The allure – and police – of subway surfing

Are thrill-seeking children like birds, deterred by the metaphorical spikes on the roof? In late October, the RTA installed barriers — vertical pads made of hard rubber — between cars on some trains running on the 7th Line, restricting the climbing routes. These experiments in design cannot obscure the fact that the problem has mostly been handed over to the police. This year, the NYPD arrested more than one hundred and twenty people on suspicion of riding out of a subway car. Just two days after the deaths of Iba and Zima, the NYPD posted a thirteen-second video on Instagram of a failed surfing attempt: In the video, two people peel themselves off the outside of a parked train car and quickly rush inside, as if in a panic. Police produced the footage via drone. It’s part of the “Drone as a First Responder” program, launched by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. (One of Tisch’s first gigs for the city was the opening of the NYPD’s Information Technology Office.) The drones are intended to act as a “force multiplier,” in the words of Public Safety Deputy Kaz Daughtry, adding to an already increased police presence in the subway. It also makes this presence more disembodied and more ambient.

Adams calls the arrest of surfers “preservation” or “rescue.” He is right that arrests may save lives. But it is also true that his administration wraps invasive surveillance in the apolitical package of saving teenagers from their perverted selves. The question of safety on the subway — a question that highlights the ugly, duplicitous programs of alleged civic cleansing, Ed Koch’s expansionism and Giuliani’s aggressive actions — has been framed by two outbursts of violence in the wake of the pandemic: the Sunset Park shooting, and the killing of Jordan Neely. At the same time, the violence that surfers inflict is on themselves. It is usually criminalized as reckless endangerment, but is not classified in the minds of ordinary people as a social crime. Drones provide Tisch’s larger surveillance operations — which include herding more than a thousand underage, mostly black and Latino New Yorkers into gangs into a “criminal groups database” — a benign lustre. (She’s also pushing to repeal Raise the Age, a state law that keeps children under 18 out of adult court.)

Demetrius Crichlow, president of NYC Transit, is a third-generation transit worker. Last year, after nearly three decades at the MTA, he secured a position running subways and buses, putting him second in power to Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chief, who took over the top job after Andy Byford, the savior the sinking subways begged for, who angrily departed under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Crichlow contrasts Adams’s pathological bravado with an air of paternal anxiety. After the deaths of Ebba and Zima, Crichlow warned: “Climbing to the top of the subway is not ‘surfing’ – it is suicide.” What else is it?

In my teenage years, I spent two or three hours a day on the subway. It was a border space, literally transient, just a short distance away. I remember feeling, on the subway, that we teenagers had a blackmailing influence on the adults, who cringed in discomfort when we spread out in the cars but shrank nonetheless. We were free to be bad on the subway because it was a salad desert between home and school. There was an unspoken display in the way we kept as close to the edge of the platform as possible while waiting for the train, forcing ourselves not to back away as the speeding car swerved into the station. What was popular at the time was not so much riding on the roof as riding between cars. I couldn’t do it. One of my cousins ​​died, one January morning, after being hit by an E train in Queens. But, with a mixture of jealousy and attraction, I watched my friends rock from side to side, feigning a stony face. And we were nothing. I knew kids who could travel for miles through subway tunnels, and their knowledge of the system was so complete.

Eyewitnesses to J recall seeing a group of children with Ebba and Zima before their fatal journey, and they were supposedly over-exciting the girls. A few days after their death, their social media accounts remained available. It was painful to watch the videos they left, which were a live track of their annihilation. A POV video shows the tunnel cavity receding at high speed, meaning the girl who was filming was dangling from the outside of the last car of a moving train. A girl lies on tracks elsewhere. Someone must have been there with her to take the photo. Much of the interior of dilapidated and abandoned buildings, many of the night shots, and atop stepped bridges, are all shot shakily. This is a double adrenaline rush: the danger of the act itself, and then the joy of downloading the guide. Recently, New York City added a lawsuit to dozens of lawsuits local governments have already filed against social media companies like Meta, which owns Instagram, and ByteDance, which owns TikTok. The city claims social media has unleashed a mental health crisis among young people, and that a lack of differentiation in algorithmic reasoning has pushed surfing videos to the forefront. (Social media companies have, in past years, cooperated with the city by flagging videos.) In filing the lawsuit, the city was following in the footsteps of Norma Nazario, who in 2024 sued TikTok and Meta for the wrongful death of her fifteen-year-old son, Zachary, who died while surfing, claiming that algorithms had encouraged her son to become addicted to the act. Meta and TikTok have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit; The courts rejected these petitions.