug use like they were before,” he said. “People will say, oh, it’s your middle-class bourgeois values that make you upset when you see people shoot up on the subway steps. But it’s like yeah, people shouldn’t be shooting up there.”

Moskos said that many of his neighbors are uncomfortable having these kinds of conversations, fearing it will sound reactionary or elitist. “But a lot of people being victimized and scared do not look different than a lot of the people causing the problems,” he said. “This is not a white problem. It’s a New York problem.”

The result? People feel vulnerable. “There’s this idea that nobody’s actually in control in the situation, and when anything goes, it creates this scary sense of a great unknown,” he said. “All you know is that there are people around you that are up to no good and you just hope you’re not a target.”

Moskos said that while social services are important, so is a level of legal enforcement, adding that there is now a reluctance among police officers to address low-level offenses.

“This is a policy issue. It’s a leadership issue. It’s about picking up the trash, it’s about arresting the actual criminals,” he said. “Ending late-stage capitalism? Good luck with that.”

An NYPD spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment about officers not responding to low-level offenses.

Local government, for its part, is escalating efforts to tackle quality of life issues. In July, Adams and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg jointly announced the creation of a Midtown Community Improvement Coalition, which brought together 20 city agencies to tackle issues ranging from retail theft to the mental health crisis to illegal cannabis shops. In January, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch vowed to quash low-level crime by creating a new NYPD Quality of Life division. Tisch’s efforts aim to tackle issues in the subway and the streets, including aggressive panhandling, public urination, street vending and more.

“The NYPD’s newly launched Quality of Life Division is a citywide public safety initiative focused on enhancing trust between communities and the police while addressing everyday issues that impact New Yorkers' sense of safety and well-being,” a NYPD spokesperson said in an email. “It will tackle persistent quality-of-life concerns such as noise complaints, illegal parking, homelessness-related issues, outdoor drug use, aggressive panhandling, and other issues that affect New Yorkers’ everyday life.”

Other criminologists say that what really drives disorder is a lack of social services, rather than a lack of policing. There have been major cuts to the city’s budget for mental health care and affordable housing support in recent years, and federal cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency are only threatening them further.

Karmen warned that people in Times Square might be entering another era of “compassion fatigue,” where sympathy for homeless or mentally ill people gives way to frustration and punitive policies. It originally played out in the 1990s, he said, when the Giuliani administration launched a “zero-tolerance” approach to quality-of-life infractions, which Karmen said was based on intimidation and harassment.

Instead of “unleashing the police” on minor violations and “driving these people to the fringes, out of sight,” he said the city should focus on helping marginalized people and tackling the city’s systemic issues.

“Things will never get solved unless you tackle the root causes, and we’re going in the wrong direction,” he said.

“There always needs to be an enemy”

An outpouring of research in recent years, both in New York and nationally, has indicated that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born individuals, but at least one person with a large platform says differently.

President Donald Trump has said that migrant gangs are terrorizing Times Square. He has also repeatedly blamed unlawful immigration for the country’s violent crimes, drug problems and decline in living standards. Several people who work in Times Square and who were interviewed for this story echoed these sentiments.

Times Square’s demographics have changed in the past five years compared to pre-pandemic times. There are fewer white-collar office workers and fewer foreign tourists. Times Square has also been an epicenter for the migrant crisis. More than 210,000 migrants have come to New York City since the spring of 2022, and several hotels there have been repurposed as migrant shelters in the past three years.

The city began closing many of the Times Square shelters last year, and one of the main migrant shelters, the Roosevelt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal, is slated to close in June.

Criminologists, however, said that blaming crime or social issues on migrants is not accurate. Moskos said that it's true there was genuine crime within migrant shelters, and pointed to a suspected group of pickpockets in Times Square — one of whom is only 12 — but added that migrant crime has gone down within the last year, and that there wasn’t necessarily a spike in crime when migrant families came to the city.

Karmen agreed that many people conflate crime with migrants, when there is little or no correlation.

“There are people from other countries hanging out on the street and people think that’s scary, especially when their president is saying they’re the worst of the worse,” said Karmen. He added that the pandemic was a catalyst for fraying community bonds and creating a sense of otherness.

He said that it’s common during election times to see politicians sensationalizing crime in order to appeal to voters: “Fear is being systematically exploited, and people are getting a message from the top that things are worse than they are,” he said.

“There always needs to be an enemy.” said Duane Jackson, a longtime Times Square merchandise vendor who serves on the Times Square Alliance’s Board of Directors.

Jackson recalled the Times Square of the 1970s, which was full of abandoned buildings and peep shows.

“People are yearning for the yesteryears, thinking it was good — it wasn’t,” he said.

‘A lot of implicit biases are playing out here’

Many experts interviewed for this article believe that the public perceptions of Times Square can be partially explained by shifting politics.

“What's happening in Times Square, seems to me, an insight into larger national politics,” said Prithi Kanakamedala, a CUNY professor who specializes in the history of New York’s Black communities. “A lot of implicit biases are playing out here.”

She added that working-class immigrants and homeless people have historically been blamed for perceived dips in the economy or in safety.

Kim Hopper, a Columbia professor who has studied New York’s homeless population since 1979, said his recent research showcases a slow “hardening” of attitudes toward street homelessness – despite the fact that the city has made progress in building shelters and sometimes creating affordable housing.

“What the public actually sees is evidence of what hasn't worked or hasn't been attempted with sufficient resolve,” he said in an email. He said that people are more likely to notice homeless people in Times Square now because there is less crime.

‘If you were there at the time’

Fears about Times Square’s decline may or may not be overblown but to long-term residents, they are not hypothetical.

“The experience of the 1970s and ‘80s left a mark on people's perceptions, if you were there at the time,” said Lynne Sagalyn, a Columbia professor who studied the area post-pandemic and is the author of “Times Square Remade.” She added that many locals fear that the area will slip back “to those terrible, dark, dirty days” pre-Giuliani.

In those times, the homicide rate was much higher. Over 1,820 homicides were recorded citywide in 1980, versus only 377 recorded in 2024, despite the population growing by over 1 million people.

“It's an indelible impression of the past that shaped Times Square, the reaction to Times Square,” she said.

CUNY’s Kanakamedala said that if people are observing more litter, more homelessness and more drug use, this is a reflection of economic woes, not issues of immigration or crime.

“I think a lot of New Yorkers are hurting after the pandemic, it feels like a cost-of-living crisis, even if it's not framed as such,” said Kanakamedala.

She hopes that this time, the backlash could spur the city to invest in social services that focus on the wellbeing of all New Yorkers.

Karmen recalled the palpable fear people had about the area when he began working as a criminologist at John Jay in the 1970s.

The answer, he said, is more social services, which are currently being cut both federally and citywide.

“None of this is new,” he said. “We’ve known what we need to do for the last 50 years.”