#NYC mayoral hopeful Eric Adams says too many transit cops are doing desk work

The NYPD needs to yank cops out of offices and onto the transit system, mayoral candidate Eric Adams said Tuesday.

“Too many officers are performing clerical duties, and they are in units that do not directly impact public safety,” Adams, a former transit cop himself, said during an appearance outside West 4th Street Station with members of Transport Workers Union Local 100.

“These officers could be on patrol, playing a visible function of dealing with the fear that’s in our subway system,” he said, in reference to the spike in transit crime since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adams, the currently Brooklyn borough president, said the administrative responsibilities at NYPD’s Transit Bureau should be handled by civilians.

“That’s just not a good use of manpower and deployment, we have to rethink this,” he said. “It’s time for the mayor and the NYPD to deploy their officers effectively, to take them out of clerical roles — to move from being reactive to become a proactive police.”

The current polling frontrunner in June’s Democratic mayoral primary also said that as mayor he’d work to install security cameras in every high-crime subway station — calling the lack of cameras at stations “an 8-track mindset in an iPhone age.”

Adams hopes to restore NYPD Transit’s homeless outreach unit, he said. He also called on the city to better utilize Kendra’s law, which permits judges to compel a person with serious mental illness to take meds or submit to supervised psychiatric treatment.

“Let’s not wait until someone carries out an act that’s dangerous to the public and themselves,” he said. “The city must work with the MTA to institute these measures immediately.”

TWU Local 100, which represents nearly 40,000 transit workers, has endorsed Adams.

Adams’ comments come amid a spate of violent crimes in the subway system, and as the MTA calls on the city to put even more cops underground to deal with the issue.

The subways saw 2.32 felony crimes per million riders in March 2021, the most recent data available — versus just 1.47 per million riders across 2019. The NYPD has responded by sending more officers to patrol trains and stations.

Adams called on the city to add another “500 to 600” more cops to “stabilize” the system.

“The more we see that omnipresence [of cops], we’re going to decrease the anxiety, increase the trust — then you can reevaluate where you are and redeploy,” he said.

“But right now we’re at a critical stage where passengers don’t trust the system, they don’t want to ride the system and many of our transit employees are being assaulted, harassed and not treated with the level of respect that they deserve.”