The Attract—and the Policing—of Subway Browsing

​​Are thrill-seeking youngsters like birds, deterred by metaphorical spikes on the roof? In late October, the M.T.A. did set up boundaries—vertical pads made from exhausting rubber—in between vehicles on some trains working on the 7 line, limiting climbing routes. These experiments in design can’t obscure the truth that the issue has largely been handed off to the police. This yr, the N.Y.P.D. has arrested greater than 100 and twenty individuals on suspicion of using exterior a subway automotive. Simply two days after Ebba and Zema died, the N.Y.P.D. launched a thirteen-second clip, on Instagram, of a thwarted browsing try: within the video, two individuals peel themselves off the outside of a parked prepare automotive, speeding inside shortly, as if spooked. The police produced the footage by way of drone; it’s a part of the “Drone as First Responder” program, caused by the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. (Considered one of Tisch’s early gigs for the town was inaugurating the N.Y.P.D.’s workplace of knowledge expertise.) The drones are supposed to be a “force-multiplier,” within the public-safety deputy Kaz Daughtry’s phrases, augmenting the already-increased police presence on the subways. In addition they make this presence extra disembodied, extra ambient.

Adams calls the arrests of surfers “saves” or “rescues.” He’s proper that the arrests doubtlessly save lives. However additionally it is true that his administration is wrapping invasive surveillance within the apolitical packaging of saving teen-agers from their addled selves. The query of security on the subway—a query that brings to gentle ugly and duplicitous applications of purported civic cleanup, of the expansionism of Ed Koch and the hostilities of Giuliani—had been framed by two explosions of violence within the wake of the pandemic: the Sundown Park taking pictures, and the killing of Jordan Neely. The violence that the surfer does, in the meantime, is to themselves. It’s criminalized, sometimes as reckless endangerment, however isn’t categorized within the minds of regular individuals as a social crime. The drones present Tisch’s bigger surveillance operations—which embody the herding of greater than a thousand underaged, overwhelmingly Black and Latino New Yorkers into gangs inside a “Legal Group Database”—the sheen of the benign. (She can also be urgent for a repeal of “Elevate the Age,” the state legislation that retains youngsters underneath eighteen out of grownup courtroom.)

Demetrius Crichlow, the president of N.Y.C. Transit, is a third-generation transit employee. Final yr, after practically three many years working on the M.T.A., he acquired the submit operating the subways and buses, making him second in authority solely to Janno Lieber, the pinnacle of the M.T.A., who took excessive place after Andy Byford, the begged-for savior of our drowning subways, left angrily underneath former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Crichlow contrasts Adams’s pathological swagger with an air of paternal angst. After the deaths of Ebba and Zema, Crichlow warned, “Getting on high of a subway isn’t ‘browsing’—it’s suicide.” And what else is it?

In my teen-age years, I spent two to a few hours a day on the subway. It was a borderline house, actually transitory, simply in need of a spot. I bear in mind feeling, within the subway, that we teen-agers had an extortionate sway over adults, who shrank out of annoyance as we unfold ourselves within the vehicles however shrank, nonetheless. We had been free to be unhealthy within the subway as a result of it was an authority desert between house and college. There was an unstated exhibitionism to the best way we slouched as near the platform’s edge as attainable whereas ready for the prepare, forcing ourselves to not flinch when the specific automotive careened into the station. What was fashionable again then wasn’t a lot using on the roof as using in between vehicles. I couldn’t do it; a cousin of mine had died, one January morning, after being struck by an E prepare in Queens. However, with a mixture of jealousy and attraction, I watched my pals be jerked backward and forward, feigning stone-face. And we had been nothing. I knew youngsters who may journey miles by the subway tunnels, their information of the system so full.

Eyewitnesses on the J recall seeing a gaggle of children with Ebba and Zema earlier than their deadly journey, presumably hyping the ladies up. For a couple of days after their deaths, their social-media accounts had been nonetheless accessible. It was excruciating to observe the movies that they had left, a kind of dwelling path to their annihilation. A P.O.V. video exhibits the cavity of a tunnel receding at excessive pace, which means that the woman filming will need to have been hanging off the outside of the final automotive of a shifting prepare. A woman lies on tracks in one other one; somebody will need to have been down there along with her to get the shot. Quite a lot of the innards of decrepit and deserted buildings, a whole lot of captures of the nighttime, filmed atop scaled bridges, all filmed shakily. It is a double adrenaline rush: the hazard of the act itself, after which the gratification of importing proof. Just lately, New York Metropolis added a go well with to the handfuls which have already been lodged by native governments towards social-media firms equivalent to Meta, which owns Instagram, and Bytedance, the proprietor of TikTok. Town claims that social media has launched a youth mental-health disaster, and that the undifferentiation of algorithmic logic has introduced browsing movies to the fore. (Social-media firms have, in years previous, collaborated with the town by flagging movies.) In submitting the go well with, the town was following the lead of Norma Nazario, who, in 2024, sued TikTok and Meta for the wrongful dying of her fifteen-year-old son, Zackery, who died browsing, claiming that algorithms inspired her son to turn into hooked on the act. Meta and TikTok have petitioned to have the go well with dropped; the courts have thrown these petitions out.