Transcript: Mayor Adams, Governor Hochul, MTA Launch "Subway Surfing Kills - Ride Inside, Stay Alive" Public Information Campaign

September 5, 2023

Janno Lieber, Chief Executive Officer, Metropolitan Transportation Authority: Good morning, everybody. Thank you.  Thank you for joining us. I'm Janno Lieber, the MTA Chair and CEO, and I'm joined by New York City President Rich Davey; Chief Safety and Security Officer Pat Warren. Pat, where are you? Thank you for your work; and, our Chief Customer Officer Shanifah Rieara. Where is Shanifah? Shanifah, you come into that picture with that colorful...

Listen, we are thrilled, thrilled to be welcoming Mayor Adams and Schools Chancellor Banks to talk about what we're doing on this front as the city and the MTA are again joining forces to launch a new public safety campaign about the dangers of subway surfing.

We've all seen the videos posted on social media too many times followed by headlines announcing that yet another young person has lost their life while riding outside of a subway car. When we see it, it's heartbreaking. We all feel it. That's where this new campaign comes in. It's called Subway Surfing Kills – Ride Inside, Stay Alive. And it was actually developed by New York City students, by the students. Chancellor Banks, thank you for your leadership on this initiative.

The students created the graphics and the animations that are going to play in all 472 subway stations, and they recorded the audio announcement that you'll hear in a few minutes. Schools are also going to be talking about this issue and giving out all kinds of swag with this tag line. Ride Inside, Stay Alive. We've even had special MetroCards made. We all celebrate the MetroCards honoring great New Yorkers like Biggie Smalls, but now we have metro cars that highlight the seriousness of this issue.

But perhaps the biggest impact is coming from what's happening on line. After a little bit of encouragement, shall we say, right, mayor, we are working with the tech companies. Google, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and others, not only to get videos and photos of the reckless and risky behavior off of social media, but also to share content that affirmatively discourages this kind of behavior, the companies have each built algorithms to identify and remove content that shows people riding outside of subway trains.

Now, in the short time we've been working together, we've already seen them take down 2,600 videos and photos. That's amazing work. And I have to give credit and kudos to each of these companies. I want to thank Governor Hochul, Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks again, and all of our city agency partners for their strong support and the passion that they brought to this issue. Now, Mayor Adams, I've heard you talk about New York City school kids as your baby. I know you feel it. I know it's sincere and powerful in your heart, and I just want to thank you for your leadership, not just on this particular issue, but generally on the subway safety campaign.

We've got Chief Kemper with us today. Your NYPD, your entire team, has made an incredible effort and we have turned around safety issues on the transit system since you and Governor Hochul announced the Cops, Cameras and Care Program, and I want to give you enormous thanks. With that, let me turn it over to Mayor Adams.

Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you, thank you so much, Janno, and the MTA team. I just cannot tell you, just want to reciprocate, just real kudos to just how we have worked together from the Subway Safety Plan to addressing issues around homelessness, addressing issues around those dealing with severe mental health issues, how we came together and stated we were going to remove encampments off our system.

And if you travel our system, you do not see encampments. People thought it was impossible. Our success around getting passengers back in the subway system, something that we have normalized so much that people no longer understand we are peaking at almost 3.6 million riders. You have witnessed a recovery of a system we could not have done it alone. Governor Hochul just has been a real partner in this. You, your team, and Chief Kemper, we cannot say enough about the attention to detail and just an Eric Adams kind of guy. Nonstop, three in the morning, four in the morning responding, this is how you get stuff done and not leaving anything ignored.

The Subway Surfing initiative just really is something that hurts all of us. No one likes to see the premature death of a young person based on just being a young person, doing something that's reckless is part of being young. I can only think of some of the dumb things I did as a child, but the difference of now and then is that when I did something dumb it stayed on the block. It stayed to 35 people. Now these children, when they do something, it expands to 35 million people, and the duplication of that.

A young man potentially lost his life the other day in the chip challenge, putting hot items on a chip and swallowing it. It was just reported in one of the tabloids. The Kia car challenge, the Hyundai challenge, stealing cars and going on joyrides that harm not only innocent people but harm themselves and give them a criminal record for their lifetime. Subway surfing. The innocence of exploration of being youthful is now being turned against our children and our young people because of the overproliferation of social media, and we have to notice this.

And there needs to be a national call of action on how social media is impacting the behavior and the norms of our children. Dr. Vasan, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, we held a summit. When you look at some of the data, some of the impact, it is really alarming. This is something that the chancellor understands that preparing our children for tomorrow is not just making sure they're academically smart but how are they emotionally intelligent, how do they deal with the changes and challenges that they're facing.

