NYC NOW - New York City’s Crackdown on Subway Sleeping, Explained

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

New York City police are taking a skyrocketing number of people to criminal court for sleeping or spreading out on the public transit system. WNYC public safety reporter Samantha Max joins us to understand how this is affecting New Yorkers, and why charges were up 3000% last year. Photo: Samantha Max Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Iruik Panobi in for Jenae Pierre. New York City Police are taking a growing number of people to criminal court for sleeping or spreading out on the public transit system. We'll head down into the subways with reporter Samantha Max to talk about what's going on and what New Yorkers think about it. But before we get into that, here's your local news headlines. Starting today, June 1st, New Yorkers who don't meet new federal work rules will lose their food assistance benefits, known as SNAP.

SNAP recipients between 18 and 64 years old had three months to meet new work requirements imposed by the Trump administration, or else lose their benefits. City officials estimate that about 43,000 people are at risk of losing their aid by today's deadline. But it's not too late to take action, even if you're not. your benefits have been turned off. The city has set up resources for volunteer opportunities and says SNAP recipients can get their benefits back if they show they're working towards compliance. If you want to hear more about this, take a listen to last Wednesday's episode of NYC Now. You know how the railing of the subway stations are painted dark green? Well, this week, they're getting some new color. The MTA is painting the railings of subway entrances around Madison

Square Garden in the Knicks blue and orange and ahead of the start of the NBA finals. The Subway System's iconic station globes will also be converted into basketball-themed lamps. The Knicks are headed to the NBA finals for the first time in 27 years. They'll be facing the San Antonio Spurs in a Best of Seven series for a shot at the championship. The Knicks haven't won a championship since 1973. 30-year-old Joseph Nelze, who lives in Bushwick, is suing the global consulting firm Accenture. he says that company fired him because of his dreadlocks.

Nelze, who was black, worked at the company for seven years. And in his discrimination suit, he says that he was promoted repeatedly until he grew dreadlocks as an expression of his Rastafarian faith. The lawsuit alleges that senior personnel told Nelze his dreadlocks would be a major barrier to advancement and that he was instructed to turn off his video during virtual meetings. Accenture employs nearly 800,000. thousand workers worldwide. Nelze's complaint states that his job at the firm was terminated less than two months after he raised formal complaints under the pretext of company downsizing.

Accenture didn't respond to questions about the lawsuit. Right now, New Yorkers can help pick the official theme song for the city's new 2K child care program. Five finalist jingles were chosen with help from Cardi B and Lynn Manuel Miranda. voting is open through Wednesday. Court cases for sleeping on the subway have skyrocketed in the past year. But do New Yorkers feel any safer? Janay talks with WNYC's Samantha Max about that. Up next. Welcome back. New York City police are taking a growing number of people to criminal court for sleeping or spreading out on the public transit system. Data analyzed by WMYC shows that court cases for these types of violations have skyrocketed since NYPDs.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced a crackdown on transit and quality of life offenses last year. WMYC reporters Samantha Max has been looking into this, and before we dove into our findings, she and I went to the West Ford Station and chat with riders about how safe or unsafe they feel on the subway. Santiago Uribe has lived in New York for 10 years and says he generally feels safe while riding the trains. I think in 10 years here, I've maybe had two experiences where I genuinely felt unsafe. As someone who wants police to help keep our city safer, that's not really what I think the priority should be at. Joseph Scorsia says he didn't even know people were getting arrested, but he is in support of sleeping passengers being moved elsewhere.

They're asleep, and I wish they would wake him up and get him up because they take a lot of room and a lot of space, and they're not supposed to be there. For Clarice Robinson, it's a bit more complicated. I feel like bad for people that maybe need to sit, and then I also feel bad for the person that's there. Like, I don't know what circumstances that they're dealing with. Hey, Sam. Hey, Jena.

So tell me how you first found out that this was happening to folks. Yeah, I was actually in Chinatown talking to homeless people for a different story that I was working on, and this one person that I spoke with just randomly mentioned to me that he kept getting arrested for sleeping on the train, which really kind of stuck in my head. And from there, I looked up at the guy's name and a state database for court cases. And I found a pending case where he had been charged with taking up two seats on the subway. I went to the state court system's website and was able to download a database.

