Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the perceptions and the realities of crime in the subway. And, because it’s the first day of the state legislative session, we’ll look at the colonial-era lawyer who compiled a book of state laws when state government was brand-new.

Last year ended and 2025 began with a disturbing torrent of incidents in the subway: a woman burned to death on a subway car that was parked at the end of the line in Brooklyn, a man stabbed to death on a train in Queens and at least three other attacks.

Each heightened the perception that the subways are unsafe.

Mayor Eric Adams and Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, used the word “perception” seven times in a briefing on citywide crime statistics on Monday. “The subways will always be a bellwether for the perception of public safety in New York City,” Tisch said. “Declining crime numbers are significant, but we must still do more because people don’t feel safe in our subways.” Later the mayor said: “It is clear perception always overrides reality.”

I asked Andy Newman, who covers homelessness and poverty in New York — and used to cover transportation — to talk about the perception and reality of recent crimes in the subway.

The crime figures that Adams and Tisch released echoed a New York Times analysis of M.T.A. and police statistics from 2022, which showed that the chance of being a victim of violent crime in the subway was remote — roughly the same as the chance of being injured in a car crash during a two-mile drive. Why does the subway seem scarier?

People in cars tend to feel like the car itself is protecting them from external threats — it’s like you’re driving around in a little tank. I know, so is everyone else, but fear is not a rational thing.

In the subway, it’s just you, whoever else is there, and a train that weighs about 600 tons (not counting the passengers) barreling in.

And a subway car is a confined space where there may be no easy way to escape danger. That can make people feel trapped and vulnerable, which is scary.

Statistically, violent crime in the subway has seesawed in the last few years. But hasn’t there been an increase in several important categories, and doesn’t that go back to before the pandemic?

Yes, compared with before the pandemic, the number of murders in the subway has been higher in the last few years, though it has fluctuated a bit. Incidents of people getting pushed to the tracks have also risen, and the rate of felony assaults is more than double what it was before the pandemic. Misdemeanor assaults in the subway have also increased, though not as much. Robberies, for what it’s worth, have not.

So the perception that the city is less safe, or unsafe, is a lingering consequence of the pandemic?

A lot of people think that something changed during the pandemic and that there were suddenly more homeless people with untreated mental illness on the streets or in the subways.

People with serious mental illness are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators. But there is a certain percentage of psychotic people who are capable of lashing out.

Some of this may be due to a drop in the number of psychiatric beds in hospitals, but no one knows for sure.

There was a point at the height of the pandemic when paid ridership on the subway had plummeted and homeless people — who were avoiding shelters because they didn’t want to get sick — made some of the trains seem like rolling encampments. That’s no longer the case, but the perception is that things never quite went back to what they were before.

One transit advocate you talked to said that the M.T.A. has poured so many resources into stopping fare-beating. Would the subways be safer if there were more police officers and M.T.A. personnel on the platforms, instead of at the turnstiles?

It’s hard to say.

People have been pushed to the tracks even when police officers were patrolling on the platform but were not close enough to stop the attack. It takes only a second to push someone off the platform.

The police seem to believe that the people who habitually jump turnstiles are more likely to go on to commit more serious crimes once they’re in the subway system, so keeping them out prevents serious crime. But the police cannot be everywhere. It’s very hard to keep someone out if they want to go in.

Weather

Expect sunshine and wind gusts with temperature in the upper 20s. For tonight, look for partly cloudy skies with temperatures in the low 20s.

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In effect until Jan. 20 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day).

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Today is the first day of the state legislative session in Albany, the first official workday for the Assembly and the State Senate.

In 2266, 242 years from now, will anyone still be talking about the laws they pass?

That question came to mind when Peter Klarnet, a senior specialist in Americana at Christie’s, picked up “Laws of the State of New York,” published 242 years ago, a compendium of actions taken by “the first session of the Senate and Assembly after the Declaration of Independence.”

It turned out that Klarnet was less excited about the book than about what he had found inside, a handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence, apparently the only manuscript copy in private hands. Christie’s plans to sell it in on Jan. 24. The presale estimate is $2 million to $3 million.

