Putting the National Guard on the New York Subway
Last month the governor of New York deployed the National Guard to the Subway, but this isn't how to provide "military aid to the civil authorities", as we learned in Northern Ireland
Early in March, Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, announced that 750 members of the National Guard would be deployed to assist the New York Police Department maintain security on the city’s subway system. The reserve military personnel were intended to work alongside NYPD officers, primarily assisting with bag checks at busy interchanges, but it was a drastic move. It came in the wake of a series of high-profile violent incidents, and the governor made it clear that she was “sending a message to all New Yorkers”. The National Guard would be “there as a deterrent to those who might think that they can get away with committing crimes”, and Hochul presented this as “something even better” than releasing state funds to pay NYPD officers overtime to patrol the subway.
The deployment of military units for this kind of task is not unprecedented in New York. Hochul was reassigning personnel already serving as part of Joint Task Force Empire Shield, the security unit created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to provide military defence for New York City, as well as deploying 250 members of the New York State Police and the MTA Police Department.
The intention was both to deter criminals and to reassure the travelling public, but at least on the second point the reaction was mixed. Some New Yorkers felt that it was a demonstration that the authorities were reacting to a present threat and the National Guard would provide an additional degree of security. Others took the view that it was not their preferred situation, for reasons of personal liberty or privacy, but they would accept it if it was effective. But the idea of “fearmongering” has been expressed, the notion that uniformed military personnel raise the sense of tension without diminishing an known danger.
One state assemblywoman pointed directly to a political hazard. Emily Gallagher, Democratic representative for Greenpoint and Williamsburg, argued that a “ham-fisted and authoritarian response” in fact “validates GOP propaganda about urban lawlessness in an election year”. There was, she was suggesting, a very real danger that putting uniformed soldiers on New York’s major public transport network would simply play into the hands of Donald Trump and MAGA critics who said crime was out of control.
There is internal Democratic politics at play, certainly. The mayor of New York, Eric Adams, is a controversial figure who seems to attract scandal, as this article by Michael Powell in The Atlantic lays out. It was noticeable that Adams was not present at the press conference at which Hochul made the announcement about the National Guard, and the move may in part be an attempt by the governor to distance herself from the mayor and emphasise her own law-and-order credentials.
This use of the National Guard is what is known in the United Kingdom as “military aid to the civil authorities” (MACA). It has been used for a wide range of tasks including the maintenance of emergency services, building flood defences and distributing Covid-19 vaccines—but it was also a central plank of the armed forces’ 38-year-long mission in Northern Ireland, Operation Banner, in which the Army provided considerable support to the Royal Ulster Constabulary and, after 2001, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
I realise that Americans will be loath to learn anything from the experience of the British security forces in Northern Ireland. That may be one reason why I couldn’t interest commissioning editors in the United States in this subject when I first thought about it a month or so ago (of course there may be other reasons). But over nearly four decades, we learned several lessons, often through making and then trying not to repeat mistakes, from which the governor of New York might have benefited, had anyone explained them.
MACA rests on up to three criteria: it should be the last resort; it should provide a capability the civilian authorities lack; or it should deploy a capability more quickly than the civilian authorities can. It is a function of soldiers, sailors and airmen that they have a peerless “can-do” attitude, which will outstrip that of any other profession, but they can be eager but ineffective if they are asked to carry out functions for which they are neither equipped nor trained.
In Northern Ireland, the British Army provided additional protection to the police and gave them a power and a punch they would otherwise lack. Armoured vehicles and helicopters brought coordination to crowd control that the police alone could not have mustered, and infantry units were able to enforce heavy-duty roadblocks and checkpoints.
This kind of power is not what the New York subway needs. The governor’s announcement instead earmarked the National Guard to provide additional numbers at busy points on the transportation network, but carrying out the same tasks as the NYPD: essentially, searching bags and regulating access. These are basic functions for the police, but not for the military. What’s more, the National Guard has no powers of arrest, and it is well established under the Fourth Amendment that passengers could refuse to submit to a search in the absence of probable cause.
Here is a critical difference. In Northern Ireland, legislation was in place to give the Army the power of arrest (section 12 of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973). This meant that soldiers and police officers could act in unison when taking people into custody, whether in response to an incident or as part of a planned operation. The National Guard is not able to do that working with the NYPD. There is some leeway for military personnel to hold a suspect for a very short time until an arrest can be made by civilian law enforcement, but it holds out the prospect of confusion and potential legal challenge.
In one way, Hochul is using the National Guard for a wholly understandable purpose: reassurance. One of the mainstays of Operation Banner was so-called “framework operations”: highly visible, relatively routine tasks which were designed primarily to make the public feel more secure. She has been explicit:
I can show you all the statistics in the world and say, ‘You should feel safe because the numbers are better,’ but you’re the mom on the subway with your baby in a stroller.
But as I mentioned above, it is not clear that this has been effective in New York. A glance at social media—by no means a perfect or unbiased lens—will show considerable scepticism of both the motives and the success of the deployment.
The governor’s strategy suffered an early setback: on 14 March, a man was shot in the head on a subway train in downtown Brooklyn. The shooting took place at around 4.45 pm, in front of hundreds of commuters, after an altercation and seemed to be regarded as an act of self-defence, but the public effect was resonant. However else one interpreted the event, the presence of the National Guard had clearly not eliminated the threat of violence. The New York Times reported mixed reactions, from fear to resignation. Then on 25 March, a passenger was pushed onto the tracks and killed at Lexington Avenue. Hours before, a man on the subway had been stabbed multiple times after an argument about smoking.
The crime statistics for the subway do not present a clear picture. Offences had soared during the pandemic, but after 2022 began to fall again. Major crimes reduced by three per cent, and 10 killings on New York’s transit system in 2022 fell to five in 2023. But public opinion has not tracked the data exactly. We should not suppose that Hochul intended the arrival of the National Guard to be a panacea, but at the moment it looks like it has not worked at all.
The first major test of public opinion will be November’s presidential election, though the result in heavily Democratic New York is unlikely to throw up a surprise. That said, in 2022, Hochul was re-elected as governor but saw a swing to her GOP opponent of almost 10 per cent. She won by fewer than 400,000 votes when her predecessor had triumphed four years before by more than 1.4 million. Donald Trump has already claimed, of course falsely, that crime is rising across the board and compared America to Venezuela, of all places: “Wouldn’t we love to have a statistic where crime is down 67 per cent? Ours is only going in one direction.”
What is frustrating is that the use of the National Guard is nonsensical on several levels. It is a dubious principle, it is likely to be operationally ineffective and it contravenes the basic tenets of its own policy area of MACA. The lessons have been learned by others, including Britain. It is hard to see the governor of New York achieving success where others have failed.
Imagine the pant wetting and screaming of the Uk establishment and its liberal elite soulmates if this happened in London. Whereas Tokyo subway is spotless, efficient, reliable and safe. But Japan does things differently,usually better than the west, and we pretend we have all the answers.