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Please stand clear of the subway criminals.
Major crime is up 5 percent on the city rails this year, putting New York on track for its first year-over-year subway-crime increase since 2004.
“Subway crime reflects what’s going on above ground,” said Thomas Reppetto, former chairman of the Citizens Crime Commission.
“The question is, can they bring it under control in 2011? Twenty years of history says they can.”
The felony spike should be blamed in part on teens stealing iPods, cellphones and other electronic devices, mainly from each other, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. Juveniles are thought to commit 15 percent of all subway crime.
Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. has responded to the crime spike by seeking higher bail and tougher punishment for subway crooks. Vance’s program is meant to thwart repeat offenders.
Vance’s office got a judge to set $15,000 bail for an ex-con accused of pickpocketing a woman’s credit cards and using them to buy MetroCards. That suspect, 45- year-old Michael Richardson, is awaiting trial.
The subways were on pace to see more than 2,100 major crimes by the end of the year. In all of 2009, police counted 2,034 major felonies on the subways.
The subway-crime spike is in line with numbers for the entire city, which also show crime is up about 5 percent this year.
Still, the uptick is hardly a return to the bad old days of subway crime.
In 2004, cops counted 3,286 subway crimes, about 55 percent more crime than straphangers can expect to see in 2010.
And rapes and murders on the subway are still rare.
Two murders and two rapes were reported in the subways in 2009; just one of each crime has been reported so far this year.
“While there’s been an increase in some subway crime, the current average of 5.9 crimes per day is still half of the 12 crimes per day in the subway system in 2000, and a fraction of the 40 crimes per day in 1990, even though there were a million fewer riders then,” said Browne.
Cops are also concerned about a trend of criminals roaming the subways looking for sleeping or drunk passengers. They call the suspects “lush workers.”
In one such incident in May, three lush workers grabbed a cellphone from a man sleeping on an uptown No. 6 train at the Brooklyn Bridge stop near City Hall.
Two suspects stood lookout on the platform and at a train door, while the third suspect grabbed a phone from the victim. Cops rounded up the three men, who are charged with fourth-degree grand larceny.