The National Guard in New York subways isn’t just bad optics. Even ‘petty’ crime matters to voters.

By Jennifer Graham

Fourteen months ago, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said there had been significant progress in making New York City subways safer. The progress, it seems, wasn’t significant enough. On Wednesday, Hochul announced that the National Guard and State Police would be conducting bag checks at the city’s busiest transit stations in order to combat a recent spate of violent crimes.

While the move may be necessary to keep commuters and tourists safe, it’s an astonishingly bad optic for a Democratic governor to offer her political party as the nation moves past Super Tuesday and looks to the general election. Her announcement comes on the heels of Donald Trump’s victory speech Tuesday, which The New York Times described as “short on celebration or exultation and long on sinister evocations of what he portrayed as a grim fate for the country if President Biden is re-elected.”

As sinister evocations go, however, Hochul has Trump beat. Nothing says “This city is unsafe” as loudly as uniformed soldiers standing watch. Just like nothing says “This country is unsafe” like images of young men crossing an unsecured southern border, or a ransacked “zombie” CVS, its shelves empty because of crime. Maybe this is not a huge problem for Hochul, whose term doesn’t end until 2027, but crime is a problem for Democrats in 2024.

Most discussion of Biden’s vulnerability in the upcoming election has to do with his age, his immigration policies and his failure to find an Israel-Gaza strategy that doesn’t repel young Americans who support Palestine. But crime is also a vulnerability for the president, even though violent crime and property crime both declined in 2023, according to FBI statistics.

Regardless of what the numbers say, many Americans don’t feel safe, and fear — not statistics — is what they’ll take with them into the voting booth. According to Gallup, “More than three-quarters of Americans, 77%, believe there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago, and a majority, 55%, say the same about crime in their local area.”

https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2024/03/06/new-york-city-national-guard-subways-democrats-crime/