‘We Can’t Continue to Work Like This’ - NYC Transit Workers Demand Safer Conditions

Evangeline Byars (cap) and Angelita Bacchus (glasses) rally alongside fellow MTA Transit workers demanding smart solutions to recent attacks throughout the system. Photos/Steve Wishnia

Thanks for reading! If you value this reporting and would like to help keep Work-Bites on the job, please consider donating whatever you can today. Work-Bites is a completely independent 501c3 nonprofit news organization dedicated to our readers — and we need your support!

By Steve Wishnia

Subway station agent Benjamin Welcome was working in the 2/3 line part of the Wall Street station on Feb. 16, the day Noreen Mallory, a station agent in the 4/5 line section, got her eye socket broken by an enraged man who punched her repeatedly in the face until passengers on an arriving train intervened.

“If the train hadn’t come in, she would have been on the tracks,” he told Work-Bites.

Welcome was one of about 50 transit workers and supporters who rallied outside Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan offices on March 8, demanding that the city restore its separate transit police force to deter assaults on workers. Less than two weeks after Mallory was assaulted, C train conductor Alton Scott was slashed in the neck while his train was stopped in the Rockaway Avenue station in Brooklyn, and on Mar. 6, a conductor on the 4 train in the Bronx was hit on the head with a glass bottle.

“We can’t continue to work like this,” says train operator Evangeline Byars of Stronger Together Rank and File Transit Workers, the group that organized the rally. There should be a police officer on duty in every station, she added.

The city’s 4,300-officer transit police force was merged into the main police force in 1995, during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration. It’s now significantly smaller: There are now “more than 2,500 officers” assigned to the Transit Bureau, police said.

The advantage of a separate transit force is that it would be “dedicated to the subway,” Byars told Work-Bites after the rally. “They’ll know the ins and outs, where the EDPs [emotionally disturbed persons] are, where the people using drugs are.”

“We had our own cops, they knew the system,” says Welcome.

Gov. Hochul’s move to send National Guard troops to help police check passengers’ bags at busy subway stations is only a temporary fix, Byars told the rally. “It is not only the crime. We have a mental-health crisis.”

“We contend that a policing-only solution is insufficient,” Stronger Together said in a statement. The group said the state should “restore funding for mental-health facilities, services, and housing initiatives to tackle the root causes of these incidents.”

Station agent Benjamin Welcome.

Hochul’s plan is “just like a Band-Aid. If you come to the hood, they’re doing nothing. The crime is in the hood,” Angelita Bacchus, a station agent in Crown Heights, told Work-Bites.

According to Bacchus,  she’s been required to spend her workdays inside a “rubber room” at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Lower Manhattan offices since December, when she posted a 12-minute video on Facebook that complained about dangerous working conditions. She says she has not been charged with any rule violations, but has heard that she might be accused of “stealing company time” because she filmed the video in the station booth.

“That is retaliation for speaking up,” Byars told the rally. She said the MTA has missed the 30-day deadline for bringing disciplinary charges against Bacchus.

“You guys are punishing me, but I told you so. Look how many people are being assaulted,” Bacchus says. “Not every assault makes the media.”

Tiara Bromfield, a conductor on the F train, told the rally that she’s been assaulted on the job four times: hit on the head once, spat on once, and pushed twice. The only perpetrator caught, she said, was one of the men who pushed her, who was not charged after he said it was an accident.

Transit workers gather outside the Quill Depot on 11th Avenue on March 8.

She doesn’t think much of another Hochul proposal, to bar anyone convicted of assault from using the transit system for three years. “How are we going to ban people from the system?” she asked.

Welcome says that when he started working in the subways in 1984, violence on the trains was “just criminals.” It got worse during the crack era and has ebbed and flowed since then. Now, he says, violence also comes from mentally ill people, the intoxicated, and homeless people, who can be “more confrontational” when they’re hungry.

“The answer isn’t military,” he says. “You have to have a plan.”

You “can’t fix the problem sitting in an office,” he adds. What worked in the 1990s isn’t necessarily going to work today.

“We have to be all in sync, the workers, police, mental-health services. There has to be communication,” Welcome continues. If someone is lying on the platform with a bunch of bags, “you can’t just ask them if they need help, they say no, and you leave. It has to be a collective effort.”

But “you can’t just throw people in the shelters,” he adds.