One month into his administration and one day after a stabbing aboard a train, Mayor Adams stood beneath the glimmering spaceship atrium at the Fulton Street subway station to roll out his Subway Safety Plan.
The plan, he said in that 2022 press conference, would restore order and rider confidence in the system. One of its major planks was "[r]equiring — instead of requesting — everyone to leave the train and the station at the end of the line."
Three years in, that hasn’t been happening at the biggest terminal in the entire subway system, Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue — the very same chaotic place where Debrina Kawam was burned to death in a horrifying attack in December.
A Streetsblog investigation into the NYPD’s own dispatching data which showed that nearly two-thirds of the calls — 5,850 out of 9,013 — coming from the station between January 2022 and September 2024 were closed out in an average of 13 seconds after they were assigned to a police unit.
Those 13 seconds are 10 times less time than the two minutes it would take someone to walk the length of a 600-foot subway train. It’s also 10 times less time than the roughly two minutes it takes to walk from the fare turnstiles and up the ramp to the closest train platform at the sprawling station in southern Brooklyn.
Also telling: the one-third of the calls that remained open for more than a minute stayed open for an average of 10 minutes and 30 seconds — enough time to actually do the job ... in those one-third of cases, that is.
The chief of the NYPD’s transit bureau, Joseph Gulotta, said the seemingly impossibly fast closure times stemmed from officers quickly filing their reports on their smart phones after removing someone from the system instead of opening the case at the beginning of the interaction, which he said would create a timeline that would appear to be artificially short.
Gulotta acknowledged in the statement that officers “conducting [end-of-line] operations are guided by a common-sense approach, exercising discretion or enforcement when appropriate, while allowing for those who may have simply missed their stops to remain on the train for the return journey.”
Stats provided by the NYPD claim that in the first nine months of last year, cops in that station made contact with 6,272 individuals, 1,935 of whom were transported to shelter, and linked up another 159 connected to medical services — approximately six people a night.
The stats of quick closures and less-than-urgent response to people in need was borne out during several visits to the station during the overnight hours, when the response by police officers and homeless outreach workers should be in full swing. Streetsblog discovered it was anything but.
There were at least two dozen cops and two outreach teams stationed on the platforms or the mezzanines. But only occasionally did they intervene. Instead, a reporter repeatedly observed officers and social workers walking inside the train past people laid out on the seats.
Streetsblog typically saw 20 or more apparently homeless people on each train that rolled during the overnight hours on its visit.
Former cops interviewed by Streetsblog said that Gulotta’s explanation did not square with how the system is supposed to work because it would make response times meaningless and it opens the door to officers having undocumented interactions with the public.
They said the analysis showed that 34th Transit District, which is headquartered in the station, has taken a hands-off attitude when comes to addressing homelessness and mental health crises that have become a defining issue in New York's post-pandemic recovery.
“There's no way in hell, even if you have cops on the mezzanine, that you [can be] closing it out in under a minute. It takes a few minutes,” said Christopher Mercado, a retired NYPD lieutenant who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You're telling me you have enough coverage to get there in a minute? That's rubbish."
Another veteran retired said the on-scene reporting backed up the data analysis indicated an extraordinary hands-off approach by the cops at the station, which should be the focal point of any city response to the crisis by its end-of-the-line nature.
"You went down there and you saw they're just going through the motion,” said the second expert. “It's like one of those football practices where they're just walking through the plays, not making contact or doing anything.
"Whatever they're doing, it's so quick. Nothing is that quick if it involves outreach,” that retired cop added. "Nothing is that quick unless you're shit-canning it."
In a speech delivered last week to business honchos, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch acknowledged that the NYPD needed to step up its quality-of-life enforcement.
"Over the past 10 years, prohibitions against taking up multiple seats, laying outstretched, smoking, drinking alcohol, etc. have not been consistently enforced," Tisch said at the Association for a Better New York event. "This increased the perception of an unsafe system and it needed to change."
A pilot program currently running in Queens will expand to a second transit district: The 34th Transit District.
The horrific immolation of Debrina Kawam occurred as she was sleeping aboard a parked train in the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in December. Security cameras captured the moment when her clothes were lit on fire by the alleged assailant, Sebastian Zapeta, who then fanned the flames with his shirt.