And I used that data to find all the court cases where the most serious charge was someone taking up more than one seat or lying down on the subway, the bus, or in a transit facility. And then I also got in touch with another person who had recently been arrested while sleeping on the train. Yeah, let's talk about Chris Madigan. Chris is 44. He's from the Bronx, and he's been struggling with addiction for a long time. I've been trying to get off for a while. It's really ups and downs. I'll be sober for a while, I've been wanting to, but haven't been able to. He told me he's been trying to get off of drugs for a while, and he has his ups and his downs. And he's been arrested in the past for minor crimes related to his addiction.

It's minor petty thefts. Stealing to get food, to get clothes, to get the drugs that he needs. And then a few months ago, around 3.30 a.m. on February 22nd, you might remember that was just hours before a massive blizzard-blanketed about two feet of snow on the city. Chris was on the train looking for somewhere to stay warm. He says he was also under the influence that night. So I was doing pretty bad that day, apparently, and it just became worse and worse. He fell asleep.

NYPD officers woke him up at the 86th Street station on the Upper West Side, and they escorted him onto the street in handcuffs and ultimately took him into custody. It just, it seems like such a waste. I mean, like I said, it's not like anybody's doing anything wrong. It's just trying to find a place to be warm. Sometimes, like I said, with me, it's not even about going down there to go to sleep. Sometimes it's going to go somewhere. You fall asleep a little bit.

You end up a few stops further than you're meant to go. Or even, you know, sometimes you fall asleep and you just kind of go with it. You know, and then you end up being awoken by police. Yeah. I mean, sometimes people are out late and they just doze off, right? Exactly. Now, Sam, I understand that you got the body camera footage from that night. Tell me what you saw.

Yeah, so I watched the footage in court. It shows police yanking. Mr. Madigan off the train by his jacket. They stopped him from getting back onto the train. And then he tried to sit on a bench in the station, started to lean over, and police told him he could not lie down. He couldn't sleep there.

And then the video shows police dragging him around on the floor of the station, cuffing him, walking him up the stairs onto the street. Wait, Sam, they threw him out. onto the street on one of the coldest days of the year? Yeah, I mean, I will say it was not as cold as it was going to get. It hadn't started snowing yet, but it was, the temperature was dropping, and he was wearing no shoes, only socks.

And you can actually hear him in the video as he's walking up the stairs with no shoes on, saying, oh, no, oh, no, and he told me after the fact that he just remembered his feet being so cold that they hurt. And then he gets upstairs and, you know, they actually went to take off the cuffs and they were like, just don't go back down there because if you do, you'll be arrested for trespassing. And then you can hear Madigan saying in the footage with an expletive that he has nowhere else to go. And the officer tells him, oh, well, you could have gone to another station.

And then you see in the footage Madigan looking over its shoulder and spitting things. toward the police officer. So then he ended up being charged with aggravated harassment, and he ultimately pleaded guilty to the non-criminal violation of disorderly behavior. Oh, wow. When you started digging into the data, you realized that this was a pattern, right? Like, arrest had jumped from last year. Yeah, so I was able to look at this over the span of a few years, and most years it was only

like a handful of these cases. In 2024, there were 19 cases where sprawling out in the transit system was the most serious charge. Last year, there were almost 600 of these cases. And that trend has continued into this year. When I looked at these numbers, we had the data for the first three months of the year. And I saw that those types of court cases outpaced already the first three months of last year. And also, those numbers are likely in underage. undercount because they only include cases where the person went before a judge and where the person wasn't charged with any more serious crime. So even Madigan's case would not have been included in this data set since he ultimately was charged with something more serious. Yeah. And I have to admit,

I was really surprised to hear about this because this isn't a new thing, you know, people getting in trouble from lying down on public transit. Yeah, I mean, it is something that has kind of ebbed and flowed over the years. Back in 2009, under then Mayor Bloomberg, transit officers issued nearly 9,000 tickets to people who occupied more than one seat on public transit. That's according to news reports from the time. But then, you know, flash forward a few years later, when then Mayor de Blasio is in office, he swore off the approach and urged police to prioritize more serious crimes. And that was a strategy that, The Manhattan DA at the time also agreed with. I should note those were tickets. A ticket is

different than arresting someone, cuffing them, taking them into custody and bringing them before a judge. Yeah. And then as I was saying, between 2021 and 2024, hardly anyone was taken to court when the most serious charge was sprawling out in public transit, according to the court data that I looked at. And of course, you know, at the height of the pandemic, ridership plummeted. So that could have played somewhat of a role. But to see such a huge jump from, by the time we got to 2024, when we saw 19 of these cases, we were several years past the pandemic at that point. Ridership had gotten back to more normal levels. And there still was such a huge jump between 2024 and 2025.

