“It Didn’t End Well!” New York City Mayor Blamed for “Cops, Camera, Care” Initiative

In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and its city’s mayor, Eric Adams, had a plan called “the three Cs.” This acronym stands for “Cops, Cameras, Care” and was a solution to New York’s subway crime rates. However, over a year later, the ‘solution’ seems to have become an even bigger problem. 

The “Cops, Cameras, Care” initiative first came up as a way to tackle the increase in subway crimes. From 2021, there was an almost 40% increase in reported felonies in its subways. Understandably, this caused a lot of panic when tabloids made this their headlines. There were also several high-profile cases, which further increased the hysteria among residents. 

Therefore, Hochul and Adams hatched the three C’s plan. According to their vision, adding more cops to the subways will, in turn, reduce crime significantly. So, they made a couple of budget cuts and generated about $151 million for this purpose. 

With this money, they hired more than a thousand cops and increased their pay significantly for them to patrol the subways. This sounds like a pretty good idea from the outside, so what went wrong?

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First, there were a lot of budget cuts that angered residents. For example, unlike before, the New York City public library is now closed on Sundays. To make matters worse, the “Cops, Cameras, Care” initiative does not seem to be working.  

According to reports, assaults in the subways increased by 5% compared to last year’s stats. Furthermore, the issue of racism has increased in subway cases. 82% of those ticketed for fare evasion were people of color. 92% of those arrested were also people of color. 

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Therefore, some of these cops only use this medium as an opportunity to be racist. This only makes taking the subway more dangerous for people of color. Fare evasion also did not reduce significantly, even with more cops in the subways. 

According to several experts, the government is hyper-focused on reducing the more minor crimes and not the more violent ones. The media also plays a massive role in this, giving these minor crimes more attention than notorious ones. 

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Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis spoke to Prism last year concerning this issue. “The media dramatically over-cover low-level crime by the poor. So, you see local news media every single day all across the country, in the national media as well, constantly talking about shoplifting, robbery, carjacking, shootings, and things like that. When you compare them to the leading causes of suffering and death in the U.S., [low-level offenders are] minuscule contributors.”

Therefore, many believe it would be better if the government channeled funds into improving the lives of citizens. Molly Griffard, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, also argued this in June with the New York Times. She said, “You have people who genuinely cannot afford the cost of transit because they cannot afford the cost of living in New York City.”

“There’s this sort of kneejerk reaction to just rely on policing our way out of a problem that police can’t solve,” she concluded. 

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