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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3873 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 14, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I am very skeptical of the 15-min claim. Neely apparently got on the northbound F train at 2nd Avenue, and died at the Broadway-Lafayette stop. That is only one stop, which is less than a minute, once the train gets underway.

I am equally skeptical of the one minute claim. This would mean he managed to antagonize the other passengers in the carriage to provoke three of them into action in just a minute.

Not every station has police officers; there are something like 450 stations in the system. Nowadays, when you ride the train, if a station has a permanent police presence, the conductor says so when the train arrives. The Broadway-Lafayette stop is a pretty busy one, since it is effectively a transfer to several other lines, though it is not an express stop for one of the lines. So it would not surprise me if there are normally police there.

There are 472 stations. NYPD has 35,030 officers. To cover all stations if none are currently covered, you would need 3776 patrolmen (2 cops per station working 12-hour shifts in 4-day periods: day-night-off-off), a 11% increase in headcount. I guess Moscow can afford to provide police presence on its ~300 stations, since there are 50k officers in Moscow Police.

I am equally skeptical of the one minute claim.

I am not saying that the incident took only 1 minute. I am saying that, if the train was running normally, it would take less than a minute to travel between the stations, once it got underway. Now, perhaps there was a delay of some sort, either before it left 2nd Ave, or between stations.

Given the rather low level of crime in subways, especially in most of Manhattan, it would be a poor use of police resources to station police at every station. Heck, it is a poor use of police resources to have many cops patrolling most of Manhattan, period.

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