by Paul Theroux
It is the obvious vandalism on the subways that conveys the feeling of lawlessness. Indeed, the first perception of subway crime came with the appearance of widespread graffiti in 1970. It was then that passengers took fright and ridership, which had been declining slowly since the 'fifties, dropped rapidly. Passengers felt threatened, and newspapers gave prominence to subway crime. Although the 'CC' line is over thirty-two miles long a passenger will be alarmed to hear that a crime has been committed on it, because this is his line, and the proprietorial feeling of a rider for his line is as strong as a jungle dweller for his regular path. Subway passengers are also very close physically to one another, but this is a city in which people are accustomed to quite a lot of space. On the subway you can hear the breathing of the person next to you—that is, when the train is at the station. The rest of the time it is impossible to hear anything except the thundering of the train, which is equally frightening.
"Violence underground attracts more coverage in the papers, but it is foolish to imagine the subway is some sort of death trap." This statement was not made by anyone in the New York Transit Authority, but by Nadine Joly, the twenty-eight-year-old head of the Special Paris Metro Security Squad. She was speaking about the Paris Metro, but her sentiments are quite similar to those of Edward Silberfarb of the Transit Authority Police.
"The interest in subway crime is much greater than in street crime," Mr Silberfarb said. "Crime actually went down six per cent in September, but the paper reversed the statistic and reported it as having gone up. Maybe they're looking for headlines."
The most frequent complaint of subway passengers is not about crime. It is, by a wide margin, about delayed trains and slow service. The second largest category of complaint is about the discourtesy of conductors or token-sellers; and the third concerns unclean stations. "Mainly the smell of urine—it's really horrible at some stations," said Mr Huber of the Transit Authority.
The perception of crime is widespread, and yet statistically the experience of it is quite small.
"But what do those statistics matter to someone who is in a car and a gang of six guys starts teasing and then threatening the passengers?" the New York lawyer, Arthur'S. Penn remarked to me. "Or that other familiar instance—you get into a car and there's one guy way down at the end sitting all by himself, and the rest of the people are crowded up this end of the car. You know from experience that the man who's sitting alone is crazy, and then, when the train pulls out, he starts screaming..."
Discomfort, anxiety, fear—these are the responses of most passengers. No wonder people complain that the trains are too slow: when one is fearful, every trip takes too long. In fact, these are among the fastest subway trains in the world. Stan Fischler, in his enthusiastic history of the system, Uptown, Downtown (1976) gives fifty-five mph as the top speed of an average express, such as the Harlem-Bronx 'D'. The train going by sounds as if it is full of coal, but when one is inside, it can feel like a trip on "The Wild Mouse."
People's fears can be at odds with reality. It is interesting that the two most famous movies with New York subway settings, The Incident (about a gang terrorizing a group of passengers on an express), and The Taking of Pelham 1–2–3 (about the hijacking of an IRT train) are both preposterous. But as fantasies they give expression to widely-held fears of subway violence. (The famous chase in The French Connection starts at Bay 50th on the B-line and finishes deep in Bensonhurst on the West End line.)
Some people do get mugged—about twelve thousand a year. I asked a uniformed police officer what reaction he got upon entering a car. "A big sigh of relief," he said. "You can actually hear it. People smile at me. They're relieved! But the ones who are the most pleased to see me are the handicapped people and the old people. They're the ones who get mugged mostly."
That is the disgraceful part: the victims of subway crime are most often the old, the mentally retarded, the crippled, the blind, the weak. The majority of victims are women. Minorities comprise the next largest category of victim: a black person in a white area, an hispanic in a black area, a white in an hispanic area, and all the other grotesque permutations of race. Of course, the old and handicapped are also minorities, regarded as easy targets and defenseless. But cities can turn people into members of a minority group quite easily. What makes the New Yorker so instinctively wary is perhaps the thought that anyone who boards the wrong train, or gets off at the wrong stop, or walks one block too many, is capable of being in the minority.
