Rider wounded on NYC subway

NEW YORK — A 34-yearold man was shot early Saturday morning on a moving subway train in Manhattan, police said, an attack that happened hours after New York City Mayor Eric Adams touted a decline in subway crime since the start of a safety initiative in October.

The victim was shot in the torso just after 1 a.m. on a southbound N train as it approached the Canal Street station, said Lt. Thomas Antonetti, a spokesperson for the New York Police Department. He was hospitalized in stable condition.

Police were still looking for the suspect, a man in his 30s, Antonetti said about 2:30 a.m. The shooting occurred after a dispute on the train, he added, and no weapon was left behind.

Police were also looking for a woman who had been with the suspect at the time of the shooting, although it was not clear if she had been directly involved in the attack, said officer Taylor Cannon, a spokesperson for the department.

On Friday, Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a news conference that major crimes in the subway system had dropped 16% from Oct. 25 to Jan. 22 compared with the same period a year earlier. The change coincided with an initiative to flood the system with more police officers, which began in October.

“That is a trend that we can feel good about,” Hochul said, “as long as that continues to hold.”

Hochul’s office said Friday that New York state had committed up to $62 million to help the city cover the cost of extra policing in the subway, and that authorities planned to install cameras in every train car.

The mayor and governor said in October that the move to assign more officers to the system was partly an effort to combat a public perception that it had become much more dangerous.

That perception has been fed by several highly visible subway crimes, including a shooting on an N train in Brooklyn in April that injured at least 23 people and set off an unnerving 31-hour search for the gunman. He pleaded guilty to terrorism charges this month and faces a possible life sentence.