And he has leaned into that, and I want to thank him for the vision he's done and preparing our children for these challenges. They're spending too much time    they are spending too much time on social media platforms. It is unbelievable how much time our young people are spending on social media platforms, and those platforms are shaping them. One mind is not ready to consume this volume of information that they're receiving.

These viral videos make young people try dangerous things, and it is really impacting on their environment and how they move forward to become adults. The consequences of these actions not only taking lives but ruin lives. It is really impacting so many New Yorkers. We lost five New Yorkers over the past year alone to subway surfing. And sitting down with family members, loved ones and classmates, it really sends a chilling impact to you. And I remember sitting down doing an interview with a courageous mom. She talks about her son, how energetic he was, and not getting that normal check in, just to find out he lost his life to subway surfing.

We have to be clear on this. These are our children. And we need to protect them in any way possible. These are young New Yorkers with promising futures that are tragically cut short because of just a prank. Just a prank. And how you carry out these pranks and these pranks, they take lives. And to be able to come together, Janno and I and the MTA team, the Police Department and DOE, all of us coming together. DYCD. Commissioner Howard. And saying let's come together and fix this problem. But anyone that understands fixing the problem knows you can't fix the problem by being an outsider. You must go to those who understand their peers. And that's what we did. We went to the best thinkers around social media and those are our New York City youth who helped us get this right.

Young people are designing and narrating this campaign themselves. This whole Subway Surfing Kills – Ride Inside, Stay Alive, it's very significant. It's about how to become appealing and attractive to the audience you're trying to reach. They know how to reach their peers. They know how to reach each other. And they know how to communicate. This must be communicated from ground up because there's one thing I learned when I was young. If my parents said no, I did yes. And the mere fact that Janno and I and the chancellor and chief tell people no, that's not enough.

It's about peer to peer communication, interaction, to stop this horrific action that is taking lives and injuring individuals and that impact, cascades out into their peer group. These engaging video ads will be posted across popular social media platforms in our city subway stations. We will make sure that every young New Yorker understands clearly subway surfing kills.

We also are working with the PD to take extra precautionary actions, and I really want to thank Chief Kemper and his team, including deploying officers to train stations and outdoor elevated lines, but they're doing home visits. They are looking at those young people who are subway surfing, and they're going out, doing good old fashioned police work, knocking on doors, speaking with parents, speaking with young people, because it blows the mind of a parent when they look at some of the videos and they see their child, instead of sitting in the classroom, they're standing on a subway train car subway surfing.

I could only imagine how horrifying that is. These home visits are extremely important. They are dealing with those young people who are caught subway surfing. And as Janno mentioned, we have to thank those social media platforms who have shown the level of responsibility and have joined us in this campaign. That was a real win for us because we called during over and over and I think they heard us and they heard the voices of those parents who lost loved ones.

So today we're taking action. We're being proactive and not reactive. This is how we can clearly address one of the many issues that are impacting young people. Hey, they have so many challenges. It's almost hard to believe what they're going through and what they're inundated with every day. We did not have anywhere near the number of challenges these young people are having, and when they step up and be part of the solution, it just really reinforces how our future is bright, our future is ready to face the challenges that are in front of them, and I commend them.

I commend our team. NYPD, DOE, MTA, DYCD. All of the team members that came together to deal with this specific problem of subway surfing, real hats off and kudos to us all. Let's continue to unite together, and with that I'm going to bring on the chancellor of the New York City public schools. This is… His Super Bowl Sunday is about to come, school is about to open, and he's ready to do his thing. But thank you all.  Chancellor Banks.

Chancellor David Banks, Department of Education: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for leaning in on this issue, which is critically important issue. Thank you so much, chief. Chief, I learned from you, really, just how young the kids are who are engaged in this kind of activity. You would imagine if there were young people that were doing this, they're 18, 19, 20 years old.  Chief informed me that most of the kids that they have addressed in this 11, 12, 13 years old.

These are real babies. And so thank you, chief, for what you have done in terms of doing this, and particularly I want to thank Janno Lieber for his leadership and for even inviting me to be a part of the working group that he put together, along with his team    a phenomenal team    to address this as a real issue. And I thank you. I think I told you, the greatest contribution that I could make is ensuring that you talk to all of our young people. They're the ones who are going to help to figure out how to solve some of these problems.  You can't just put a group of adults in the room and think you're going to figure out how to solve for problems that young people themselves are going through.