The most-mugged man in New York must be the white-haired creaky-looking fellow in Bedford-Stuyvesant who has had as many as thirty mugging attempts made on him in a single year. And he still rides the subway trains. He's not as crazy as the looks: he's a cop in the Transit Police, a plainclothesman who works with the Mobile Task Force in the district designated "Brooklyn North." This man is frequently a decoy. In the weeks before Christmas he rode the "J" and the "GG" and the "2" lines looking like a pathetic Senior Citizen, with two gaily wrapped parcels in his shopping bag. He was repeatedly ambushed by unsuspecting muggers, and then he pulled out his badge and handcuffs and arrested his attackers.
Muggers are not always compliant. Then the Transit Police Officer unholsters his pistol, but not before jamming a colored headband over his head to alert any nearby uniformed officer. Before the advent of headbands many plainclothesmen were shot by their colleagues in uniform.
"And then we rush in," says Sergeant Donnery of the Mobile Task Force. "Ninety per cent of the guys out there can kick my ass, one on one. You've got to come on yelling and screaming. 'You so-and-so! You so-and-so! I'm going to kill you!' Unless the suspect is deranged and has a knife or something. In that case you might have to talk quietly. But if the guy's tough and you go in meek you get sized up very fast."
The Transit Police have three thousand officers and thirteen dogs. It is one of the biggest police forces in the United States and is separate altogether from the New York City Police, though the pay and training are exactly the same. It is so separate the men cannot speak to each other on their radios, which many Transit Police find inconvenient when chasing a suspect up the subway stairs into the street.
What about the dogs? "Dogs command respect," I was told at Transit Police Headquarters. "Think of them as a tool, like a gun or a nightstick. At the moment it's just a test program for high-crime stations, late night hours, that kind of thing."
I wondered aloud whether it would work, and the reply was, "A crime is unlikely to be committed anywhere near óne of these dogs."
The Canine Squad, doing its part towards taking a bite out of crime, is housed with a branch of the Mobile Task Force at the underground junction of the LL and GG lines—Metropolitan Avenue. The bulletin board on the plainclothesmen's side is plastered with Unit Citations and Merit Awards, and Sgt Donnery of the Task Force was recently made "Cop of the Month" for a particularly courageous set of arrests. Sgt Donnery is in charge of thirty-two plainclothesmen and two detectives. Their motto is "Soar With the Eagles". A sheaf of admiring newspaper clippings testifies to their effectiveness. As we talked, the second shift was preparing to set out for the day.
"Morale seems very high," I said. The men were joking, watching the old-man decoy spraying his hair and beard white.
"Sure, morale is high," Sgt. Donnery said. "We feel we're getting something accomplished. It isn't easy. Sometimes you have to hide in a porter's room with a mop for four days before you get your man. We dress up as porters, conductors, motormen, track-workers. The idea is to give the appearance of being workers. If there are a lot of robberies and track-workers in the same station we dress up as track-workers. We've got all the uniforms."
"Plainclothesmen" is something of a misnomer for the Task Force that has enough of a theatrical wardrobe to mount a production of Subways Are For Sleeping.
And yet, looking at Howard Haag and Joseph Minucci standing on the platform at Nassau Avenue on the GG line you would probably take them for a pair of physical education te
achers on the way to the school gym. They look tough, but not aggressively so; they are healthy and well-built—but some of that is padding: they both wear bullet-proof vests. Underneath the ordinary clothes the men are well-armed. Each man carries a .38, a blackjack and a can of Mace. Minucci has a two-way radio.
Haag has been on the force for seventeen years, Minucci for almost seven. Neither has in that time ever fired his gun, though each has an excellent arrest-record and a pride in detection. They are funny, alert and indefatigable, and together they make most television cops look like hysterical cream-puffs. Their job is also much harder than any City cop's. I had been told repeatedly that the average City cop would refuse to work in the conditions that the Transit Police endure every day. At Nassau Avenue, Minucci told me why.
