Transcript: Mayor Adams, Governor Hochul Celebrate New Subway Safety Milestones, Massive Decreases In Subway Crime

July 17, 2024

Deputy Mayor Philip Banks III, Public Safety: Good morning. We are here today to talk about public transportation safety, which is a priority for the mayor and is pertinent for the 5 million people who use public transportation in New York City every day. 

Public transportation safety is a team effort. As a team, we all have our roles and responsibilities to execute or the team can fail. This team did not. Collaboration, communication, and commitment are key elements that make up a good team. This team included the Adams administration, the governor's administration, the riders and employees of the subway system and the transit system, and of course, law enforcement. Law enforcement, including the NYPD, MTA police, and the National Guard all play a crucial role on this team. It is on all of us to assist and maintain safety and order. 

Before we continue, I would like to extend a special thank you to Governor Hochul for her partnership and commitment to this team, which is creating a safer and more secure environment for everyone who uses public transportation. I'm joined here today by the chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Janno Lieber, NYPD's Chief of Transit Police, Michael Kemper, and of course, the mayor of New York City, Mayor Eric Adams. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Mayor Adams.

Mayor Eric Adams: Thanks so much, DM Banks, and really, I want to just thank this entire team that's assembled in general, but specifically what Janno has meant to this operation and the partnership with the governor. From the beginning of this administration, when we inherited a system that was not only dealing with the physical aspects of criminality that was taking place, but also the visual. 

The number of people who were living in the subway system, dealing with severe mental health issues in our subway system, the violence, and we had to put the right team together. The governor and I came together to talk about the subway safety plan, and then we continued to build on that. We did not rest on the success. We looked at and examined how do we use technology to effectively keep this system of approximately four million riders a day that utilize our system. 

We knew that crime fighting had to be not only the actual numbers, but the perception. How do people feel? How do they believe the system was as they use it every day? That is how we move forward with the MTA, with the governor, and we brought on the right quarterback down here in the system with Chief Kemper. Chief Kemper brought that 24 hour, seven days a week approach, and each crime he took not only professionally, but personally, to how New Yorkers were being treated. 

This is something that I'm very much aware of, former transit cop, I know the challenges of moving throughout this system, the challenges of keeping this system safe. How important it is to everyday New Yorkers, it's an equalizer, because when you swipe your MetroCard, you are one of the millions of passengers, you're not treated any differently. There's no limousine service on the 4 train, there's just a train that takes you to your destination with a conductor, with a motor man that is committed to making sure the system is safe. 

We want to thank the TWU. They have been real partners in pointing out some specific items that needed to be corrected, and they went through a terrible period of their members being assaulted and attacked, but they remained steadfast. I want to say thank you to the president and the entire membership of all of our transit unions for what they have done. 

Our transit system is the lifeblood of our city. All of these various train lines are the arteries that make sure that blood continue to flow and it must flow without any form of impediments to prevent us from moving forward. New Yorkers use the system, they believe it's important, and keeping New Yorkers safe is one of our key foundational issues in this administration. You heard me say over and over again, public safety is the prerequisite to prosperity, and prosperity lies in keeping this city safe. 

Our subway system is getting safer every day. Today it's clear that our action is working, and we're going to continue to implement those aspects of the plan and grow on those aspects of the plan. We are breaking the cycle of crime in our subway system. If you look at the numbers alone, this week alone, transit crime is down 44.4 percent. Over the last four weeks, it has decreased by 26.6 percent. You remove that month of January when we had a bump and executed 1,000 cops into the system and really build on that, we have not seen an increase in crime since then. 

Year to date, transit crime is down 7.8 percent. If you take out the first two years of the pandemic when no one was on the system, our system is now the safest in over 14 years. Here is a number that I was really impressed by. We currently, robberies year to date, are the lowest point in recorded history. The lowest point in recorded history, our robberies. These numbers don't lie. Safety is part of our strategy, and we want New Yorkers to be confident that this system is going to continue to be safe, and we're going to continue to deploy the manpower that's needed. We're also going to continue to coordinate with our union and the MTA leadership so that we can do it as a plan. 

This is really falling in line with what we have accomplished in the city. In addition to the reduction in transit crime, specifically, we have seen six straight months of overall crime reduction all across the city. The reason this is impressive is because we were moving through lower numbers last year. DM Banks will tell you one of the biggest challenges you have is when crime is down the previous year, you have to meet those numbers and bring it down even further the year that you are now in, and that's what we're continuing to see.