It's funny, as I was sitting here, listening to the sounds of New York City and I'm watching the buses go by, and I remember as a kid watching people ride the backs of buses. They would run… Remember that? People would run and jump on the back. You don't see that as much because we made adjustments. We made changes. They don't have those same bumpers on the back of the buses which made it so easy to do that.

When problems are presented, we've got to come together as a city and figure out those solutions. What I am entirely clear about is that it is the mind, the talent of young people themselves which are really the solutions...they have the solutions that we're looking for, and we've got to make sure we're doing that.

So I want to shout out Milana Blokhina. Milana, who is here today, you'll hear from her in just a moment, who has really been in many ways a leader on this entire initiative and what our response is going to be. She's from Art and Design High School. And they helped to make this campaign a reality. These students, including Milana today, here are her other classmates here. Let's give it up for the people from Art and Design High School. Look at them. You can just see the brilliance in their faces and your intelligence, your ingenuity, your creativity, your innovation is what we need.

We're so glad you stepped up to the plate to help solve for this issue. I told them before the press conference started, how great that must feel to know that you are actually going to save lives, and thank you, thank you for being there. Thank you for being the best of what New York City public schools is really all about, and I want to thank your principal Maximillian Re-Sugiura. Thank you, sir, he's the leader of their school.

Together, they represent what we talk about when we say a reimagined school experience. It's not just going to school for school's sake. It is taking the issues of the day, the problems that we see, looking at those issues, studying those issues, researching those issues, and young people coming together to talk about what they can do to solve for these problems. The mayor talks about the issues we have around the city and in fact all around the country and, in fact, around the world. Issues of climate change, and proliferation of guns. There's so many issues that we face that were not created by these young people. But yet we're going to need them to be the ones that will actually solve for those problems.

So they say I don't want to be on the sidelines, put me in the game, coach, and that's what we did. We put them in, and you are going to see what this campaign looks like across the city and it is certainly our hope, it's certainly my hope as chancellor that the young people, who otherwise would have engaged in this kind of behavior, will no longer do that. For the life of me, I'm sure for many of you as well, we don't even understand how somebody would jump on the top of a moving train and think that that's okay.

But kids do the craziest things. That's why they're kids. And so we've got to make sure that we're doing everything we can to support them and to give them the help that they need so they can make better choices. So just thank you to everyone who is part of this. I'm a father of four children myself, and every time I hear about a child that's been killed or maimed or hurt by this kind of activity, it breaks my heart.

So thank you for coming to the rescue, the young people of New York City. The best is yet to come because of you and we thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Chief Michael Kemper, Transit Bureau, Police Department: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, Chair Lieber, to everyone behind me good morning and in front of me. Far too often and unfortunately when we stand in front of you to discuss subway surfing it's to announce catastrophic and tragic endings associated with it. Just this year alone, five teenagers lost their lives while subway surfing in New York City, including, let me give you some of the ages, just including a 16 year old, a 15 year old, and two 14 year olds. Today I stand in front of you with an announcement of promise and hope multi-agency partnership all working together to end the allure of subway surfing, to prevent future senseless tragedy from occurring.

Our goal and our work at the NYPD in relation to combatting subway surfing includes intervention, apprehension, reunification, and most importantly, prevention. The safety of our fellow New Yorkers and, in this case, some of our youngest New Yorkers, is our top priority. I'll repeat what we've said many times before. The subway is no place for reckless thrill seeking behavior. No amount of clout, no amount of attention or no amount of social media "likes" is worth risking your life. Unfortunately, in recent past, we've seen the lives of some of our youngest New Yorkers taken, and as a result it left their families' lives shattered all because of misplaced steps, errors in judgment and the failure to recognize the tragic consequences associated with subway surfing.

While our intervention out in the field is vital and is multifaceted, education and prevention is critically important to this endeavor. I'd like to acknowledge that today's public service message was made for kids by kids. An impressive group of young New Yorkers known as the Subway Squad managed, or coached, if you will, by Principal Max. While their peers were enjoying summer break, Principal Max and this group of talented teenagers from the High School of Arts and Design answered the city's call and delivered a top notch messaging campaign that gives our youngest riders a much needed wake up call on how they need to ride safe to remain safe.

And for that, and as the chief of the transit bureau of the NYPD I salute this team and thank them for this important work. Our message is clear to anyone who is still thinking of subway surfing. Don't do it. It is not only illegal and if you're caught you will be arrested but it is deadly. You need to recognize this. There are no do-overs if a mistake occurs. Consider it game over. The end. Our work at the NYPD carries on. As I mentioned, the well being and safety of our youth is our top priority. Our monitoring of social media, our investigations, our deployment, our enforcement and our outreach and prevention will continue. Again, I'd like to recognize and thank all our partner agencies for joining forces and working together on this important topic. And let me offer this message to all New Yorkers who are listening. Subway surfing kills. Ride inside. Stay alive. Thank you.

