New York City Has an Assault Problem. One Reason Sticks Out

After a 76-year-old New Yorker was pushed to his death down a subway-station staircase earlier this month, the profile that emerged of his suspected assailant was distressingly familiar. Rhamell Burke had been released from Bellevue Hospital that afternoon after being picked up by police for threatening, erratic behavior earlier in the day. He had been arrested four other times since February, once for a subway station meltdown in which three Port Authority police officers were injured trying to arrest him and once for attacking a young woman on a subway train. A little less familiar, although not entirely unheard of, was 32-year-old Burke’s personal history — a once-promising Broadway performer who, according to a friend, fell into a downward spiral when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down Broadway in addition to a lot of other things.

If during the troubled 1970s and 1980s New York City’s signature crime was a mugging, the 2020s equivalent is the deranged punch or shove or thwack. Punches, shoves and even thwacks with hard objects are seldom fatal, and thanks to New York’s success in reducing gun violence its 2026 murder rate is on track to be the lowest since 1892. But non-firearm assaults sometimes do end tragically, especially in the subway system, and their persistence is the main reason New York’s violent-crime rate remains 30% higher than before the pandemic.