New York City police will be waking up people who take naps while riding the subway.
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“If you are sleeping on the subway, you make yourself a very easy victim and much more susceptible to a crime”, Bratton said at a press conference on Wednesday.
He said snoozing passengers can expect a wake-up call from cops to keep them from becoming crime victims.
The commissioner said that sleeping passengers accounted for half of the seven crimes a day on the subway and were more of an issue that knife attacks.
Bratton also said he doesn’t get on the last auto of a train and always stands near a pole, based on his experience as head of the city transit police in the early 1990s.
Crime in the subway is up by 36 percent from last January.
A 71-year-old woman was slashed in the face and one man with a machete attacked a woman after shouting: “I will chop you up on this train!” in front of horrified riders.
There are a number of examples, of incidents that happened just recently. “I can just chop you and they can’t do nothing!” the man told Ms Lewis.
“There’s an aggressiveness that’s taking place in the subways that hasn’t taken place for quite some time”. And they don’t mean much when someone pulls a knife on you in the subway.
While overall crime was down 10 percent city wide, the NYPD reports transit crime for the month of January was up more than 36 percent compared to a year ago. New Yorkers, though, are savvy enough to know that statistics never tell the whole story.
The outbreak of subway slashings and stabbings may have as much to do with the city’s abysmal record of dealing with the violent mentally ill as it does with policing methods.
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Mr Bratton added: “We don’t have somebody moving around the subway system randomly slashing multiple victims”. In his December announcement of the city’s retooled efforts to combat street homelessness – dubbed HOME-STAT to mirror NYPD’s longstanding CompStat system – Mayor Bill de Blasio touted the clearing of 30 homeless encampments, a line that garnered uneasy applause.