The manuscript was written by Samuel Jones, who had compiled “Laws of the State of New York” with another colonial-era New Yorker, Richard Varick. Their names live on — Jones’s in Jones Beach on Long Island and Great Jones Street in NoHo, and Varick’s on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan.

Klarnet said Jones’s legacy also included proposing compromise wording that broke a deadlock over the Bill of Rights and cleared the way for New York to ratify the federal Constitution. New York’s state Constitution was the only one that originally began with the Declaration of Independence; Jones apparently wrote out the manuscript that Christie’s is selling to take to the state’s ratification convention in 1788.

Looked at from the polarized 2020s, the back story of comity and compromise seems improbable: Jones had been a British loyalist during the Revolutionary War. But after the British surrendered, he became an ally of the state’s first governor, George Clinton, who had been on the side of the colonials as a brigadier general in the state militia.

The copy of “Laws of the State of New York” that Christie’s is selling has notes by Jones in the margin about laws that had been revised or repealed into the 1790s. He had been elected to the Assembly in 1786 and the State Senate in 1790, and in 1797 was appointed the state’s first comptroller.

So what about that question — the one about whether laws passed in this legislative session will be remembered 242 years from now?

I asked the current comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli.

“I hope you’re not thinking about congestion pricing,” he said, laughing.

Dear Diary:

On the train in Brooklyn,
a lady stood facing the doors.
She s-l-ow-l-y extended her front leg
in an elegant line
and pressed her toe into the ground
with purpose.
The toe lightly tapped
and tapped again.
The movement caught my eye — a dancer!
Gemstone-studded ballroom heels
peeked out of her “The Heart of NY” tote.
With front leg extended,
she lightly flicked the leg upward in a tango kick,
silently dancing on the way home.

— Sarah Jung

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

The man charged with burning a woman to death on the New York City subway last month told investigators that he did not remember the incident because he was blackout drunk at the time, according to a transcript of his interrogation released by prosecutors on Tuesday.

The man, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, pleaded not guilty to five counts, including first- and second-degree murder, in a five-minute hearing on Tuesday morning in Kings County Supreme Criminal Court.

During his interrogation, which was conducted on the day of the attack, he described an all-night bender that ended in a blackout and then his arrest the next day in the death of the woman, Debrina Kawam.

“I am very sorry,” Mr. Zapeta-Calil said, according to the transcript, which was translated from Spanish. “I didn’t mean to. But I really don’t know. I don’t know what happened, but I’m very sorry for that woman.”

Ms. Kawam, 57, was from New Jersey but had recently stayed in a shelter in the Bronx. She was asleep on an F train parked at the end of the line in Coney Island early on the morning of Dec. 22 when Mr. Zapeta-Calil walked up, pulled out a lighter and set her on fire, the police said.

The violence of Ms. Kawam’s death and the video that captured the scene horrified many New Yorkers who have grown concerned in recent months about the safety of the subway system, despite assurances from the police that crime there has fallen overall.

In the video, which spread widely on social media, Ms. Kawam is seen standing in the doorway of a subway car as flames engulf her body and people scream in terror just out of frame.

A police officer walks by, appearing not to react, although law enforcement officials have said he was securing the crime scene.

The video then shows a man rising from a subway bench holding a shirt. But instead of smothering the flames, he appears to fan them by waving the garment at Ms. Kawam.

She was burned so badly that it took the medical examiner’s office more than a week to identify her remains.

In his interrogation, Mr. Zapeta-Calil said he did not remember any of that.

He said he began drinking shortly after he left his job as a construction laborer the night before the killing. He had no memory of seeing Ms. Kawam, no memory of the attack and no memory of when or how he boarded the train, he said.

“Sometimes when I drink and erase the memory and I don’t know,” he told investigators. “When I wake up, I’m already in the house, already sleeping. I wake up when I’m already at home. Or there are times when I wake up and I’m already at the train station.”

Federal immigration officials said Mr. Zapeta-Calil is an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who had been deported in 2018. He later returned illegally to the United States and was living in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn for men with drug problems, according to the address he gave the police after his arrest.

Immediately after the attack, the Police Department circulated images of the assailant. The department quickly received a tip from a group of teenagers who believed they had seen the man on another train in Brooklyn.

