The horrifying arson homicide of a sleeping woman at Coney Island was the 11th murder in the subway this year. That is far too high a number. Along with other elevated crime underground, the gruesome atrocity should spur officials in charge — we’re looking at you, Gov. Kathy Hochul and you, Mayor Eric Adams — to take smart steps to make public transit safer. National Guard bag checks and gun scanners don’t qualify.

To say that there is more crime than there should be in the subway does not mean that the subway is dangerous. To the contrary, the vast, vast, vast majority of rides are without incident, and though there’s no rigorous way to compare underground to above ground, a back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests the former is actually safer than the latter.

To put this in real numbers, there’s one felony assault for roughly every two million subway trips. Murders are even less frequent.

But less frequent doesn’t mean nonexistent, and recent years have seen far more homicides than decades prior. The annual underground homicide counts since 2020 are 6, 8, 10, 5 and now in 2024, 11. In the 11 years from 2008 to 2018, there were never more than two annual killings underground. Each homicide has ripple effects. Fear spreads quickly, and understandably.

Add to those homicides and too-high felony assault totals property crimes, and the stubbornly high presence of unstable, seriously mentally ill individuals on platforms and trains, and the subways have a problem, of reality amplified by perception, worth solving.

Adams has toyed with putting surveillance robots underground; that’s showy and silly. He’s also talked about deploying next-generation gun scanners, another misallocation of resources — because to work, scanners would essentially have to blanket the system, and every scanner must be staffed by cops, making it prohibitively expensive. Besides, the main problem underground isn’t guns.

Hochul’s use of the National Guard, generally to do random bag checks, doesn’t make much more sense. Meant to combat terror, it’s throwing expensive camouflaged uniforms at the wrong problem.

The answers to this problem include more thoughtful and targeted efforts.

We are grateful for the installation of security cameras on all subway cars; though cameras are of questionable deterrent value, it was footage from such a camera that helped cops catch the alleged perpetrator in the arson homicide.

We also appreciate the more frequent presence of police on platforms and trains. Yes, too many of them may just be standing there — and the city has to keep its hand on its wallet with respect to overtime pay — but cops are the right resource to address this particular problem.

The city and state have also been ramping up efforts to engage troubled vagrants sleeping and sometimes bothering straphangers, connecting them with services and shelter and potentially involuntary treatment. It’s early to say whether that’s going to yield noticeable dividends, but it ought to be beyond debate that the alternative, letting people languish, is unacceptable.

Violent crime on the subways, like anywhere, tends to be committed by a small cohort of offenders. Identify, catch and remove those people, and the subways as a whole are likely to get safer. Start and finish with that truism.

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