Seeing more NYPD officers in the subway? We explain what’s happening.

New York City subway riders may have noticed more police officers on subway platforms in recent weeks.

The reason: a swirl of local and state initiatives aimed at making commuters feel safer.

Subway crime has trended down for several years, according to police data, but several high-profile violent attacks in recent months have rattled commuters. Gothamist set out to break down where NYPD officers and National Guard troops will be stationed, what they’ll focus on and how much it will cost New Yorkers.

What’s new about the way police are patrolling the subway?

City and state initiatives have increased the number of officers underground and changed where they’re posted.

Officials haven’t said how long the increased patrols will last, but MTA Chair Janno Lieber has said he hopes it could be permanent. In an interview with the watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission last week, he complained that past police surges into the subways tended to “disappear.”

“ We need those cops to stay. So that's something I'm thrilled that the governor and the police commissioner and City Hall seem to be working on,” he said.

Here’s what’s underway:

More officers at high-crime subway stations

NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in January that she was assigning 200 more officers to the 50 highest-crime subway stations. That’s on top of the 2,600 uniformed officers normally assigned to the subway system, according to budget reports. A recent analysis by the civic group Vital City found that less than 10% of the city’s hundreds of subway stations accounted for half of all violent crime underground.

More state funding for officer overtime

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state is going to pay half of the overtime costs for an equivalent of an extra 1,000 officers patrolling the subways. How to assign most of these officers will be up to the NYPD. Hochul said the state payments will last for six months, but she said she will likely extend them into the future.

Onto trains and platforms

Tisch said she wanted to move officers away from the turnstiles, where they mostly focused on fare evasion, and onto the trains and platforms.

“It's all part of a strategy to refocus our subway efforts to the places where the crime is occurring,” she said in January. “We know that 78% of transit crime occurs on trains and on platforms.”

More officers overnight

Part of Hochul’s state funding for the extra 1,000 overtime shifts is to put two officers on all 150 overnight trains in the transit system between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Tisch said the NYPD would be able to accomplish this by the end of last month. An NYPD spokesperson declined to say if that target was met or if all the officers required for it have been trained, though the department indicated that “hundreds” have been trained so far.

According to David Sarni, a retired NYPD detective and current professor at John Jay College, training is needed because patrolling subways is different from regular street patrols. He said it requires knowing the dangers of the subway tracks, tactical considerations when confronting people on moving trains, and possible communications problems underground.

The National Guard will stick around

Last year, Hochul posted National Guard soldiers to transit centers and bridges around New York, including in the subway stations. According to a spokesperson for the governor, the soldiers will remain in the transit system for now.

On any given day, there are as many as 1,000 troops in the subway system, officials said. But because the National Guard members have to be paired with NYPD officers, they are limited by NYPD staffing and can only be stationed across 150 subway stations a day, said Hochul’s spokesperson Maggie Halley.

Officials said the soldiers are meant to provide a presence and an extra pair of eyes while NYPD officers conduct random bag searches. These soldiers are typically armed with pistols and stand outside of subway turnstiles. They are paid for by state taxpayers.

Why all these added police officers?

Subway crime has fallen over the last couple years, and was down 8% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the NYPD. Overall crime also fell in the first month of this year, compared to January last year.

But several high-profile incidents have recently ignited fear among passengers.

In December, authorities said a man set a sleeping woman on fire on an F train at Brooklyn’s Coney Island station, burning her to death. That was followed by an incident where police said a man shoved another man onto the tracks as a train was pulling into a Chelsea subway station in the middle of the day. The man who was shoved survived but suffered multiple injuries.

So far, support for the plan to add officers to subway trains overnight has cut across party and racial lines, and has been especially favored by those living in the suburbs and older New Yorkers, according to a recent Siena College poll.

“Over the last several years, it has become a significant issue for voters,” said pollster Steve Greenberg. “People's reaction trails the actual statistics. So even though over the last year or two, crime statistics show that crime is going down, people are not feeling that yet.”

Where did these new officers come from?

Most officers were moved into the transit system from community affairs units, counterterrorism, and police headquarters jobs, according to transfer orders.

Sarni of John Jay said the list includes mostly people doing desk jobs, not patrolling or investigating crimes.

But at a recent community meeting in Manhattan’s Midtown North Precinct, NYPD Deputy Inspector Robert Gault said the new subway initiatives have caused him to assign new rookie officers away from addressing complaints about people living illegally in three buildings on 49th Street, in order to send them into the transit system.

“Which I don’t think is a bad idea,” he said. “I think people need to feel safe traveling.”

The police union, however, has complained that these kinds of reassignments frustrate officers and lead them to quit.

“New Yorkers shouldn’t have to choose between safe streets and safe subways,” Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry said in a statement. “Reassigning cops to boost subway patrols not only leaves gaps in coverage elsewhere in the city — it will also worsen the NYPD’s historic staffing crisis by driving even more talented police officers out the door.”

How will these officers interact with the public?

In announcing the additional 200 officers assigned to subway stations, NYPD Commissioner Tisch said their focus would be less on fare evasion and more on crime prevention.

She also announced a new quality-of-life pilot program on Queens trains aimed at enforcing subway rules, like those against drinking alcohol or sleeping on the train.

“Our officers will not simply walk by someone who is violating the law and disrupting passengers," she said last week. "We are going to correct the condition.”

An NYPD spokesperson declined to offer specifics on the program.

The police union criticized Tisch's comments, saying that enforcing minor violations puts officers at risk of misconduct complaints because elected officials have largely decriminalized many of these offenses.

“If quality-of-life enforcement is going to be a priority, the NYPD must work with lawmakers to change those policies first, so that police officers aren’t needlessly putting our careers or safety in jeopardy,” said Hendry, the union president.