Across the city, homicides are down. From year to date, shootings are down, burglaries are down. This is progress. This is what we believe we need to do to continue to have this city as the safest big city in America. Job well done to the police officers, the men and women who are down here patrolling every day. There is a modern-day transit cop Eric Adams, that are on these lines making sure our city is safe, and I really thank them for the job well done. Thank you very much.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Thank you, Mayor Adams. Next, we will hear from the chair and CEO of the MTA, Janno Lieber.

Janno Lieber, Chair and CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority: Thank you, deputy mayor. Thank you, Mayor Adams. You've been an amazing partner at every step of the way. You are a transit cop. There's transit cop blood in your veins, I know it, and it's flowing today. 

Thank you for also giving us the leadership that you talked about, the Chief Kemper in the Transit Bureau. I also have to acknowledge Governor Hochul, who has been your partner and obviously the MTA's partner in this tremendously successful effort. Governor Hochul would be here today, but for the fact that she has to be upstate touring the tornado damage that they've suffered, but we very much acknowledge her leadership in everything we're talking about. 

When I came to this role in 2021, there were three main priorities for the MTA. We had to get ridership back. This was what the mayor and the governor were talking about in their new New York, and we had to run great service with enough personnel to run all the buses and trains, and the system needed to be safe and feel safe for New Yorkers. Mayor, with your partnership and the governor's partnership, we're doing it. 

You mentioned all those crime stats. The one that I love is that we have the lowest crimes per day in 14 years, and except for that one year and the year before in 2009, we have the lowest crimes per day since the NYPD kept keeping those stats in the late 90s. We are really making progress. When I came in, we also ramped up hiring because we wanted to run all those trains, provide great service, and make sure people weren't having to hang out on lonely platforms. That is a safety issue as well. 

The legislature came through under Governor Hochul’s leadership, and we've been able to not only maintain service and maintain employment of all those TWU folks that you mentioned, mayor, but also to run more service, more service, more attractive, bringing people back to the center of the city, bringing people back to transit, and we have the best service on the commuter railroads we've ever had. 

I keep saying it, those folks in New Jersey are seething with new jealousy over Metro North, 98.5 percent on-time performance, and Long Island Railroad, only a hair behind at 96 percent plus. We also know that apart from service, our riders' biggest concern is safety. They tell us that every month in our surveys. We take these massive surveys, hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of riders, and they talk about safety as their secondary issue on top of performance and frequency. 

We've been able to achieve all these safety goals with the support of an amazing NYPD team, an amazing team in City Hall and in Albany. There are other measures that have been taken that have increased safety, and I just want to make sure folks are aware of them. Security cameras, Governor Hochul's passionate project, 10,000 in stations, and now we're on the way to having every car, every subway car, no matter how old, retrofitted so it has a camera inside, and that we are able to record anything that goes on in those subway cars. 

We have station agents, you see them behind me. The folks who used to sit in the token booths are now out and they're interacting with customers and they're collaborating with the police, so the police have real-time intel on all the conditions in the system. We have hundreds of unarmed gate guards, these are the folks in the blue uniforms, we're making sure that folks don't pop open that exit gate and turn it into the super highway of fare evasion, but they are also a presence, a uniformed presence in the system. That is making a difference. 

Probably most important, we have the mental health professionals out there, backed up by cops. This is a joint state-city operation, we call it SCOUT. The NYPD is also increasing the investment in these operations under Mayor Adams' leadership. The SCOUT operation is identifying those seriously mentally ill people who are struggling in the public space and need to be helped and also need to be out of the subway system so that the environment feels safer and more orderly. That has been a huge success in terms of rider feedback as well. 

Proof of success is we're up at roughly 80 percent of ridership. When you take account of the little additional fare evasion we're experiencing, we're really at 80 percent of ridership and New Yorkers are coming back to transit. Because newsflash, it is not the dystopian hellscape that our friends in the tabloid media sometimes portray. Subway crime represents 2 percent, 2 percent of overall New York City crime and the mayor is bringing that overall crime down. 2 percent and yet it seems to occupy about 72 percent of the coverage. 