Lieber: I'm going to ask New York City Transit President Rich Davey to say a few words but I'd like to acknowledge the councilmember from the district who has joined us, Julie Won. Thank you for being here. Rich Davey.

Richard Davey, President, New York City Transit: I'll be brief. Just a few things I wanted to say. First to thank Janno, my colleagues at MTA, all the city officials, the chief who worked hard on this. But I want to call out the mayor in particular. Mayor, we've been together in a few events. Some happy. But one pretty sad. You showed up personally, Mayor Adams showed up personally at a subway surfing death several months ago at a subway station.  I think in part the reason we're here is you've put your personal imprimatur behind these efforts and I want to thank you sincerely for that.

Two is to New York City transit employees, those who are trained to see this kind of behavior, to call it in. For those train operators, conductors, who are generally the first on scene to see these kids who are lying, severely injured or worse, this is not an easy moment for the 47,000 men and women at New York City Transit either. I want to thank them for their work and for encouraging us to find strategic and different ways to get this message out.

The last group of folks I want to say thank you to is the Subway Squad, apparently your new nickname. You are representative of the youth of this city, and I will tell you, our city is in damn good hands if you are representing what we're doing. So thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. If you think at your age you can't make change, you brought the mayor, you brought Janno Lieber, you brought every TV camera in New York to come, you're wrong, because what you did today brought all this about. So congratulations.

Lieber: On that note, let's see the work of this team and the announcements. Go ahead and play it.

[Video plays.]

Lieber: Now the woman who engineered and helped to lead this effort, Milana Blokhina.

[Applause]

Milana Blokhina: Hello. My name is Milana, and it is my utmost pleasure to speak to you all today on behalf of all the Art and Design High School talented artists who participated in this summer's anti subway surfing campaign. Art and Design is a career and technical education high school that trains young professionals in a plethora of digital media spanning eight majors. In this campaign, we were joined by three graphic design students, Nicholas, Maximillian and me, and two animation majors, Lang and Del. And, of course, the creative director leading this campaign, our principal, Maximillian Re-Sugiura, and outstanding voices recorded urgent messages playing in trains and train stations. We took on this campaign during our summer break as we understood the urgency of the design before us.

As young adults, we felt strongly about the tragedies that resulted from subway surfing accidents among the youth. That is the difference between us and outside for hire agencies. We can design from the view of our targeted audience as we naturally make up a part of it. In our design process, we talk to youth and adult focus groups which allowed us to better understand the elements that appeal to and affected each group. We worked closely with city leadership whose feedback was instrumental in our vision of messages. I'd like to say thank you in particular to [inaudible] for his consistent support throughout. Now that the campaign is being implemented, we're left with a sense of satisfaction, knowing that we continue to contribute to something bigger, the safety of fellow New Yorkers and all who travel our subways.

We also hope that the work we have accomplished is proof of the creative capacity of New York City public school students and forwards the conversation on design for greater good.  Even if we save one life, we make a difference. Thank you.

Lieber: As was mentioned, there are announcements, audio announcements that are going to be playing on the trains and stations. Those will be released to the press as well for folks to hear.

Question: Since the chancellor mentioned that when kids used to ride on buses there were physical changes made to the buses to discourage that behavior, have you done anything to the trains to make it more difficult to subway surf and how soon will that initiative take place.

Davey: We're looking at engineering options. We don't want the trains less safe for crews, for example, they need to get up and around the train. We're looking at that. Others said, for example, should we be locking doors. That brings its own risk. So we're weighing that, but I think again today what we're seeing is an amazing group of young people to say the message is important peer to peer. So engineering will continue to look at, but today is a good day on message.

Question: Mr. Lieber, you talked about the tech companies removing videos. Who is going to make these alternate videos or safety videos like this that you would like to see replace those?

Lieber: The tech companies themselves so far evidence a willingness to develop content with us and also accept content we're developing. I want to acknowledge NYC:Tech is represented today by Julie Samuels, the trade association leader, and this has been a partnership that started out with us saying to them, you've got to do something because all of a sudden as the mayor highlighted again and again young people are being subjected to massive doses of video and material that was glorifying this, and they actually stepped up.

They developed algorithms to weed it out and they're working with us to take it down and now, as I said, we're actually doing content to discourage subway surfing. That's a big step. And we appreciate the cooperation of the tech industry.