"Look at the stations! They're dirty, they're cold, they're noisy. If you fire your gun you'll kill about ten innocent people—you're trapped here. You stand here some days and the cold and the dampness creeps into your bones and you start shivering. And that smell—smell it?—it's like that all the time, and you've got to stand there and breathe it in. Bergen Street Station—the snow comes through the bars and you freeze. They call it 'The Ice-Box'. Then some days, kids recognize you—they've seen you make a collar—and they swear at you, call you names, try to get you to react, smoke pot right under your nose. 'Here come the DT's'—that's what they call us. It's the conditions. They're awful. You have to take so much crap from these schoolkids. And your feet are killing you. So you sit down, read a newspaper, drink coffee, and then you get a rip from a shoe-fly—"
Minucci wasn't angry; he said all this in a smiling ironical way. Like Howie Haag, he enjoys his work and takes it seriously. A "shoe-fly", he explained, is a police-inspector who rides the subway looking for officers who are goldbricking—though having a coffee on a cold day hardly seemed to me like goldbricking. "We're not supposed to drink coffee," Minucci said, and he went on to define other words of the Transit Police vocabulary: "lushworker" (a person who robs drunks or sleeping passengers); "Flop Squad" (decoys who pretend to be asleep, in order to attract lushworkers); and "skell" (an unwashed person who lives in the subway).
Just then, as we were talking at Nassau, the station filled with shouting boys—big ones, anywhere from fifteen to eighteen. There were hundreds of them and, with them, came the unmistakable odor of smoldering marijuana. They were boys from Automotive High School, heading south on the GG. They stood on the platform howling and screaming and sucking smoke out of their fingers, and when the train pulled in they began fighting towards the doors.
"You might see one of these kids being a pain in the neck, writing graffiti or smoking dope or something," Howie Haag said. "And you might wonder why we don't do anything. The reason is we're looking for something serious—robbers, snatchers, assault, stuff like that."
Minucci said, "The Vandalism Squad deals with window-kickers and graffiti. Normally we don't."
Once on the train the crowd of yelling boys thinned out. I had seen this sort of activity before: boys get on the subway train and immediately begin walking—they leave the car immediately, bang through the connecting doors and walk from car to car. I asked Minucci why this was so.
"They're marking the people. See them? They're looking for an old lady near a door or something they can snatch, or a pocket they can pick. They're sizing up the situation. They're also heading for the last car. That's where they hang out on this train."
Howie said, "They want to see if we'll follow them. If we do, they'll mark us as cops."
Minucci and Haag did not follow, though at each stop they took cautious looks out of the train, using the reflections in mirrors and windows and seldom looking directly at the rowdy students from Automotive High.
"They play the doors when it's crowded," Minucci said.
Howie said, "Schoolkids can take over a train."
"Look at that old lady," Minucci said. "She's doing everything wrong."
The woman, in her late sixties, was sitting next to the door. Her wristwatch was exposed and her handbag dangled from the arm closest to the door. Minucci explained that one of the commonest subway crimes was inspired by this posture. The snatcher reached through the door from the platform and, just before the doors shut, he grabbed the bag or watch, or both; and then he was off, and the train was pulling out with the victim trapped on board.
I wondered whether the plainclothesmen would warn her. They didn't. But they watched her closely, and when she got off they escorted her in an anonymous way. The old woman never knew how well-protected she was and how any person making a move to rob her would have been hammered flat to the platform by the combined weight of Officers Minucci and Haag.
There were men on the train, drinking wine out of bottles sheathed in paper bags. Such men are everywhere in New York, propped against walls, with bottle and bag. A few hours earlier, at Myrtle—Willoughby, I had counted forty-six men hanging around outside a housing project, drinking this way. I had found their idleness and their stares and their drunken slouching a little sinister.
