Chris Madigan remembers his feet were so cold they hurt. He had no shoes on — only socks — when NYPD officers stopped him for sleeping on the subway in the 86th Street station on Feb. 22. He said police escorted him onto Broadway in handcuffs on a cold night, just hours before a blizzard dropped nearly 2 feet of snow on New York City.
The 44-year-old Bronx native said he’s spent the last several years sleeping on benches and friends’ couches. Police body camera footage viewed by Gothamist shows him sprawled across a row of subway seats on the night he was arrested. Two officers tried to wake him up — calmly at first, then pulling him by his jacket off the train.
“I remember waking up, and I remember being dragged,” he said.
Madigan is one of a growing number of New Yorkers who ended up in court after police caught them occupying more than one seat in public transit or lying on the floor of a station in recent months, according to a Gothamist data analysis.
State court data show there were 591 cases last year in which lying down or taking up more than one seat in public transit was the most serious charge. That’s up more than 3,000% compared to the year prior, when there were just 19 of these cases. Court cases for the first three months of 2026 have already exceeded the number during the same period in 2025.
The ballooning case numbers come as NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has pledged to crack down on subway and quality-of-life crimes — the types of low-level offenses she says contribute to perceptions that the city and its subway system are unsafe. While the latest trend started under the prior administration, data show it has continued under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on promises to rely more on outreach workers than police to deal with homelessness in the transit system. Mamdani has chosen to keep Tisch at the helm of the department despite differences in their philosophies on public safety, including the enforcement of low-level offenses.
“ Riders want the subways to be a place to comfortably and safely get from point A to B, and I think everyone appreciates that the subway should not be housing or a hospital-like setting of last resort, because it can't function that way,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director with the commuter advocacy group Riders Alliance. “That said, I think New Yorkers are also aware that a revolving door approach has been tried too many times and simply can't work.”
A spokesperson for the NYPD said in a statement that keeping the subways safe is a priority for the department, and that officers are expected to enforce the rules and regulations in the transit system. Last year was the safest year for New York City’s subways, not including the pandemic years, and transit crime remained down as of mid-April 2026, the spokesperson added.
The mayor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Cracking down on quality-of-life crimes
At the annual State of the NYPD address in January 2025, recently appointed Commissioner Tisch told a roomful of police and supporters of the department that “the subways will always be a bellwether for public safety in New York City.”
She said the NYPD would send a surge of officers into the transit system at night. She also announced a new division dedicated to policing “quality-of-life” issues, including aggressive panhandling, illegal street vending and public urination, which she said give “the impression of an unsafe community.”
“For too long, we asked our cops to correct these conditions without sufficient direction,” she said. “No more.”
Tisch’s public commitment to subway and quality-of-life enforcement coincided with the upward trend in court cases for spreading out or lying down in public transit, according to state court data. That month, more cases appeared before a judge in which the top charge was of one of these violations than in the entire year prior, according to state court data.
The state court data Gothamist analyzed only include cases that went before a judge, in which the most serious charge someone faced was for spreading out on the subway. They do not include all arrests for these transit violations.
An NYPD spokesperson declined to comment on court system data but said the police department arrested even more people than those included state court dataset. Between January 1 and March 31 of this year, according to the spokesperson, police arrested 643 people whose only initial charge was stretching out on the subway. The NYPD said 83% of those people had an active warrant and 41% had been convicted of felonies in the past.
The state court data also does not include cases that started with an officer approaching a person for one of these transit violations and then escalated, leading the person to be charged with a more serious offense. Madigan’s case was one of those.
After two transit officers removed him from a subway car, they told him he couldn’t lie down on a bench in the station, either, according to body camera video. The footage shows police dragging him across the floor of the station, cuffing his wrists and walking him above ground.
Hours earlier, the mayor had declared a Code Blue and said outreach teams would be working with the NYPD and FDNY to connect people in need with warm places. But police informed Madigan he would be arrested for trespassing if he returned to the 86th Street station. Madigan can be heard in the video yelling that there was “nowhere to f---ing go.” When an officer told him he could have gone to another station, Madigan looked over his shoulder and spit in her direction, the video shows. Police took him into custody, and he was charged with aggravated harassment.