Question: Chairman Lieber, thank you so much. Could you go into more context on the number of people spotted riding on top of trains by MTA stats. I understand the number last year was as big as you had ever seen at over 900.

Lieber: I'll go to Chief Kemper, but Chief Kemper's NYPD officers, the mayor's NYPD officers, every day, are posted at the stations including those on the 7 Line, which seem to attract this behavior. As the mayor said, they're not only getting kids down but they're escorting them home and having sit downs with the parents. Chief Kemper.

Chief Kemper: So as we mentioned, and as I mentioned myself, we said the safety of our youth is our top priority, and certainly when looking at subway surfing and our deployment, a lot of our deployment is associated or surrounded by historic locations where subway surfers surf where they like to do it. We're under the 7 Line, this is one example. We have individuals in the NYPD monitoring social media, if conversations are had, subway surfing meet up, we pivot immediately. Again safety is our concern. I could talk about enforcement numbers. I said when I spoke it's illegal and if caught you'll be arrested.

So far this year, so from January 1st until present, there's been 88 individuals arrested for subway surfing in New York City. When comparing that 88, just to show you how we prioritize this, last year, at the same time, there were 30. So it's 88 subway surfing arrests this year versus 30. That's an increase of 58. Or, if you want to get really granular and nerdy, 193.3 percent increase this year versus last year.

I'll say this, end with this, this will continue. Let me say this also very quickly. Enforcement is important. That's one component of our strategy to eliminate and end subway surfing. It's the education. It's the outreach, and that's what we're here today to really highlight. Thank you.

Question: You had mentioned that there was some encouragement of the tech companies to spool up the algorithms to start taking down some of these videos. I know this is something going on. I think the last time you and I spoke about it, it was in March, tell me what it took to get them to the table, what that encouragement was?

Lieber: I want to credit the mayor who should take credit for this. The mayor spoke up in no uncertain terms. MTA chair has a voice but there's nothing like the mayor of New York City. And the mayor spoke out about how wrong it was that this kind of material was being allowed to circulate in such large quantities on social media. Mayor.

Mayor Adams: And I think there's a combination. We woke up overnight and realized we have this new entity in our lives that it is impacting our children. And there's not been a real national approach of how we manage social media on so many different levels.

And we have elevated this conversation. Commissioner Vasan from the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, something he did some months ago zeroing in with social media companies. Let's not kid ourselves. These guys are masters. They know how to use algorithms to attract you to different things.

There's a reason, when you cough, you start getting cough syrup ads. There's a reason why you start yelling at your spouse, you start getting divorce lawyers popping up on your phone. These guys know what they're doing. If we can use social media to help, we cannot continue to allow it to harm, and we can't say, well, we're just producing a product. No, these are our children, and they're the children of social media designers.

A child that's impacted by the negative action on social media is something we have to address. We've leaned into it. We've communicated with them over and over again and now you're seeing young people that are being part of this conversation. You could produce a good product without harming young people in the future and even adults, when you look at some of the contents on social media, we have to be honest about it and we have to address it.

What we did, what we'll continue to do as a city, we look at a problem. We dissect a problem. We identify each area and what role we all are supposed to play to turn those problems around, and that is the hallmark of this administration. So before we leave, I think it's imperative to bring in our council partner, Councilwoman Won, who has been a real partner on this.

City Council Member Julie Won: Thank you, good morning. Thank you so much to the MTA president, the mayor, the chancellor, the chief. It is a multifunctional cross level effort to make sure that our children are safe. There is no glamorous way to die, and there is nothing worth your life for a moment of fleeting fame on social media. And that is what Ride Inside, Stay Alive is about. I want to give a shout out to all the students from Arts and Design because that's a reflection of this government.

We do not have a mayor or a governor or an MTA president that says I know what I'm doing and I'm going to say from top down this is how we're going to solve this problem. But they go directly to the students who are facing this issue on a daily basis to say, you come to our table and we're going to figure out from your voice exactly how to reach these young minds who are starving for attention, who are starving for affirmation, validation that says you are enough and you are special. And that is what we are going to do to continue to make sure that our students stay alive.

So thank you so much to the students, and we're going to continue to make sure as an effort with the MTA, as well as NYPD, and all the city agencies, the DYCD commissioner is here, to make sure that our students have these arts programming, that the students have athletic programming, that the students have tech programming or whatever it is that they desire after school so that way once they leave their school building they're not trying to climb up on top of the subway but they're looking to be with each other to make sure that there is so much more for their future in this amazing city has to offer. Thank you so much for being here. And we're going to continue to make sure that our students are safe. Thank you.