“I don’t want to put another black man in jail,” said an unidentified 23-year-old woman in New York City’s latest case of suicidal empathy. In April, criminal suspect Rhamell Burke, who is black, allegedly grabbed the unfortunate woman by the back of her head and kicked her accompanying friend in the back, accosting them on the subway after asking them if they were white. The police apprehended Burke at the time but let him go because the young woman reportedly refused to cooperate owing to her deeply misguided considerations of race-based “social justice.”

A month later, as reported by the New York Post, Burke was arrested after a recorded incident in which he appeared to shove 76-year-old retired teacher Ross Falzone down the steps of a Chelsea subway station, causing him fatal injuries. Just five hours earlier, Burke had been released from Bellevue Hospital’s psych ward, where he had spent one hour under observation after police had brought him there. Upon learning of Falzone’s death, the 23-year-old woman said of her decision not to cooperate, “I regret it 100%.”  Had she pressed charges in April, she would almost certainly have taken Burke off the streets.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims the city has become safer since he took office in January. A New York Police Department report released on May 4, two days before Falzone’s death, suggests many categories of crime are down over the same period in 2025. Within the data, however, New York’s transit system stands out for a rapid rise in violent crime. Falzone’s apparent murder is just one of four so far this year, representing a 300 percent spike in the subway homicide figure over last year, when only one person was killed by the same date. Three of this year’s four victims appear to have been killed by strangers in unprovoked attacks, suggesting that individuals inclined to violent crime are undeterred by the police, whom Mamdani, in a 2020 X post, called “racist, anti-queer, & [ironically] a major threat to public safety.”

In March, Bairon Posada-Hernandez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras who the Department of Homeland Security reports has illegally entered the country five times, and who has 15 prior arrests, was indicted for allegedly pushing 83-year old Air Force veteran Richard Williams onto the tracks at an Upper East Side station, causing him a fatal brain bleed. That same month, Nassadir Tate was arrested—and initially released—for having punched a 55-year-old man who had bumped into him at Penn Station’s subway terminal. The victim was punched so hard that he died of his injuries. In February, as the New York Post reported, an argument at a Bronx station resulted in the fatal shooting of a 41-year-old man.

Subway murders are not the only category of transit crime that is now on the uptick under Mamdani. While “major crimes” reported in aggregate are nearly static year-over-year, according to numbers cited in the Post, assaults overall are up 9.2 percent. The increase is officially concentrated in “misdemeanor assaults,” which rose 15 percent, rather than “felony assaults,” which NYPD data suggests are down, but as the Post reports, the misdemeanor category includes punches, the type of assault that killed the victim at Penn Station. Subway robberies, according to the Post’s analysis, are up 18 percent over the same period last year. A close look at how the statistics are compiled also suggests the situation may be much worse than it seems. Falzone’s murder, for example, will not be included in the city’s official subway crime statistics because he was pushed while still above ground, even though he sustained his injuries upon impact within the station.

Mamdani, who has also speciously claimed to have eliminated the $12 billion deficit New York suffered when he entered office, will use maximum spin to portray his troubled and increasingly dangerous administration in the best possible light. New Yorkers are not fooled. The mayor’s approval rating after 100 days in office, according to Marist, rested at 48 percent, slightly lower than the electoral majority he had last November and significantly lower than the 61 percent approval rating his predecessor, Eric Adams, enjoyed after his first 100 days. Mamdani has nearly four more years to go, but Americans should not be fooled, either.