Come back, join the 4 million folks who use the subway every day, 6 million riders if you count commuter railroads and buses as well. The system is not the same. Mayor, I need to talk about something else. The system is not exactly the same as before the pandemic. Newsflash, and it's not terrible news, when you ride the train at the peak hour, it's not jam-packed. You can actually get on the first train that comes through, not like the old days. People are coming back on the off hours, nights, weekends, when they have somewhere they want to go and that means the system feels much safer. That night and weekend travel, which is really growing at a fast rate. 

I want to talk about another aspect of cops, cameras, and care, which is making sure that our system is in a state of good repair. We all talk about how the environment, look at this amazing, beautiful station. This feels like a safe place because of the lighting, because of the caliber of the environment. We need to invest in those things that make the system feel safer and be safer. 

We need new turnstiles. Mayor and I grew up in the city, we grew up in the city riding. Turnstiles are basically the same, right? It's time for us to have turnstiles like some of the other places in the world, which are more protective because keeping fare evaders out actually keeps a lot of guns, keeps bad guys out, and that is a priority for us. 

We need more cameras. The governor's made it a priority, but the next capital program needs to fund even more cameras so that we have trains that have pre-installed cameras that can stream directly to the train crew. They can make sure. We need to run more service. We need to have, as I say, better lighting and more ADA stations, safety for people with mobility issues as well as for people who can move up and down stairways. The more people who can use the system, the better it is for everybody and the safer the system will be, so that's why ADA matters so much. 

I am focused on traditional safety and security, but also on investing in the system in all the ways I'm talking about to make it safer. These discussions about capital investment are going to ramp up in the fall, so while we're celebrating the success of the subway safety program that Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams have put in place, we need to look forward to the investments that we can and must make. I'm going to turn it over to Chief Kemper, who has been our partner in every way. 

I don't want to close without one point of business to thank Demetrius Crichlow, who's here, who runs the New York City subway system, who is the interim president of New York City Transit, and Shanifah Rieara, who is our chief customer officer. Two people who are so essential to making sure that we are successful in delivering for New Yorkers. With that, Chief Kemper, please.

Chief Michael Kemper, Transit, Police Department: Good morning, and Mayor Adams, thank you for your kind words and for your unwavering and steadfast support. Chairman Lieber, thank you very much for your support and the partnership you offer us over at the MTA. 

Look, I've said this a lot, this administration has been clear from day number one, public safety is our top priority. Any ongoing investment in subway safety by City Hall and NYPD leadership and state leadership continues to pay dividends. As Mayor Adams stated, overall crime in the New York City subway system is down 7.8 percent this year. This translates to 95 less victims of crime this year versus last year and equates to less than six index crimes per day in a system that spans four boroughs and sees upwards of 4 million riders per day. Crime in the subway system accounts for just 1.7 percent of all crime in New York City this year. 

We've accomplished these reductions with the support of our city and state partners, especially those from the MTA. This is true partnership and this is partnership that works. Make no mistake, the accomplishments we speak of today are in large part due to the hard work of the men and women of the NYPD, your cops, who are out there every day, 24/7, and are dedicated to getting riders from point A to point B safely. 

Our cops have stepped up to the challenge this year, delivering on our promise to put public safety as our top priority. They are working long hours, they are working hard, and to be quite frank, I couldn't be more proud of them. All areas of enforcement are up. Arrests, quality of life enforcement, fare evasion enforcement, weapons possessions, and so on. This is modern day precision policing. We've already removed 38 guns and hundreds of other dangerous weapons from the subway system this year. That's 19 more guns than last year, which translates to a 100 percent increase in gun arrests this year so far. 

We continue to embrace technology, all in the name of advancing public safety. This includes drone technology to help combat the dangerous trend of subway surfing, apprehending, and again, to be quite frank, saving 125 people this year, with most of them being young, impressionable teenagers, before tragedy strikes proactively. Of course, we remain hyper-focused when it comes to fare evasion and quality of life offenses that seem minor to some, but weigh heavily on the minds of our riders and their perception of law and order. 

Our goal is to deliver a subway system that is safe and feels safe. Our presence in the subway system offers so much value, and our approach is about so much more than just fighting crime. Our officers are out there helping people whenever and wherever they can. Time and time again, we hear incredible stories about our cops, stories like administering first aid, including CPR, to people in the middle of medical episodes, giving life-saving doses of Narcan to people in the midst of an overdose, putting their own lives in jeopardy by assisting people off of live train tracks, or reuniting loved ones who have become separated during their subway journeys.