In the immediate aftermath, Mayor Adams faced renewed questions about his effort to tackle the twined crises of homelessness and mental health underground. Indeed, had Kawam been taken off that train, she would likely be alive today.
"Because we didn't enforce the law, because we didn't enforce the rules and regs, by us de-policing, we're allowing for victimization," said Mercado, the John Jay expert. "If she hadn't been allowed to sleep on that train, she wouldn't have been lit on fire."
A growing crisis all over
The NYPD assigned cops to investigate more than 200,000 reports of disruptive behavior or people in emotional distress in the subways from 2018 through September 2024.
The number has ticked up every year that Adams has been mayor, rising from 27,000 in 2022 to a record 29,000 in 2024. That's double the 14,898 calls reported during the first nine months of 2018 and the 16,300 reported in that same period of 2019, before the pandemic struck.
The year-to-year analysis included only the first nine months of each year to ensure consistency because the 2024 data covers only through September.
The data shows that the single station hardest hit by the crises has been Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue, where the number of reports went from 143 during the first nine months of 2018 to an astounding 2,425 over the same period in 2024, an increase of nearly 1,600 percent.
The number of reports is more than any other station in the 472-stop system by at least double. The No. 2 hotspot, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, logged 1,101 complaints over the same period of time. The No. 3 station, another major terminal, Flatbush Ave.-Brooklyn College, had 519.
Of those 2,425 calls at Coney Island-Stillwell Ave. in the first nine months of last year, 1,568, or 65 percent, were closed out in under a minute.
Differing outcomes
Streetsblog discovered a sharp disparity in how cops across the city are handling reports of New Yorkers suffering from mental illness underground.
The calls come into the NYPD's central dispatch in a variety of ways: Cops on patrol can radio in that they have seen something and are responding; MTA staff at the stations can call in complaints (which are typically routed through the subway system's dispatch center in Manhattan); or the general public can phone in a complaint via 911.
There are two ways these calls can be categorized, experts said.
The call may be for someone in emotional distress. This category is reserved for a person who presents an imminent threat to themselves or others — and, crucially, they are high-priority calls that require the dispatching of a supervisor and an ambulance, according to sources and the NYPD patrol guide.
Systemwide, calls for emotionally disturbed people — often called EDPs — have dropped by 20 percent over the last three years, falling from 5,700 in 2022 to 4,500 in 2024.
That’s is the lowest number of EDP calls since 2018, despite the MTA's ridership surveys showing straphangers remain deeply concerned about erratic behavior and violence in the system.
How can they be dropping? The answer can be found in that second category, calls of disorderly behavior, which have soared. This catch-all covers a much broader set of complaints, including a person sprawled out on a train bench or going out between the cars to smoke.
Experts said that this category is frequently used for complaints about homeless and mentally ill New Yorkers who have not met the strict standards that a person present an imminent risk to themselves or others.
There were 10,000 calls during the first nine months in 2018, which jumped to almost 25,000 for the same time period in 2024.
"I'm concerned that the data is getting is getting conflated or miscategorized," said Mercado, suggesting that many calls that should have been categorized as the more serious EDP calls are actually being logged as the simpler "disorderly."
EDP calls require an extra report, known as an "aided report." As a result, beat cops may be calling in some things as "disorderly" to avoid extra paperwork.
"A cop would much rather call it in as a disorderly instead of an EDP," said a veteran retired cop. "You've got supervision, you have to do an aided report. For the most part, no cop with any experience would invite unnecessary paperwork unless they absolutely have to."
Last stop
The massive Stillwell Avenue station serves as the terminus for four lines — the D, F, N and Q — a design that reflects travel patterns of a century ago when Coney Island was the summer getaway for those seeking a reprieve from New York’s swelter.
The Boardwalk has faded, but the station remains a key part of the subway network. At terminals such as Coney Island, trains can spend 10 minutes or more at the platforms, which has made them a focus — going all the way back to the mayoralty of Ed Koch — for efforts to get the homeless and mentally ill off trains. Attempting to diagnose a person’s condition while a train is moving through the system — when the doors are opening and closing every couple of minutes, when people are jostling around and squeezing in and stepping off — is incredibly difficult.