Minucci said, "The winos don't cause much trouble. It's the kids coming home from school. They're the majority of snatchers and robbers."
Subway crime to a large extent is schoolboy crime. So much for the Mafia. But some New York schoolboys are the very embodiment of menace.
Minucci went on, "On the LL line, on Grant Street, there's much more crime than before, because Eastern District High School relocated there. It's mostly larceny and bag snatches."
It is worth pointing out that what is called larceny in the subway might be called something else in the street. Necklace-yanking, which was very popular in the summer of 1981 (because of the high price of gold and the low necklines), was called "Robbery" in the street but "Grand Larceny" in the subway. If a so-called lushworker robs a sleeping drunk of his watch, the Transit Police have a choice not only between "Robbery" or "Grand Larceny", but if they want to bring down the crime statistics they can call it "Lost Property"—after all, the drunk did not see the thief and might well have lost it.
It was a salutary experience for me, riding through Brooklyn with Officers Minucci and Haag. Who except a man flanked by two armed plainclothesmen would travel from one end of Brooklyn to the other, walking through housing projects and derelict areas, and waiting for hours at subway stations? It was a perverse hope of mine that we would happen upon a crime, or even be the victims of mugging-attempt. We were left alone, things were quiet, there were no arrests; but for the first time in my life I was traveling the hinterland of New York City with my head up, looking people in the eye with curiosity and lingering scrutiny and no fear. It is a shocking experience. I felt at first, with bodyguards, like Haile Selassie; and then I seemed to be looking at an alien land—I had never had the courage to gaze at it so steadily. It was a land impossible to glamorize and hard to describe. I had the feeling I was looking at the future.
Some day all cities will look like this, the way they appear from the windows of the el or the tunnels of the subway. You can see in New York how parts have become more dangerous and fiercer and other parts have softened or become richer. A large section of the Bronx has been levelled. There is no crime in that bare place. Some sections of Queens are very pretty, and blocks of Manhattan on the upper west side have become trendy. In most of Brooklyn the situation is different—haunted and awful—and you can well believe that there are people, not evil people but hopeless ones, who live and die on the dole and never know a day's work. In this patchy pattern the city will go on changing, one district breeding savages and another breeding bankers, until it is ten cities in one, some fortified, and others neutral and still others totally wild.
Propped up by the plainclothesmen, unafraid, and sticking near the subway, I saw New York in a way I had never seen it before. What surprised me most, after seeing the housing projects and the desperate idleness and the rather fierce and drugged-looking people on these derelict frontiers, was that they had not wre
cked more of the subway or perhaps even destroyed it utterly.
"It's not the train that's dangerous—it's the area it passes through."
The speaker was a uniformed Transit Police Officer named John Burgois. He was in his mid-thirties and described himself as "of Hispanic origin." He had four citations. Normally he worked with the Strike Force out of Midtown Manhattan in areas considered difficult—34th and 7th, 34th and 8th, and Times Square. Officer Burgois told me that the job of the uniformed cop is to reassure people by being an obvious presence that someone in trouble can turn to. The Transit cop in uniform also deals with loiterers and fare evaders, assists injured people and lost souls, keeps a watch on public toilets ("toilets attract a lot of crime") and as for drunks, "We ask drunks to remove themselves."
I asked Officer Burgois whether he considered his job dangerous.
"Once or twice a year I get bitten," he said. "Bites are bad. You always need a tetanus shot for human bites."
One of the largest and busiest change-areas on the subway is at Times Square. It is the junction of four lines, including the Shuttle, which operates with wonderful efficiency between Times Square and Grand Central. This, for the Christmas season, was John Burgois's beat. I followed him and for an hour I made notes, keeping track of how he was working.
4:21—Smoker warned (smoking is forbidden in the subway, even on ramps and stairs).
4:24—Panicky shout from another cop. There's a woman with a gun downstairs on the platform. Officer Burgois gives chase, finds the woman. She is drunk and has a toy pistol. Woman warned.