Look, I could go on and on with example and example, but for the sake of time, I won't. Our officers' presence alone offers so much value, just their mere presence, from standing tall at the turnstiles, to checking in with train conductors while on a platform post, to offering directions and answering questions. Mr. Mayor, I'm certain you remember very well the look of comfort and ease on a subway rider's face when a transit cop steps onto a train. 

Let me say this, very important, even with the greatest funding which we have, the greatest support which we have, and the greatest plans, which I think are pretty good, nothing would get accomplished without our cops getting the job done. Again, I said it before, I'll say it again right now, I couldn't be more proud of the men and women at the NYPD, our cops. It is an absolute privilege to lead them and to tell their stories. 

With that in mind, we recognize our work is not done, and we still have a lot to accomplish. Make no mistake, we remain focused, we remain steadfast in our mission of public safety. Thank you very much.

Question: Thank you. Do you think that it's really the perception about safety or just the work-from-home trend that is keeping riders away? Also, are you still on track to get all subway cars outfitted with cameras by the end of the year? 

Lieber: Yes, we are on track to get the fleet fully outfitted. We're about halfway there right now. That is moving forward, Sam. Digging into perceptions, hybrid work has definitely had the principal impact on ridership. The reason you know that, even without doing a bunch of customer surveys, is it's all peak-hour ridership, it's mostly peak-hour ridership where we're down. Folks who used to come to work five days a week and are now coming to work, two to four days a week. That's where most of the loss is. 

The good news is, especially from a safety standpoint, ridership is strong in the off-peak, in the weekends, and in the nighttimes. Those are the times when we want to make sure there are plenty of people on the train so everybody feels comfortable, like my kids always did when they came home from going out late at night on the weekends. 

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor Adamss: How are you? 

Question: I'm doing well. How are you?

Mayor Adams: Good. 

Question: I've got a question about the weapon detection systems that you were discussing a few months back. I know that the NYPD has done more than a dozen tests, by my count, of the Evolv system throughout the subway system over the past couple of months. 

Given the way that the numbers are trending, is there still a plan to roll that out? Have any other vendors been tested? If not, why not?

Mayor Adams: First, we're looking. I had a conversation with Deputy Commissioner Daughtry and Chief Chell last night, to be exact, to get an update. We are going to be implementing and rolling it out in a few locations. They did thousands of tests, thousands, to gauge the success of it. We're extremely impressed with the outcome. We wanted to make sure we followed City Council laws and rules on how and when you could roll them out. It should be rolled out in the next few days to do our initial implementation. 

They are looking at other companies as well. We're not being locked into one company. We strongly believe good competition produces good results. That is what we're leaning towards, exactly how well those other companies actually carry out. It's extremely difficult to do this in an environment like the subway system that's below grade. It's going to really push folks to produce a good product. We're excited about it. It's just a continuation. 

We're not resting until we take that 5.7 average crime down to zero crimes a day. We're not happy that we have over 4 million riders and we're down to 5.7 from 6.1. We want zero crimes in our in our subway system. We're going to continue to go after particularly those who are carrying guns.

Question: Okay. Thank you very much. Two questions. Do you have, for Mr. Lieber, do you have comparable statistics for the Long Island Railroad for each of these categories of crime? Then the second, what are the rules relating to police officers using their personal phones, during their patrols? Do you think that has any impact on crime?

Chief Kemper: Just very quick. The rules on police officers using phones? Is that the question? Look.

Deputy Mayor Banks: Personal phones.

Chief Kemper: Personal phones? Yes. It's discouraged. But … 

Question: Is it against the rules? 

Chief Kemper: Listen, I heard the question. Their personal phone, right? They have a job phone and they have a personal phone. The job phone, we're paperless now with the increase in technology. A lot of what they do is in the phone. It's also hard to differentiate. How do what phone they're on, right? 

Do cops go on their personal phone? Of course they do. They're human beings. They have lives also. They have issues going on through their lives. It's discouraged. We speak to them. We try to have them limit it, limit the use of their personal phones as best we can. For someone to differentiate between a job phone, I have a job phone and a personal phone. They're identical phones. That's almost impossible to do. I hope I answered your question.

