The Governor Sent in the Troops

What is Kathy Hochul doing?

There are now, for reasons both clear and quite strange, 750 National Guard troops patrolling the New York City subway system. People who don’t live here might think this means I have seen them and had my bag searched already; I have not seen them yet because the system is enormous. I will at some point. I don’t plan to allow them to search my bag. In that way, I will always be a civil libertarian.

The troops have come because crime in the subway is out of control. That is the message, at least, that is being implicitly delivered by New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul. Since Republican Lee Zeldin almost beat her in 2022, Hochul has been straining to prove she’s the most law-and-order Democrat out there. No Trump Republican will ever outflank her again. On a variety of issues—funding for public schools, campaign finance reform, fixing public transportation—she has governed to Andrew Cuomo’s left, but on criminal justice reform, she has been as inherently conservative as the ex-governor. Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace and is hoping to make a comeback of some kind, signed into law various reforms, including the partial elimination of cash bail. But Cuomo didn’t want to do this; it was the progressives in the State Senate, who had stormed to power in 2019, who forced all sorts of changes down his throat. Legislative Democrats made Cuomo overhaul New York’s antiquated discovery laws and raise the age of criminal responsibility. Conservatives, to this day, blame these reforms for the pandemic-era crime spike—never mind crime increases occurred nationwide, in towns and cities that never changed their bail laws—and Hochul has repeatedly tried, with some success, to weaken these reforms in Albany.

Her move to send in the troops is fully aligned with that push. Just as Cuomo carried a suburban sensibility into his governorship—he favored automobile projects over public transit, refused to upzone Long Island, and capped property taxes—Hochul, a Buffalo native, has brought an outsider’s mentality to New York City affairs. Her husband, a former federal prosecutor, is known to be reflexively conservative, and one imagines Hochul forming her views on urban crime by watching a lot of Fox 5 and Marcia Kramer and reading the New York Post. What’s probably been disorienting for Hochul is that various power elites and the NYPD dislike what she’s done. A top aide to Michael Bloomberg panned the troop deployment in the Times. The NYPD, for once, is insisting crime in the subway is not a major problem—after a January uptick, it declined last month—and Democrats, broadly, are condemning Hochul. For her right-wing critics, deploying troops for a job that can be handled by New York’s large and very well-funded police department validates every declinist narrative they hold— that the city is slipping back to some amalgamation of the 1970s and early 1990s.

Like London Breed in San Francisco, Hochul is in the process of manufacturing a doom loop for the city she governs. And since the state, by law, has so much power over New York City—including control of the subways—it can be accurate to say the city is under Hochul’s dominion. Cuomo himself would remind city residents of the state’s authority when he unilaterally shut the subway system for potential snowstorms and imposed a curfew during the George Floyd protests. Hochul’s touch is lighter and New York might simply be too big, unlike San Francisco, to succumb to a genuine doom loop. But if you are a family in Ohio or Missouri or Nebraska and you’re contemplating taking a vacation to New York City, why would you bother after hearing National Guard troops are swarming public transit? Isn’t it all a bit unsettling? Are we at war? Is it truly safe to even travel around to ballgames or the Empire State building if the governor thinks the military should be involved? Isn’t this what they do in developing countries?

New York is no stranger, of course, to a military presence. The NYPD itself is highly-militarized and troops have appeared at landmarks in the post-9/11 era. Cuomo and Chris Christie briefly kicked up an ISIS scare a decade ago. The difference between all of that and Hochul’s maneuver is terrorism: tourists and locals can tolerate troops if there’s a perceived threat of a mass casualty attack. September 11 was deeply traumatizing, the single worst day most people will ever live through. Crime itself, however, doesn’t warrant a troop build-up, particularly when it’s not very high and it’s unclear what men from upstate with guns would do other than intimidate people. Consider, as of 2022, there was about one violent crime in the subway for every million rides, and that number has tailed off since because crime was higher then. Overall violent crime in the city has leveled off, too. The homicide rate declined in 2023 from 2022, and the number of people killed last year, while higher than pre-pandemic 2019, was less than the allegedly halcyon Bloomberg years of 2011 and 2012. This is not to downplay the challenges New York does face—homelessness, mental health, affordability, even shoplifting—but to put it all into context. New York is a fine place to visit and it’s a fine place, if you can afford it, to lay down roots. Taking the subway most days is a forgettable experience. What you will see is sad: a lot of homeless people, most of them sleeping, some begging for money. This is its own crisis, but not one that can be solved with a troop surge.

If Hochul were better at politics, she would lay this all at the feet of the Transport Workers Union. It’s the TWU demanding an indefinite troop presence because several subway conductors have been attacked. It’s the TWU, as a powerful labor union with occasionally progressive politics, that could lend Hochul cover or at least serve as a punching bag. But few realize, beyond Hochul, the TWU is the loudest voice for the National Guard in the subways. Cuomo would not have made the same mistake. He was a savvy, cynical operator, and understood the value of organized labor when furthering his own ends. Unions with business before the state, like TWU, pandered to Cuomo and joined him in pettier political fights, like his ongoing war with Bill de Blasio. Hochul could wield the TWU here. But she’s chosen, for reasons unclear, to be the face of a policy few ordinary people or politicians desire.

What do New Yorkers want out of their leaders? They want them to lead. Both Hochul and Eric Adams mistake weakness for toughness, panic for resolve. When Adams says the migrant influx could destroy New York City, only the brain-poisoned nod along. If you’ve lived in the city for a while, you’ve witnessed a cataclysmic terrorist attack, a superstorm that destroyed the shorelines and plunged downtown into darkness, and a deadly pandemic. The city, despite all that terror and death, remains standing. Adams was around for all of this but has a selective memory. Hochul genuinely was not present: she’s lived in the Buffalo area most of her life, and spent the Hurricane Sandy year in Congress. New Yorkers want to feel safe and have a fraught, if ultimately supportive, relationship with law enforcement. But they know the difference between an imminent, terrifying threat and the ebb and flow of crime.

What Hochul doesn’t understand is that the people who don’t live here or barely visit aren’t going to be so discerning. They’ll read the news, watch a YouTube clip, or take their cue from some kind of pundit or influencer. They’ll hear “National Guard” and “New York City” and write the place off. Why spend the money and go through the hassle if the Democratic governor truly believes only the troops can keep anyone safe? And if you’re a foreigner already afraid of American gun crime—most European and Asian cities have far lower murder rates—you might really stay away this time. Without tourism, New York craters. Someday Hochul will realize this. I’ll offer a straightforward prediction: Hochul eventually pulls the troops. And she concedes, only privately perhaps, she made a real mistake.