Chris Madigan is one of a growing number of New Yorkers who ended up in court after police caught him occupying more than one seat in public transit.
“ People like Mr. Madigan who are sleeping on the train or taking up more than one seat — no one would be doing that if they had another option,” said Maggie Bergmann, Madigan’s defense attorney with the New York County Defender Services.
She said officials should focus on connecting people like her client with housing, mental health care and substance use treatment — not arresting them.
“Sure, there’s conduct in the end that matches up to what is a crime,” Bergmann said. “I think the context and just seeing what happened, as it was happening, paints a completely different story.”
The NYPD did not respond to questions about Madigan’s case.
‘There’s not a lot of options’
Jillian Snider, a former NYPD officer who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the goal of enforcing low-level offenses like these is to deter more serious crimes in the transit system. It can also assuage the concerns of commuters who feel uncomfortable riding the subway alongside sleeping, homeless New Yorkers, she said.
“Regular citizens, when they see homeless people encamped on a sidewalk or laying in a subway car, they immediately feel less safe,” she said. “That is not that these are dangerous individuals by any means, but it puts forth this perception of incivility.”
When Snider was an officer, she said, she was instructed to write summonses, which allow people to stay out of jail while they await a court date, for quality-of-life issues. But since January 2025, more than 98% of court cases with a top charge of lying down or taking up more than one seat in public transit resulted in someone being taken into custody, according to Gothamist’s analysis of court data. The others were given a summons or desk appearance ticket.
Snider said one reason might be that many people police find sleeping on the subway lack proper identification. She said when she was on the force she was told to take people without valid photo IDs into custody. A department spokesperson said today police are not required to take someone into custody who does not have a photo ID and that officers make a “reasonable effort to identify an individual through multiple venues.”
Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, said she hopes the city and state will continue to invest in programs that provide services to homeless people in the transit system. She mentioned SCOUT teams, which send nurses and police into the subways to determine whether homeless people with severe mental illness need medical treatment.
“There are a lot of different schools of thought,” she said, when it comes to addressing homelessness on the subway. “There are some riders who want to see everybody who they feel shouldn’t be on a train taken off a train. There are a lot of people who believe that anybody who needs help should get the help that they need.”
A police spokesperson noted the NYPD participates in the Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness program, which pairs officers with clinicians and employees from the Department of Homeless Services to offer services, provide basic medical care and transport people to the hospital. The spokesperson also said the majority of interactions related to spreading out in the transit system result in voluntary compliance.
‘What are you picking on me for?’
The NYPD’s focus on this kind of quality-of-life enforcement on public transportation has ebbed and flowed over the years. In 2009, under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, transit officers issued nearly 9,000 tickets to people who occupied more than one seat on public transit, either by lying down, resting their feet or putting their belongings next to them, according to news reports from the time. By 2016, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio had sworn off the approach and urged police to prioritize more serious crimes. Then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance also announced that year that his office would stop prosecuting low-level offenses like taking up two seats in most cases, according to news reports from the time.
Between 2021 and 2024, hardly anyone was taken to court on a top charge of sprawling out in public transit, according to a state court dataset that includes information on all arraignments for felonies, misdemeanors and violations since 2021. In the initial years after the height of the pandemic, when ridership plummeted, only a handful of these cases made it before a judge, according to state court data. In 2024, 19 did. The rising case numbers since early 2025 signal a marked shift in strategy.
Anthony Clarkson, a homeless man who often stays in Chinatown, said in an interview that police frequently stop him for falling asleep on the subway. He said he’s not typically trying to sleep on the train. But if he’s riding late at night and there’s a long delay, he said, sometimes he drifts off and misses his stop.
“If there’s no intent, what are you picking on me for?” he said.
Clarkson said police have brought him to court on these violations, only for a judge to dismiss the case.
“They’re bullies,” he said.
Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the approach "a heavy-handed criminalization of a vulnerable population who don’t need more policing and criminalization.”
“What they need are connections to services [and] the city to make deeper investments in affordable housing,” he said.
This enforcement approach isn’t only affecting homeless New Yorkers. In December, a video went viral on social media that appeared to show police pulling a Black woman off the subway for sleeping. Since 2021, more than half of the people who went to court on a top charge of lying down or spreading out in transit were Black, according to Gothamist’s analysis of court data.