Lev Radin/ZUMA Press Wire / SplashNews.com
MTA chief Janno Lieber seems bent on infuriating the entire city.
First came his Saturday celebration of the midnight start of the much-despised $9 “congestion” toll on entering Manhattan below 60th Street.
Then on Monday, the first commuting day under the new tolls, he used a “Bloomberg Surveillance” interview to . . . gaslight on subway crime.
“Some of these high-profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten in people’s heads and made the whole system feel unsafe.”
In people’s heads. Feel.
Is anything more offensive than “it’s just your imagination”?
He then doubled down, bragging, “The overall stats are positive. Last year we were actually at 12½% less crime than 2019, the last year before COVID.”
First, ridership is still down more than 12½%, so per-capita overall crime is still up.
Plus, this assumes crime is reported as often now as it was then, when the difficulty in comparing crime stats is one reason experts call homicides the gold standard for measuring crime — it always leaves a corpse.
And the subways are producing a lot more dead bodies these days: 43 these last few years, since COVID hit in March 2020; it took the prior 20 years to total so many.
Plus, the 2024 total was higher than the previous two years’, so the underground murder rate isn’t even dropping.
And it got worse: Lieber next talked fare evasion, which is indeed a “gateway crime” of subway disorder and peril — but he pretended that spending up to a billion on new turnstiles will make a real difference, when testing has shown they can’t.
The only answer is better policing and serious prosecutions, not burning cash on bogus technocratic fixes (including the million bucks it’ll burn on that absurd “personas” study of farebeaters).
At a time when New Yorkers are hurting from the MTA’s toll cash-grab, Lieber first gaslit about the subway’s No. 1 problem, crime, then bragged about stupid MTA spending that plainly won’t help.
Some advice, Janno: Instead of digging a deeper hole, call out the politicians who actually created this crisis.