The end-of-the line has a second advantage for doing homeless outreach on the subway system. By policy, everyone must exit the train at the end of the line so the MTA can change train crews and its cleaners can scrub the trains.
It’s in the regulations that govern the subway system, a set of rules that also bans passengers from creating “a nuisance, hazard or unsanitary condition (including, but not limited to, spitting, defecating, or urinating, except in facilities provided)”; sleeping or dozing if it interferes “with the operation of the authority's transit system or the comfort of its passengers”; occupying more than one seat; or failing to follow the orders of the train operators and conductors, including the directions to exit the trains at the last stop.
The Police Department has been charged with enforcing those rules since it merged with the old Transit Authority Police in the 1990s.
The whole dance among exiting passengers, changing crews, train cleaners, cops and social workers unfolds at Coney Island hundreds of times a day, every day of the week. The trains roll in and then, a few minutes later, roll back out, toward Manhattan and its glittering skyscrapers, which are visible in the distance.
On a recent frigid February night, just after a snowfall, train after train pulled into the transit complex, with conductors calling out on the train PAs "last stop, last stop, last stop." But the trains weren’t cleared. And it wasn’t for lack of manpower.
There were a large number of cops on duty in the station. And there were also at least two homeless outreach teams there from the Bowery Residence Committee, a longtime social services nonprofit that continues to receive substantial contracts from City Hall, which were worth $120 million in the most recent year, to run shelters and perform homeless outreach despite a slew of investigations questioning their effectiveness.
Many of the cops clumped together on the mezzanine or in the middle of the platforms; while pairs walked the platforms.
Sometimes they would either poke their heads inside the trains or walk through the cars. Occasionally, they would wake up someone stretched across the seats. But, during that early morning, most of the time they left them alone and walked right past them.
The story repeated with the Bowery Residence Committee teams, which are there to convince needy New Yorkers to get off the trains and come into the shelter system.
They walked the platforms, too, past cars where homeless New Yorkers were plainly visible and sleeping. Sometimes, they walked into train cars and directly past sleeping New Yorkers who were clearly homeless.
Not all were asleep. Sometimes the shouted rants from those awake and aboard could be heard echoing through the station. The cops sometimes responded to them. One man, who had covered himself in a blanket, was escorted from a train by cops and then bolted ahead of them and down the ramp.
He was later spotted outside the station alone and muttering to himself. The Bowery Residence Committee bus to a city shelter was parked a few feet away.
In another instance, a BRC team told a homeless person nodding off on a train to sit up or the cops may boot him off, in an interaction that was witnessed by the reporter, who just a few feet away on the platform. The BRC outreach worker then moved on, never offering the person shelter.
The trains that arrived that early morning often had 20 or more apparently homeless people on board. Even if the police and Bowery Residence Committee teams worked the train, typically no more than one or two people were removed.
Most often, the trains rolled back out of Coney Island and toward Manhattan with the needy people who were aboard when they arrived, shelters on wheels in the richest city in the country.
"End-of-line operations are under the joint command of MTA and the city, with specific roles assigned by them to police and to outreach," Bowery Residence Committee said in a statement. "Under these protocols, the police are to board trains and engage clients, offering to connect them to the outreach workers should they want assistance, or to remove them from the train and the station if they refuse."
The statement said that teams assigned to the station had removed 12 people from the trains during that overnight period.
What unfolds at Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue stands in sharp contrast to what the MTA's own teams, known as SCOUT, do at the end of lines. The SCOUT teams of nurses and MTA police officers ask each person to clear the train, offer on-site connections to shelter and treatment and evaluate the mental fitness of people who refuse to comply to see if they meet the standard for removal and commitment.
When asked about the police presence at Coney Island, a top official in the union that represents the train car cleaners offered up a description that was nearly identical to what the Streetsblog reporter saw that evening.
“Think about it, there’s somebody acting crazy, they’re acting erratic, they [the cops] come over they talk to them, they calm down for the minute, then they have to leave them alone,” said Matt Ahern, the Transport Workers Union Local 100’s Vice President for Car Equipment Division.
“What do you want them to do,” he added. “In that sense, it looks like it was swept under the rug, but you can’t clear him out, he’s sleeping there.”
