In December 2012 a woman pushed a man to his death. He had been waiting for a train on a Queens elevated subway platform. This was not a cowardly unwitnessed late night attack by criminals—it was not a hidden homicide—but the act of an irrational person who was seen muttering to herself before she pushed her victim in front of an incoming train.
The crazed woman quickly fled the station but police—thanks to a recording made on a surveillance camera—soon had a complete description. She was quickly apprehended and charged.
But that camera was not on the subway platform. It was in a retail store window on Queens Boulevard.
Yes, riders on the world's largest transit system, who are supposedly protected by America's largest metropolitan police force, can only hope that their attacker leaves the subway and runs past a Chinese restaurant (or a nail salon or a pawn shop) that just happens to have a camera pointing toward the sidewalk. If not, the criminal will go free.
The lack of cameras in the subway has been noticed by The New York Times and the Daily News. Reporter Pete Donohue wrote in the News that in a certain high-crime area in Queens,