Lieber: As to the stats for the commuter railroads, they're really small stats, but we'll provide them to you.

[Crosstalk.]

I'm going to answer one question, which is, I talk so much to Deputy Mayor Banks and Chief Kemper and the leadership in City Hall, and the next frontier that we all agreed that we got to focus on is the presence of recidivist offenders in the system. That's where we can really drive the numbers down further. We need the cooperation of the criminal justice system. 

This morning, there was a robbery. Someone grabbed a cell phone right on the platform at Grand Central and hit a guy while he's trying to take his phone away, and the MTA PD got him, and then the NYPD got him together. The guy had 66 prior arrests. We talk about this all the time. The people who had five or more arrests, 120 people last year who had five or more arrests in transit, and together they have almost 5,000 arrests in transit. 

Those are folks who come back again and again and again, and we need them to be handled in some different, special way. I'm not getting into the criminal justice debates. I'm not an expert, but that is the next priority that I believe all of us want to focus on. The mayor and his team have talked about it a great deal.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you? I'm good, thank you. A couple questions for you. The gun weapon detection system that you were just talking about, those are going to be installed, you said, in the next few days. Do you have locations for those yet? 

Also, I was on the subway recently and I saw they were still doing the bag checks. Was hoping for an update there if there was still National Guard, if you guys are still doing those bag checks. 

Then one more question, with 1,000 extra officers and 800 extra officers for the Fair Fares program, are those still implemented, those that were put into the system, like in February?

Mayor Adams: Thank you. Yes. Chief Kemper?

Chief Kemper: As far as the bag checks, yes. Those bag checks are nothing new. I just want to make this clear one more time. We've been doing bag checks for a while. What we did was we increased our footprint with bag checks. They're still going on. We have, we're doing them jointly with our state and National Guard partners. 

It's working well. great deterrent, offers a visible presence of cops. Our riders love to see it. Again, great deterrent and it sets the tone of law and order the minute our riders enter a subway station by seeing uniformed cops and/or National Guard members, at those turnstile areas.

Question: Extra officers and then where are you guys going to start that pilot program for the weapon detection system?

Chief Kemper: I think the mayor answered that. It's coming soon. It's coming soon. We're at the point right now where we filed the post-act paperwork. That 90-day period is over. It just ended a couple of weeks ago. Now we're working out final logistical issues such as that. Coming soon.

Question: Good morning, mayor and chairman. I want to ask about the presence of cameras on trains. I wonder if that had any effect on these numbers at all and also the presence of the National Guard. Do you think that has had any effect on the numbers? Then for the mayor, a couple of years ago, you talked about the perception of safety among riders. I'm wondering if you noticed any change as you talk to people. Do you think there is a perception of more safety on the subway?

Mayor Adams: Yes, I remember when I said it just got such negative feedback. Then when we drove down crime, everybody else was saying, okay, crime is down but the perception is there. You can't have it both ways. I was right then and we're right now. We must address perception and reality. people must not only be safe, they must feel safe. 

Part of feeling safe is dealing with what we're going to do with the SCOUT Program. We have to deal with severe mental health illness. If you can't take care of yourself, if you don't know that you need to be hospitalized or services, you should not be on the subway system. It's dangerous for yourself and it's dangerous for others. We're going to really lean in the partnership that First Deputy Commissioner Tania Kinsella is doing with Deputy Mayor Williams-Isom and her entire team. We're moving to the next iteration of how we're dealing with severe mental health illness. 

That is the frontier we must tackle in a real way because we have been just walking past people we know should not be on our system and we're going to become more aggressive in addressing that. That plays on the psyche. That's what we hear over and over again. Yes, we feel the system is getting safer but we still see a large number of people with severe mental health and we're going to really lean into that and address that in a real way. You want to talk about the cameras?

Lieber: Sure. Listen, everybody is starting to realize that the bad guys do figure out there's cameras everywhere in the system and knowing that there are cameras increasingly on the trains, we think has had a positive effect and the word is out through the press and otherwise. I don't do a lot of surveys of recidivist criminals so I can't tell you with exactitude how it's affecting their psychology. I think that the word is out that if you do something wrong in the subway system, you're going to be photographed and the NYPD will always find you.