Soon after, police officers boarded that train and detained Mr. Zapeta-Calil at the Herald Square station in Manhattan. As his interrogation wound down later that day, investigators at the 60th Precinct station house in Brooklyn showed him the grisly video of Ms. Kawam’s death.

They asked him: Did he recognize the man setting her on fire?

“Oh, damn,” Mr. Zapeta-Calil replied. “That’s me.”

Andy Newman and Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Monday proposed an expansion of the state’s child tax credit that would more than double what some families currently receive.

The plan, the second in a series of recent proposals the governor has made toward addressing the state’s affordability crisis, would give eligible families a tax credit of up to $1,000 per child under the age of 4. Each child from the age of 4 to 16 will qualify families to receive up to a $500 tax break per child.

In recent years, the state has offered up to $330 per child for the poorest New York families. Ms. Hochul will include the proposal in her State of the State address next week and push to include it in her executive budget.

Frustration with the high cost of living surfaced among voters in the 2024 elections, and many Democrats, amid soul searching about Republican victories, said they should have talked more about addressing affordability.

Both Ms. Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams of New York City have already announced tax cuts or refunds they want the Legislature to adopt this year. Mr. Adams’s proposal would eliminate New York City income taxes for more than 400,000 of the lowest-wage earners. Ms. Hochul announced in December that she wants to spend about $3 billion to send checks between $300 and $500 to roughly 8.6 million New Yorkers, using money from sales tax revenue.

In a news conference Monday, Ms. Hochul said she has long focused on affordability, adding that proposals like increasing the child tax credit are partly shaped by raising her own children and seeing the financial strain that experience can have on a household.

“I will continue doing this,” she said. “I’ll do it independent of elections. It’s the right thing to do.”

“People are hurting right now,” she added, “and we cannot be tone deaf as a party, as a nation or as a state to those cries for help. This is how to respond to them.”

The state has spent billions in recent years on child care and to make more families eligible for subsidies. Tax credits like the one Ms. Hochul proposed have proved popular and effective. During the early years of the coronavirus pandemic, an expansion of the federal child tax credit led to dramatic reductions in adolescent poverty. This expansion then expired, and bipartisan efforts to bring it back failed.

Ms. Hochul’s proposal would apply to more than 2.75 million children in the state; families earning up to $200,000 a year would be eligible for the credit. In a news release, Ms. Hochul’s team said the average credit for families would double to nearly $950 under her proposal.

Legislative leaders, who have suggested similar proposals in past budget negotiations, appeared receptive.

“We are very glad the governor is supporting these important tax credits, which we have long championed in the Assembly majority,” said Mike Whyland, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie.

State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader, noted in a statement that she, like Ms. Hochul, is both the first mother and grandmother to serve in her role. Funding child care would remain a focus this legislative session, she said.

“I know firsthand how expensive raising children has become in this great state,” she said. “We look forward to discussing this proposal further. But we also know we have to deal with the rising cost of child care. The cost of child care is a burden that can overwhelm families, and we need to take steps to make affordable child care available to all New Yorkers.”

Even some Albany Republicans were open to the proposal. State Senator Jacob Ashby, a Republican from Rensselaer County, said that the state needs to do more “to make structural changes to our state economy” like lowering taxes across the board. Many of his colleagues have criticized Ms. Hochul, arguing that her administration has not done enough to lower costs for New York families.

“As someone who’s sponsored bipartisan legislation to provide new parents with targeted relief and pushed to increase the child tax credit across the board, I’m really optimistic about this proposal,” Mr. Ashby said in a statement.

If enacted, Ms Hochul’s proposal would be among the most generous child tax credits nationwide, according to researchers at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. In 2023, New York and 15 other states had some form of this credit, ranging in the amount given to families and the income threshold when it phases out. When the proposal is fully up and running in several years, these Columbia researchers estimate the tax cut could drop child poverty by about 9 percent.

“When the federal child tax credit was expanded during the pandemic, we saw child poverty plummet to historic lows,” said Richard Buery Jr., the chief executive of the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit in New York City that works to reduce poverty.

“With more money in your pocket, as a parent, you are less stressed, you can be more present, you can be much better and more effective at parenting children,” Mr. Buery added. “But when those federal credits expired, we saw our local poverty rate reach a 10-year high. So we know what to do. We just need the political leadership to do it.”