New York reinstituting bag checks in fight against subway crime

New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said Tuesday his city is reinstituting bag checks in the fight against crime on the subway.

“[W]e are reinstituting bag checks,” Adams said at a Tuesday press briefing. “There’s several things that we are reinstituting in the system.”

Adams said that bag checks would restart in “a week or so” when asked about a timeline.

Adams’s announcement follows a shooting at a subway station last month in which one person was killed and five were wounded, according to The Associated Press. The shooting stemmed from a dispute between two groups of teenagers.

“We don’t believe this was a random shooting. We do not believe that this was an individual indiscriminately firing into a train or a train station,” Michael Kemper, the NYPD’s chief of transit said, according to the AP.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) also announced a five-point subway safety plan Wednesday “to rid our subways of people [who] commit crimes and protect all New Yorkers.” 

The plan includes actions like deploying nearly 1,000 law enforcement members to conduct bag checks in “the city’s busiest transit stations” and proposing that New York law be amended “to allow courts to ban anyone from riding the subway or taking a bus, who’s convicted of a violent crime against another passenger,” according to Hochul.

“I’m not here today to talk to you about numbers and tell you stats and statistics about what’s going up or what’s going down, I’m here to take action,” Hochul said. “Because that’s what the situation requires.”