Days after yet another stranger-on-stranger subway murder rattled New Yorkers, the governor and the mayor stood together to reassure commuters.

“We will do whatever it takes to make our subways safer,” vowed Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Oops: Hochul didn’t make these remarks last week.

She made them four years ago.

The subways today aren’t much safer — but Hochul, on the eve of another re-election, is hoping you’re exhausted by the topic. 

This year looks eerily like 2022: In little more than two weeks, two innocent commuters lost their lives in unprovoked attacks.  

Preventable attacks: Both incidents show the cost of a lenient criminal-justice system. 

On Sept. 30, construction worker Mesias Lojano lost his life on a Queens J train after Jyrell Thomas allegedly stabbed him repeatedly.

Weeks earlier, police had arrested Thomas for shoplifting at a Bronx Target, and for fleeing arrest — but under laws that Hochul supports, a judge released him. 

On Oct. 17 Darrel Rodriguez, coming home from his security job, was shot to death on a Midtown subway platform, allegedly by 17-year-old Xavian Collins.

Collins was reportedly smoking pot in the station, and Rodriguez told him to knock it off.  

Because the state goes easy on juvenile offenders — under another policy Hochul supports — we can’t know if police had arrested Collins before.  

But the killing itself is exactly the kind of case that broken-windows policing was invented to prevent.  

A masked and hooded kid toking in the subway is exhibiting antisocial behavior.

Once upon a time, cops could have arrested him for the smaller infraction — and prevented a killing. 

Except: We’ve stopped arresting people for smoking pot altogether.

And Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s NYPD is doing less criminal enforcement in transit this year, period.  

Through mid-October 2026, transit arrests are down 5% year-over-year, and farebeating arrests down 14%. 

Not coincidentally, crime is up.

Serious subway violence is up 6%, and seven people have been murdered, up from four last year. 

Things really aren’t better than they were in 2022, when Hochul, in a close race against GOP challenger Lee Zeldin, stood with then-Mayor Eric Adams and trumpeted more cops, more cameras and more mental-health support in the subways.  

Back then, through August (the latest month for which year-by-year comparisons are available), subway riders and workers suffered 783 violent felonies — compared to 722 for the same period this year. 

That’s 8% fewer, sure — but the problem, four years ago and now, is how much worse things are this decade, compared to the safety that persisted for a generation before 2020.  

Today’s incessant felony violence remains 27% above the pre-pandemic levels of 2019.  

Another measure: Rodriguez’s killing was the 50th subway murder since March 2020.

Over not quite seven years, we’ve suffered a level of killings that, before 2020, took 22 years to rack up.  

In 2022, we ended up with 10 subway murders, a modern record (matched in 2024).

With the seven killings so far in 2026, we’re not far off.  

Hochul, on her third mayor, has never figured out how to deal with recidivist criminals and the severely mentally ill.  

With Adams as mayor, she pushed the NYPD to flood the subways, paying for the overtime with state funds.  

This year, crickets.

And when cops do apprehend perps, they’re quickly released.

The man who allegedly killed the elderly Ross Falzone in May by pushing him down a flight of Chelsea subway steps had left Bellevue Hospital hours before. 

The real difference between this year and 2022 is that Hochul doesn’t see a need to reassure the public.  

Yes, she had a press conference with Mamdani last week, after Rodriguez’s murder — but it was focused on her new favorite topic, child care.  

When asked later about subway violence, she lamely claimed that “it seems a lot more scary in scale” than it is. 

Meanwhile the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which Hochul oversees, last week halted the civilian fare-enforcement teams it had been dispatching to city buses.

Civilians clearly aren’t equipped to do this job; armed, trained police must do it.  

So how many bus fare-evasion tickets has Mamdani’s NYPD written so far this year, compared to 2025’s year-to-date 1,053?

Just 231. 

It gets worse — after a recent month of inactivity, in which the NYPD issued zero bus tickets, it erased the line altogether from its regular CompStat report.  

Under Mamdani, the NYPD has quiet-quit the fare-enforcement business.  

Hochul is betting that voters have gotten used to what once would have been an unacceptable level of subway crime; that they’re too concerned about inflation and unaffordability.

Next week, we’ll find out if she’s right. 

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a 2026 Moynihan Center fellow. Opinions are her own and not her employer’s.