the shooting<\/a> at the Seventh Avenue station near West 53rd Street. He pointed the finger at his opponent and accused her of cutting cops from the platforms.<\/p>\n\u201cKathy Hochul doesn\u2019t care. She hasn\u2019t tried. She\u2019s pro-criminal. She doesn\u2019t care about the families and the victims, and she\u2019s demonstrated that time and time again,\u201d Blakeman said. \u201cPut more police officers on the subway \u2014 number one. Number two, we\u2019ve got to improve the lighting there. Number three, we\u2019ve got to have more conductors on the trains.\u201d<\/p>\n
The governor\u2019s campaign team responded, pointing to two years worth of Hochul backed-millions in state tax dollars dedicated to NYPD overtime and overnight patrols for the system.<\/p>\n
Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly came to his ally\u2019s defense in the Bronx at a separate press conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is looking to exploit any fear that a New Yorker may have at any time for his political benefit. We\u2019re talking about a governor who has been so committed to the city of New York than so many of her predecessors,\u201d he said of Hochul.<\/p>\n
The broad daylight attack at the 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue stop began as an argument between two men and ended in the death of a 26-year-old man, according to police. The suspect has yet to be caught.<\/p>\n
Comparing the post-pandemic years, NYPD officials have touted dips in overall crime, including on the subway. But there\u2019s been seven deaths recorded in the system this year alone \u2014 compared to four last year.<\/p>\n
Hochul defended her investments weeks ago in September.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are so concerned about driving down crime on the subway that the state will actually put in money to supplement a local government\u2019s overtime on this important asset and the results have been extraordinary,\u201d she said, adding that it\u2019s led to \u201chistoric lows crime rates on the subway.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blakeman says riders still don\u2019t feel safe.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe if a police officer was there, they would\u2019ve been able to stop it or maybe the person got discouraged because of the police presence. So I think there\u2019s a lot of material things we can do to make it safer here in New York,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n
When Hochul ran for her first full term in 2022, then-GOP candidate Lee Zeldin\u2019s campaign slammed Democrats for what he described as Hochul\u2019s inattention to spiking crime.<\/p>\n
He lost by six percentage points.<\/p>\n
\u201cGovernor Hochul took office with crime spiking and the subways deserted, invested a record $4 billion in policing, put boots on the ground in our subways, and brought subway crime to its lowest level,\u201d Hochul campaign spokeswoman Sarafina Chikita said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the wake of a fatal subway shooting in Midtown over the weekend, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[109,387,25,1084,8889,9,24,11,10,12,87,308,27,142,200],"class_list":["post-377443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-app-public-safety","tag-app-top-stories","tag-app-traffic-transit","tag-bernadette-hogan","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-public-safety","tag-top-stories","tag-transit","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}