Robberies on New York City's trains and buses have jumped 21% compared with the same period last year, with 128 muggings recorded as of April 5, up from 106, and experts warn the numbers will climb further as summer approaches and police staffing stays thin.
The spike arrives just weeks after Mayor Mamdani's administration slashed overtime that had funded 300 additional officers deployed to subway patrols in January. Those officers, assigned two per train on overnight shifts, were put in place under former Mayor Eric Adams to combat crime and improve the perception of safety. February's budget cuts pulled them back, and the robbery count has reflected the gap ever since.
An NYPD spokesman tried to soften the numbers, telling the New York Post that last year set an all-time low for transit robberies and that the current count is "only two more incidents so far this year than in 2019." But that framing papers over a broader picture that riders and officers describe in far harsher terms.
Robberies tell only part of the story. Misdemeanor assaults in the transit system rose 12%, from 395 to 441. Petty larceny climbed from 46 to 57. And murders on the system jumped from zero at the same point last year to three so far in 2025.
Felony assaults did dip 6%, from 171 to 160. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch pointed to that kind of selective good news last week, citing a 5.3% drop in citywide crime and a 1.3% drop in subway crime as of March 29.
But measured against pre-pandemic 2019, the picture looks very different. Assaults in the transit system are up 60% compared with that year. And citywide, the comparison is equally stark: Fox News reported that NYPD data showed homicides were up 21% at the end of last year compared with 2019, robberies up 26%, felony assaults up 35%, and motor vehicle thefts had nearly tripled.
Retired NYPD Sgt. Pete Panuccio, a 39-year veteran, captured the mood many riders share:
"There's a sense of disorder, a sense of decay, and what I like to call palpable fear. Those are things you can't quantify, but people are scared again."
The statistics land differently when you're the one standing on a platform at night. Claude Butler, a 62-year-old dispatcher for Charter Communications who lives in Harlem, said he feels compelled to stay on the defensive underground.
"Just this morning I had to come with my wife because I don't feel it's safe for her to ride alone. A lot of times, when I'm not with her, guys approach her. Sometimes they brush up against her."
Butler said he mainly sees officers stationed inside subway stations, not riding the trains where crimes actually happen. "I don't see them on the trains... they should ride the trains," he said.
Ronald Stokes, a 55-year-old assistant superintendent for NYCHA who also lives in Harlem, echoed that complaint. "The safety on the trains is not good right now," Stokes said. "They need to ride the trains... to stand outside the station is one thing but to ride the trains would be a big help."
Samanteer Beckford, a 32-year-old from the Bronx, was blunt: whatever is being done to protect straphangers is not enough. "The homeless are an issue," she said. "More needs to be done."
These are not political commentators. They are working people, a dispatcher, a building superintendent, a young commuter, describing what they see every day. Their testimony matters more than any press conference stat sheet.
One recent incident illustrates the kind of brazenness riders fear. Three friends riding a Bronx subway car were set upon by a gang of eight strangers who beat, kicked, and cut them with a knife, then stole their electronics. The NYPD reported that 34% of robbery incidents so far this year were committed by juveniles, a detail that raises its own set of questions about accountability and consequences for young offenders in a city that has steadily loosened its approach to juvenile crime.
Separately, three attacks on straphangers on a recent Saturday, described as involving a machete-wielding assailant, underscored the randomness and severity of violence riders now face. The NYPD noted that 63% of robbery incidents this year have led to arrests, but that figure offers cold comfort to the other 37% of victims whose cases remain open, and even less to riders who wonder whether arrested suspects stay behind bars.
The January-to-February timeline is important. Under Adams, the NYPD flooded trains with 300 extra officers at the start of the year, targeting overnight shifts where riders are most vulnerable. The robbery increase in January and February still ran 54% above the same period last year, but NYPD data showed incidents trending downward in March, a sign the patrols were beginning to bite.
Then Mamdani's administration cut overtime, and the extra patrols shrank. The mayor had campaigned in part on cutting the NYPD's budget, including shuttering the department's Strategic Response Group, which handles protests and counter-terrorism. Pulling back subway overtime was consistent with that campaign posture, but it left trains less protected at the exact moment robbery trends were starting to improve.
A longtime Bronx police officer, speaking without giving his name, connected the transit crime problem to another Mamdani-era policy: congestion pricing. "It's really bad because people are pretty much forced to take the subway because of congestion pricing," the officer said. "Now they're forced to walk around with their heads on a swivel."
That observation deserves more attention than it has received. Congestion pricing was sold as an environmental and traffic measure. One of its predictable side effects is pushing more commuters underground, into a transit system where robberies are climbing and police presence is being reduced. The people absorbing that tradeoff are not Manhattan professionals who can expense a cab. They are outer-borough workers with no alternative.
Former NYPD Detective Michael Alcazar, now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, comments about what lies ahead.
"It's concerning because summer is coming. I think that just shows that the police department is really short on uniformed officers. I'm sure the bad guys are realizing that too."
Alcazar said criminals are adapting to reduced patrol patterns. "They can almost predict where police are going to be and they're timing it," he said. His forecast was direct: "I think robberies are going to increase because there's going to be more riders and there's going to be more bad guys, especially in the subway."
His prescription was equally direct: "We need to have an omnipresence." In plain language, that means enough uniformed officers on trains, on platforms, and in stations that a would-be mugger cannot calculate a safe window to strike. That is the opposite of what overtime cuts produce.
The broader budget picture makes Alcazar's warning more urgent, not less. Mamdani's administration has already retreated from a major property tax hike and pivoted to agency belt-tightening as the city faces a record budget gap. When the money is tight and the mayor's instinct is to cut police spending, subway patrols are an easy line item to trim, and an impossible one for riders to replace on their own.
Commissioner Tisch's selective statistics, the 5.3% citywide drop, the 1.3% subway dip, are the kind of numbers designed for a podium. They compare this year to last year, when transit robberies hit an all-time low. Measured against 2019, before the pandemic reshuffled crime patterns, the trajectory looks far worse.
Panuccio, the retired sergeant, put it simply: "If you compare it to 2019, the crime jump is staggering." That is the baseline most New Yorkers remember, the last time the city felt roughly normal.
Meanwhile, the mayor who promised to reshape city transit is presiding over a system where a 62-year-old man feels he has to escort his wife onto the train every morning. Where three friends can be surrounded and cut with a knife on a Bronx car. Where a third of the people committing robberies are juveniles who may face few real consequences.
Mamdani's early tenure has already been marked by a pattern of ambitious promises followed by quiet retreats, on housing vouchers, on property taxes, on free buses. The NYPD overtime cuts fit that pattern, except the consequences are not abstract. They show up in emergency rooms, in police reports, and in the daily calculations of millions of riders deciding whether to keep their phones in their pockets and their heads on a swivel.
New York City's leaders can cherry-pick whichever year-over-year comparison flatters the press release. But the people riding the 2 train at midnight don't get to pick their baseline. They get the subway they're given, and right now, they're getting less protection, not more.
When the policy is to cut cops and the result is more robberies, the only people surprised are the ones who never ride the train.
