NYC police’s ‘quality of life’ strategy for subways: arrest food vendors – By Lauren Aratani (The Guardian) / Nov 22 2019
Clip of police handcuffing a woman selling churros at a subway station went viral as over-policing becomes a hot-button issue
Along with cat videos and TikToks, a relatively new type of clip has become fodder for thousands of users on social media: police in the New York City subway.
A growing archive of videos and pictures on social media have been held up as proof that the city’s subway system, run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), is under excessive policing after it was announced in September that the MTA would be hiring 500 officers to join its police force.
In October, two clips of scuffles with the police went viral. One showed a group of cops trying to restrain a group of teenagers at a subway stop, including a frame of an officer punching a young man in the face. A second showed showed police drawing their guns and storming a subway car.
This steady stream of videos appear to pop up on social media every few weeks and go viral, firing up debates about the MTA, New York police department (NYPD) officers and everyday subway riders.
Most recently, a clip of police handcuffing a woman selling churros on 9 November racked up nearly three million views on Twitter.
The scene was captured by Twitter user Sofia Newman, who approached the NYPD officers while filming. “What’s going on? Why are you taking her shit away?” she asks an officer as the woman selling churros looks visibly distraught. “It’s illegal to sell food in the subway stations and we warned her multiple times, and she doesn’t want to give it up,” an officer tells Newman.
Continue to article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/22/nyc-subways-500-police-officers-vendors
A downtown 1 train pulls into the WTC Cortlandt subway station in New York. Photograph: Patrick Sison/AP