I still wonder why, though. Yeah, well, one thing that changed is we got a new police commissioner. So in January 2025, just a couple months after Jessica Tisch becomes the police commissioner of the NYPD, she announces a surge of officers to police the train system. The subways will always be a bellwether for public safety in New York City. And while we have seen crime reductions on our trains, we're not where we need to be. She also announced a new division addressing quality of life issues, things like aggressive panhandling, public urination, and lying down on the subway. It gives the impression of an unsafe community.

And data shows that these arrests started to rise just around when Tish made these announcements. And we're talking about nearly 600 cases, but I'm wondering, like, who makes up those cases? There's a lot that we don't know about them because this data, is anonymous, but there are some pieces of information that we do have. We know that most defendants in the subway sprawling cases are people of color. Since 2021, more than half of the people who went to court on a top charge of lying down or spreading out in transit were black. That's according to a data analysis that I did of the court data. We know that at least some of these people are homeless. Something that I found out in my reporting is that not having a valid ID can sometimes

lead to you being taken into custody as opposed to just getting a ticket. And of course, people who are unhoused sometimes don't have all of their proper documentation. But this is not just affecting homeless New Yorkers. For instance, a few months ago, a video went viral on social media that appeared to show police pulling a black woman off the train who had just fallen asleep. Yeah, wow, that's heavy. I can't help but think about Mr. Madigan here, you know, who pleaded guilty. Once someone gets charged for this, what happens then? Yeah, I mean, most of the time the person was taken into custody

rather than just getting a ticket, as we discussed, so that means that you go to central booking, you go to court, you go before a judge. But then once people actually got to court, in about 95% of the cases, the judge ultimately tossed the charge, either through an outright dismissal or through an agreement to drop the case if that person met certain conditions, like not being re-arrested within a certain amount of time. I know you went through a lot of data and a lot of cases. What did the NYPD tell you when you brought all of this to them? Yeah, a spokesperson for the NYPD told me in a statement

that keeping the subway safe is a priority for the department and that officers are expected to enforce the rules and regulations in the transit system. The spokesperson also said that last year was the safest year for New York City's subways, not including the pandemic years. and they noted that transit crime remained down as of mid-April 2026 when my story initially published. The department also said that it arrests even more people than those I was looking at in this data set who had open warrants for other crimes. I also brought all this information to council member Crystal Hudson.

She's the leader of the city council committee that oversees homeless services, and she told me she was really concerned about these numbers. She said local lawmakers and the mayor's office really need to assess and address this surge and arrest. But I should note that I tried many times to ask the mayor's office about this. Mayor Mamdani ran on a platform that he was going to rely more on outreach workers than police to deal with homelessness in the transit system. but his spokespeople repeatedly did not respond to my request for comment. I even took the ferry all the way to Staten Island to ask about it at a press conference, and I was unfortunately not called on.

Is this enforcement actually working? Are New Yorkers feeling safer? Well, you and I spoke to people at West 4th Street, and many people didn't even know that this was happening, but remember Mike? Yeah, definitely Michael D. He didn't feel comfortable giving him. us his last name because he works for one of the companies that contracts with subway stations. He did ultimately agree to walk with us through the tunnel at West Forest Street. And he told us that, you know, he doesn't know exactly what the solution is, but that the city needs to do something when people are sleeping on the subway. And, you know, there are certainly people, I mean,

I had one guy email me after I wrote this story who felt very very. Very strongly that, you know, he was upset about people sleeping on the subway. And I think that that is certainly something that lots of New Yorkers face that they feel uncomfortable or even unsafe when they see that. But we also heard from lots of New Yorkers that we talk to that makes them feel sad, but it doesn't necessarily make them feel unsafe. And, you know, as we ride the subway every day, it's something that we all just kind of figure out how to navigate. whether or not people agree or disagree with the arrest, a lot of people I spoke to felt like something needed to be done and what's happening now is not really working.

Here's Danny Pearlstein with the Riders Alliance. What New Yorkers in need actually made is a safe and private place to be, ultimately at the end of the day. So, you know, it's a really tough issue. I don't think anyone we spoke to thinks that it's an ideal situation for people to be sleeping in the transit system. And you and I, as subway riders, every day, you know, we're figuring out how to navigate all the obstacles

that we face when trying to get from point A to point B. But the question is really how law enforcement and policy makers are going to address this moving forward. And if they're going to feel like arresting people is, you know, going to be a way to solve the problem moving forward. Yeah. That's WNYC's Samantha Max. Thanks a lot, Sam, for covering this.

Thanks, Janae. And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. See you next time.