NYC Transit Workers Demand ‘Common Sense Solutions’ to On-the-Job Attacks
“An Injury To One, Is An Injury to All: Transit workers fed up with being attacked on the job rally outside Governor Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan offices on April 4. Photos and Video/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
Problematic policing in the subways and a chronic inability to care for emotionally disturbed New Yorkers in need of help are the major reasons why MTA employees are going to work fearing attack, according to those Work-Bites spoke to recently.
“They need to put MTA cops back in the subways because the cops that they have are street cops — they don’t know what’s going on,” veteran MTA Transit worker Ciara Bromfield told Work-Bites on Thursday.
Bromfield was part of a small group of Transit workers who returned to New York State Governor Kathy Hochul’s Third Avenue offices in Manhattan on April 4, to once again demand elected officials finally get smart about the ugly on-the-job attacks Transit workers are being subjected to on a daily basis.
“If it keeps going the way it’s going, there’s going to be a murder,” New York City train operator and Stronger Together Rank and File Transit Workers Organization spokesperson Evangeline Byars warned Work-Bites in February.
Just a few days later, a 58-year-old MTA conductor named Alton Scott narrowly averted death in Brooklyn after an unknown person ran up to him at the Rockaway Avenue station and slashed the A-train operator across the neck.
Luckily, according to published reports, Dr. Patrick McGrory was riding the same A train a couple of cars away and came running to the motorman’s rescue after Scott managed to get out a call for help on the PA.
MTA train operators employ coded horn signals meant to alert police when there’s trouble aboard. But Bromfield told Work-Bites the NYPD cops patrolling the subway system don’t respond to those horn signals.
“There's a code that we blow on the horn when we need police to respond to the train, and they never respond to the train,” Bromfield said. “I've come in, and they've been at my position, and I'm like, ‘Ya’ll don't hear us blowing for help?’ And they're like, ‘Oh, we thought ya’ll were blowing the horn for each other.’ They don't even know what's going on — so, it's like they can't respond to the train because they don't know.”
NYC Transit workers march on Governor Kathy Hochul’s Third Avenue offices this past Thursday.
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani merged the 4,300-strong NYC Transit Police force with the NYPD back in 1995. Today, there are somewhere around 2,500 officers assigned to the Transit Bureau.
Even when the cops do respond to MTA Transit workers in distress, Bromfield said they often do not offer much help.
“I have people threatening me [all the time],” she said. “A guy was laying across the seats and I'm like, ‘You cannot lean across the seats; can you please get up?’ He started yelling…cursing. I saw the police and told them — and he’s threatening me in from of the cops.”
Instead of ejecting the abusive person from the system, Bromfield said the officers’ solution was to “take them off one train, and put them on the next one.”
“Plenty of times the cops have held our train doors to put [disturbed] people on because they don't want them on the platform,” she said. “So, until they start dealing with the homeless problem, and start dealing with the migrant problem, and start dealing with the emotionally disturbed person problem — it’s not going to get better.”
Work-Bites reached out to the NYPD for a comment on this story and is awaiting a response.
Brooklyn Bus driver Nasar Abdurrahman has seen a lot in his 13 years on the job. On Thursday, he told Work-Bites the New York City Transit system has become “inundated” with emotionally disturbed people not getting the care they need.
“When I started the job back in 2011, I didn't see this type of energy in the city,” he said. “I think it's gotten worse. I think the quality of life has deteriorated. I’ve had a few run-ins with emotionally disturbed people inside the bus and outside the bus who want to attack the bus and try to maybe break the windshield.”
Station agent Angelita Bacchus is still serving time inside an MTA “rubber room” after speaking out online about the regular abuse she and her co-workers are enduring on the job.
“We are the face of the MTA — so the homeless affect us, the fare-beaters affect us, the EDPs [emotionally disturbed persons] affect us,” Bacchus told Work-Bites. “Everything is in our face…we too, are going to become ‘EDP’ employees because we can’t take it — it's too much.”
Bacchus further said she feels like she’s trapped in an abusive relationship with the MTA.
“I want to go back to work. I have to pay my bills. I can't leave. But I don't want to deal with all this abuse,” she said.
Last summer, the NYC Coalition for the Homeless put out a report advocating reopening all inpatient psychiatric unit beds that were diverted to COVID-19 care during the pandemic, and assuring that “all admissions, whether for observation or inpatient care, include full care management and discharge planning services.” The same report also stressed expanding access to “low-barrier physical and mental health care, including virtual care and street medicine.”
In January, The City reported that 629 of the 850 mental health beds Gov. Hochul promised to return to New Yorkers had been restored — about half of them in NYC.
The State of New York, meanwhile, “lost” nearly 1,850 psychiatric unit beds between 2014 and 2022 — falling from 9,320 to 7,471.
Resources alone isn’t the problem, according to Bromfield.
“I can't say more funding, because there are [homeless] advocates that come down into the subway,” she said. “And the problem they're saying is that they can only offer the help — they can't make people take it. And it's comfortable for [the homeless] to live in the subway — so what's gonna make them take the help?”
Bromfield offered a possible answer.
“It has to be the police telling them, ‘No, you can't sleep on the train. No, you can't ride all day.’ It has to be in conjunction with the Police telling them you don't have this option. But as long as they have the option to sleep on the train all night, they're not going to take the help.”
Abdurrahman said many Transit workers throughout the system are suffering from PTSD and other serious anxiety disorders as a result of the abuses they suffer on the job.
“There's a lot of depression,” he said. “I think the morale is really down across the Transit system in terms of the rank and file workers.”
Last month, the governor ordered hundreds of heavily armed National Guardsmen and New York State Police Troopers into the subway in response to the gruesome attack on Scott and other violence across the system.
JP Patafio, vice-president of Transport Workers Union Local 100 — the union representing New York City Transit workers — was at a NYC-DSA Town Hall on public sector organizing also on Thursday when he talked about the “knee-jerk” reaction to call for more law enforcement.
“We’ve also gotta be able to lead with a different type of agenda — rather than just saying, ‘Bring in the National Guard,’” he said.
Outside the governor’s offices on Thursday, however, Bromfield told Work-Bites “Everything is a joke, and everything that they’re doing to help us is a joke on top of that.”
“I work at 179th Street on the F train,” she said. “I saw [National Guardsmen] one time. Most of the time they're at Grand Central and 34th Street — stations where people aren't really doing anything because there’s already a heavy police presence there. Why would you not put the Guard out everywhere? They're not everywhere. And even these cops that are out…they’re just standing in our positions…coming in — like, you're not even paying attention to us!”
Byars said this week that consultations between Transit workers and “key high-ranking officials in the NYPD” about how to effectively deal with subway violence have already produced positive results.
“We’re demanding that common sense solutions be implemented and that the governor and [Mayor Eric Adams] talk to the people that are affected and who are bringing the solutions and the answers,” she said.