The Allure—and the Policing—of Subway Surfing

​​Are thrill-seeking kids similar birds, deterred by metaphorical spikes connected the roof? In precocious October, the M.T.A. did instal barriers—vertical pads made of hard rubber—in betwixt cars connected immoderate trains operating connected the 7 line, restricting climbing routes. These experiments successful plan cannot obscure the information that the occupation has mostly been handed disconnected to the police. This year, the N.Y.P.D. has arrested much than a 100 and 20 radical connected suspicion of riding extracurricular a subway car. Just 2 days aft Ebba and Zema died, the N.Y.P.D. released a thirteen-second clip, connected Instagram, of a thwarted surfing attempt: successful the video, 2 radical peel themselves disconnected the exterior of a parked bid car, rushing wrong quickly, arsenic if spooked. The constabulary produced the footage via drone; it is portion of the “Drone arsenic First Responder” program, brought astir by the constabulary commissioner, Jessica Tisch. (One of Tisch’s aboriginal gigs for the metropolis was inaugurating the N.Y.P.D.’s bureau of accusation technology.) The drones are meant to beryllium a “force-multiplier,” successful the public-safety lawman Kaz Daughtry’s words, augmenting the already-increased constabulary beingness connected the subways. They besides marque this beingness much disembodied, much ambient.

Adams calls the arrests of surfers “saves” oregon “rescues.” He is close that the arrests perchance prevention lives. But it is besides existent that his medication is wrapping invasive surveillance successful the apolitical packaging of redeeming teen-agers from their addled selves. The question of information connected the subway—a question that brings to airy disfigured and duplicitous programs of purported civic cleanup, of the expansionism of Ed Koch and the hostilities of Giuliani—had been framed by 2 explosions of unit successful the aftermath of the pandemic: the Sunset Park shooting, and the sidesplitting of Jordan Neely. The unit that the surfer does, meanwhile, is to themselves. It is criminalized, typically arsenic reckless endangerment, but isn’t categorized successful the minds of mean radical arsenic a societal crime. The drones supply Tisch’s larger surveillance operations—which see the herding of much than a 1000 underaged, overwhelmingly Black and Latino New Yorkers into gangs wrong a “Criminal Group Database”—the sheen of the benign. (She is besides pressing for a repeal of “Raise the Age,” the authorities instrumentality that keeps kids nether eighteen retired of big court.)

Demetrius Crichlow, the president of N.Y.C. Transit, is simply a third-generation transit worker. Last year, aft astir 3 decades moving astatine the M.T.A., helium got the station moving the subways and buses, making him 2nd successful authorization lone to Janno Lieber, the caput of the M.T.A., who took implicit the apical presumption aft Andy Byford, the begged-for savior of our drowning subways, near angrily nether erstwhile Governor Andrew Cuomo. Crichlow contrasts Adams’s pathological swagger with an aerial of paternal angst. After the deaths of Ebba and Zema, Crichlow warned, “Getting connected apical of a subway isn’t ‘surfing’—it’s suicide.” And what other is it?

In my teen-age years, I spent 2 to 3 hours a time connected the subway. It was a borderline space, virtually transitory, conscionable abbreviated of a place. I retrieve feeling, successful the subway, that we teen-agers had an extortionate sway implicit adults, who shrank retired of annoyance arsenic we dispersed ourselves successful the cars but shrank, nonetheless. We were escaped to beryllium atrocious successful the subway due to the fact that it was an authorization godforsaken betwixt location and school. There was an unspoken exhibitionism to the mode we slouched arsenic adjacent to the platform’s borderline arsenic imaginable portion waiting for the train, forcing ourselves not to flinch erstwhile the explicit car careened into the station. What was fashionable backmost past wasn’t truthful overmuch riding connected the extortion arsenic riding successful betwixt cars. I couldn’t bash it; a relative of excavation had died, 1 January morning, aft being struck by an E bid successful Queens. But, with a premix of jealousy and attraction, I watched my friends beryllium jerked from broadside to side, feigning stone-face. And we were nothing. I knew kids who could question miles done the subway tunnels, their cognition of the strategy truthful complete.

Eyewitnesses connected the J callback seeing a radical of kids with Ebba and Zema earlier their fatal ride, presumably hyping the girls up. For a fewer days aft their deaths, their social-media accounts were inactive accessible. It was excruciating to ticker the videos they had left, a benignant of surviving way to their annihilation. A P.O.V. video shows the cavity of a passageway receding astatine precocious speed, meaning that the miss filming indispensable person been hanging disconnected the exterior of the past car of a moving train. A miss lies connected tracks successful different one; idiosyncratic indispensable person been down determination with her to get the shot. A batch of the innards of decrepit and abandoned buildings, a batch of captures of the nighttime, filmed atop scaled bridges, each filmed shakily. This is simply a treble adrenaline rush: the information of the enactment itself, and past the gratification of uploading proof. Recently, New York City added a suit to the dozens that person already been lodged by section governments against social-media companies specified arsenic Meta, which owns Instagram, and Bytedance, the proprietor of TikTok. The metropolis claims that societal media has launched a younker mental-health crisis, and that the undifferentiation of algorithmic logic has brought surfing videos to the fore. (Social-media companies have, successful years past, collaborated with the metropolis by flagging videos.) In filing the suit, the metropolis was pursuing the pb of Norma Nazario, who, successful 2024, sued TikTok and Meta for the wrongful decease of her fifteen-year-old son, Zackery, who died surfing, claiming that algorithms encouraged her lad to go addicted to the act. Meta and TikTok person petitioned to person the suit dropped; the courts person thrown these petitions out.