MTA boss admits subway crime a ‘nightmare’ but vows NYC won’t go back to bad old days

New York City can’t surrender and return to the bad old days of subway crime, MTA boss Janno Lieber stressed Wednesday — as the agency touted its latest plan to tackle mental illness underground.

Lieber’s comments came days after an unhinged man allegedly shoved an innocent straphanger to his death at an East Harlem station in the latest random attack on the subway system.

“This is a nightmare for New Yorkers,” Lieber said during a Metropolitan Transportation Authority board meeting in downtown Manhattan.

“I grew up in New York riding the trains at a time when crime and subway breakdowns were much more frequent. My kids grew up in a different subway era. They were able to come and go at all hours of the night feeling safe,” the transit chief continued.

“We’re not going back. We’re not going back!” he vowed.

Agency officials touted the success of the MTA’s new “SCOUT” pilot program — which has two teams that include mental health clinicians who can intervene if a mentally ill New Yorker suffers a breakdown in a station.

The teams, who are tasked with sticking with the person until they are admitted to a hospital or taken to an appropriate shelter, have gotten 90 people out of the transit system over the last three months — or roughly one person a day, officials said.

“We are not surrendering our city to anyone — not to criminals and not even to the people who have severe mental health issues, even though we feel a ton of compassion for them,” Lieber told the transit agency meeting.

“For millions of New Yorkers, there’s no alternative to mass transit, they need to live their lives,” Lieber said. “There is no New York for them without mass transit.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul last month gave $20 million to rapidly expand SCOUT, which runs alongside the state-funded Safe Option Support (SOS) program and a city-backed response team rolled out by Mayor Eric Adams in 2022.

The SOS and city-led teams are essentially both made up of social workers meant to offer support and services to those who are mentally ill but aren’t necessarily threatening harm to anyone else in the subway system.

Adams’ mental health team currently removes 130 people involuntarily from various stations per week, a City Hall spokesperson said. It isn’t clear how many of them, if any, are admitted to hospitals for treatment.

Concerns about transit crime have continued to surge in the aftermath of Monday’s chilling attack, in which a 24-year-old Bronx man with a history of mental illness and several past arrests is accused of suddenly pushing a rider in the path of an oncoming train.

Relatives of suspect Carlton McPherson’s said they had tried to get him psychiatric help — to no avail —  in the months leading up to 54-year-old Jason Volz’s slaying at the East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue station.

It was just the latest violent incident underground in recent months, including the deadly shooting on a crowded train car in Brooklyn earlier in March.

The number of felony assaults in the transit system jumped 53% last year from pre-pandemic times, with 570 such attacks in 2023 compared to 373 in 2019, the latest NYPD data show.

While it wasn’t immediately clear exactly what is behind the alarming spike, a number of recent incidents are tied, in part, to mental illness.

Half of the nearly 40 perps busted for attacking MTA employees in the underground system last year had histories of mental illness, a recent Post investigation revealed.

Of the 38 charged in 41 separate assaults on the transit staffers, 20 had documented psychological problems and at least five arrests to their names, documents obtained by The Post showed.

Lieber acknowledged Wednesday there was a link in “some cases” between the mental health crisis and spiking subway crime.

“I think we all know some of those instances. I’m interested in making the system feel safe for the riders – not just statistically safe, but it feels safe,” he said.

“We’ve acknowledged from the get-go that the presence of people struggling with psychosis, who may be acting aggressively in the public space, is part of the subway experience that we all need to address,” he added.

“But we need to bring those people indoors, that’s what the SCOUT program is about.”