Deputy Mayor Banks: I just want to address that perception issue because I actually think it's a good point. Less than one percent of New Yorkers are going to be a victim of a violent crime or any type of violent crime. We are dealing, we're in the perception business so policing is perception so as much of our job is to be able to, and I say not the NYPD, the mayor, the city, is so of course we have to stop the crime but we have to make people feel safe and you will see a series of initiatives that the mayor is going to be launching real soon and they're all going to have a perception aspect to it. 

Because though I may become a victim of a crime and you won't, you still have some fear because it happened to me and that is something that the mayor has made it very clear before we came into office. These are some of the things that he laid out before he even took office, even before he was, he knew he was going to win. These things have been discussed and laid out. 

You're going to see a lot more of this perception because we want you to be safe and we want you to feel safe and that's what we're working on. You're going to start seeing it and actually if you look closely, you'll start seeing a big part of an element of a lot of our strategies that's coming out.

Chief Kemper: I just want to jump on that question because I'll offer you my opinion about the subway, the camera system in the subway system. The question was do you think it's helping reduce crime? Yes. Absolutely. 100 percent. This is a topic that's near and dear to us in the NYPD. Again, this is technology also that didn't exist just a few years ago and certainly with Chairman Lieber and him and his team at the MTA, we talk about this all the time. 

This is not a secret. We want people to know. There are literally thousands of cameras operating in the New York City subway system throughout the mezzanines. I guarantee right now, each and every one of us is being captured on video right now and that it's expanding onto the train cars and by the end of the year, we hope to have a significant number if not all of the train cars outfitted with video cameras. 

It's a deterrent and it's an amazing investigative tool or resource to offer our detectives and cops if a crime were to occur and captured on video. Just think about the probative value that office prosecutors and juries watching the crime that happened. These cameras are also used, certainly crime fighting, but non-crime fighting also, proactive. We have cops right now monitoring the vast network of subway cameras 24-7 looking to see if there are any issues going on proactively before waiting for something to happen. 

If we have missing children, we get the description over, we scour the videos in real time. We have access in real time to view these videos. Like I mentioned before, I can give example after example how we use these videos. It is certainly helping toward our advancement in public safety in the subway system in so many ways.

Question: Question for Janno. On July 11th, court filings show that there's now an engagement in mediation between Westfield and the MTA. Can you comment on the current state of that litigation?

[Crosstalk.]

Lieber: Short answer is there's a mediation and, Westfield's trying to get out of, trying to get out of leases all over the United States. We want to make sure that …

[Crosstalk.]

No, no, look, there are gate guards, there are cops, there's enormous presence in Fulton Transit Center. This is a public space. There are definitely always challenges, but this has been, in many ways, an exemplary public space, especially under Mayor Adams.

Question: This will be really quick. Just safety, but about heat safety, there were some major problems yesterday for commuters during one of the hottest days of the year. How do you make sure something like that doesn't happen again? With people on hot train platforms, New Jersey Transit, of course, had major issues yesterday, too. It's tough out there. How do you keep, make sure people are okay getting home during the summer?

Mayor Adams: Janno was talking about that a little earlier, about that. Listen, you never want a system that's old, that needs a lot of capital improvements and repairs. As I can recall, there are many days when you have these types of malfunctions, but the goal is to make sure that we can continue upgrading our system. This is a complex system. I don't know if we have one more complex than here in New York City, and it operates every day. 

Any time you have those breakdowns with transformers or track repairs, it hurts. We don't want passengers in a hot area waiting, and so we've got to continue to look at the multibillion-dollar budget that's needed to keep this system operating and repaired. I'm going to do one more question before. That's it?.

Question: Mr. Mayor, I just want to ask you about these metal detectors. [Inaudible.]

Mayor Adams: What we're going to do is we're going to, once we move the implementation, we're going to specifically give everyone a set of rules. We're going to lay out how it's going to be done. You're going to be advised well ahead of time. We're not surprising people. You're not going to wake up one day and see Evolv at the turnstile. We're going to lay out exactly what methodologies we're going to use to make sure we prevent guns on our subway system. 

If you were to talk to the average passenger, do you want to stop guns from coming on the system and use this technology? I'm sure many of them would say yes. People don't want to have people with firearms on a close, confined area such as our subway system. We're going to do it so that passengers would know the rules and make the determination if they want to enter the system or not. Okay. Thanks a lot.