New York’s subways are suffering from an old, familiar plague: broken windows. For the first half of the year, the Daily News reports,
the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has recorded
485 smashed windows, costing nearly $300,000—including 47 destroyed on
just one July day. The MTA has also lost $1.2 million worth of
digital-screen property to vandalism this year. Old-time New Yorkers who
rode the trains before their mid-1980s renaissance will remember
spider-vein windows and doors as a ubiquitous part of commuting—along
with something grimmer: the threat of violent crime. It’s no surprise,
then, that a bloom of broken windows is coinciding with a surge in
criminal attacks on people riding on or working in subways.
The pandemic’s first five weeks saw three murders in the subway system; now comes a fourth, the gruesome death
of 57-year old Dwayne “Bilal” Brown, pushed to the subway tracks and
killed by a train as he tried to break up a fight on a Harlem platform
earlier this month. The last time New York’s subway system saw four
murders in one year was in 2007—and 2020 is barely half over. Moreover,
2007 was an aberration. Over the past 23 years, the subways have seen an
average of just over two people murdered each year...........
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