Hochul Sends National Guard and State Police to Conduct Bag Checks in NYC Subway

Soldiers from New York's National Guard are headed to the city's subway stations, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Wednesday. The Democratic governor said 750 Guard members, joined by state and MTA police officers, will be posted at busy stations to inspect riders' bags as part of a new push against transit crime.

Speaking at a news conference, Hochul said the deployment is meant to reassure passengers after a series of high-profile violent incidents in the subway. Riders who are stopped must agree to a bag check to enter a station, she explained. They are free to decline, but will then be turned away. "They can refuse," she said. "We can refuse them. They can walk."

The troops come from a National Guard unit known as Joint Task Force Empire Shield, and Hochul's office confirmed they will wear camouflage while carrying out the checks. The governor and her office had previewed the plan earlier in the week, promising extra state personnel to supplement Mayor Eric Adams' plan to put another 1,000 NYPD officers in the subways.

Hochul rejected comparisons between the bag checks and the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk practices, describing them as an "absolutely different dynamic." She argued the visible presence of more officers could discourage people from carrying weapons. "They might be thinking, 'You know what? It just may not be worth it,'" she said. She declined to say how long the random checks would last, saying she would not "telegraph to would-be criminals the date this may stop."

The plan has several other parts. Hochul is seeking a new law that would let judges bar anyone convicted of assaulting a passenger from using public transit for three years, though that needs approval from the Democrat-led state Legislature, which has not yet taken a position. She also said the MTA is installing more cameras, including one in each train car, and that the person who slashed a conductor's neck on the A line last week, still at large, would have been caught had such a camera been in place.

She also announced an expansion of SCOUT teams, which pair mental health professionals with police officers to reach people with severe mental illness on streets and in the subway. Launched by the city and state as a pilot, the program will receive $20 million in expanded funding by the end of 2025, Hochul said. The MTA reported that in the past 75 days, the teams had involuntarily hospitalized 15 people, given medical treatment to 15 others and placed 45 people in Safe Haven shelters.

Reaction was mixed. Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Richard Davis, who criticized MTA officials last week over the conductor's attack, said MTA Chair Janno Lieber and other leaders were "late to this conversation." He said the union had warned for months about violence against its members and was ignored, leaving both riders and workers to suffer.

Danny Pearlstein of the Riders Alliance called the move "well-intentioned" but said it was "more likely to increase the perception of crime among people who don't ride public transit than to protect the millions of riders and workers." He urged more investment in housing, healthcare and other social services. The New York Civil Liberties Union called the plan "overreaction and overreach." Executive Director Donna Lieberman said such tactics would, like stop-and-frisk, be used to profile Black and Brown New Yorkers and do nothing to address homelessness, poverty or access to mental health care.

NYPD data show subway crime fell 2.6% in 2023 from 2022, yet more people were assaulted on the transit system last year than in any year since at least 1996. January figures show a 46.7% rise in subway crime compared with the same month in 2022.