Are thrill-seeking children like birds scared away by metaphorical spikes on the roof? In late October, the MTA installed barriers—vertical strips of hard rubber—between cars on some trains operating on the 7 Line, limiting lift routes. These experiments in design cannot obscure the fact that the problem has largely been left to the police. This year, the New York City police have arrested more than one hundred and twenty people on suspicion of riding outside a subway car. Just two days after Ebba and Zema's deaths, the NYPD posted a thirteen-second clip on Instagram of a failed surfing attempt: In the video, two people break away from the outside of a parked train car and quickly run inside as if scared. Police captured the video using a drone; This is part of the Drone as First Responder program initiated by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. (One of Tisch's first appearances in the city was the opening of the NYPD's information technology office.) The drones are intended to be a “force multiplier,” in the words of public safety lawmaker Kaz Daughtry, adding to an already increased police presence in the subways. They also make this presence more disembodied, more three-dimensional.
Adams calls the surfer arrests a “rescue” or “rescue.” He's right that arrests potentially save lives. But it is also true that his administration is recasting invasive surveillance as an apolitical package for rescuing teenagers from their confused identities. The question of subway safety—a question that exposes the ugly and duplicitous agendas of supposed civilian cleanup, Ed Koch's expansionism, and Giuliani's war efforts—has been posed by two outbreaks of post-pandemic violence: Shooting in Sunset ParkAnd murder of Jordan Neely. Meanwhile, the surfer commits violence against himself. It is criminalized, usually as reckless endangerment, but is not classified in the minds of normal people as a social crime. The drones give Tisch's larger surveillance operations, which include organizing more than a thousand mostly black and Latino New York City juveniles into gangs in the “Gang Database,” a sheen of virtue. (She's also pushing to repeal Raise the Age, a state law that keeps children under eighteen out of adult court.)
Demetrius Critchlow, President of NYC Transit, is a third-generation transit worker. Last year, after nearly three decades at the MTA, he was named subway and bus chief, making him second in power to Janno Lieber, the MTA chief who took the top job after Andy Byford, the sought-after savior of our sinking subways, quit in anger under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Critchlow contrasts Adams' pathological swagger with his father's anxiety. After the deaths of Ebba and Zema, Critchlow warned: “Climbing to the top of the tube is not surfing, it is suicide.” What else?
As a teenager, I spent two to three hours a day on the subway. It was a liminal space, literally transient, there was barely enough space for him. I remember on the subway I felt that we teenagers had predatory power over the adults, who cowered in irritation as we scattered throughout the cars, but cowered nonetheless. We could behave badly on the subway because it was a power desert between home and school. There was an unspoken exhibitionism in the way we pressed ourselves as close to the edge of the platform as possible while waiting for the train, forcing ourselves not to flinch as the express pulled into the station. Back then, it was not so much riding on the roof as riding between cars that was popular. I couldn't do it; My cousin died one morning in January after he was hit by an E train in Queens. But with a mixture of jealousy and attraction, I watched as my friends shook from side to side, pretending to have stone faces. And we were nothing. I knew kids who could walk miles through subway tunnels and their knowledge of the system was so complete.
Eyewitnesses on J recall seeing a group of kids with Ebba and Zema before their fateful trip, allegedly hyping up the girls. For several days after their deaths, their social media accounts were still accessible. It was painful to watch the videos they left behind, a kind of living trail to their destruction. The POV video shows the tunnel cavity moving away at high speed, meaning the girl who filmed the video must have been hanging outside the last car of the moving train. In another, a girl lies on the tracks; someone must have been there with her to give the injection. Lots of the insides of dilapidated and abandoned buildings, lots of night shots shot on high bridges, and it's all shaky. It's a double adrenaline rush: the danger of the act itself, and then the pleasure of downloading the evidence. New York City recently added a lawsuit to dozens already filed by local authorities against social media companies such as Meta, which owns Instagram, and Bytedance, the owner of TikTok. City officials say social media has fueled a youth mental health crisis and that undifferentiated algorithmic logic has pushed video surfing to the forefront. (In past years, social media companies have worked with the city to flag videos.) In filing the lawsuit, the city followed the lead of Norma Nazario, who in 2024 sued TikTok and Meta for the wrongful death of her fifteen-year-old son Zachery, who died while surfing, claiming that algorithms encouraged her son to become addicted to the activity. Meta and TikTok filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit; the courts rejected these requests.
