MTA sees spike in reports of sexual abuse on subways

City straphangers are grabbing onto more than just poles.

With victims encouraged by police and transit officials to come forward, sex abuse complaints in the city’s transit system skyrocketed in 2015 as cops saw a rise in reports about creeps groping, molesting and grinding up against vulnerable women riders in packed subway cars, the Daily News has learned.

 

The city ended 2015 with a nearly 33% increase in sex abuse cases on the rails — from 98 in 2014 to 130, according to documents obtained by the Daily News.

There was also a 25% jump in forcible touching cases — from 272 in 2014 to 340 — and a 9.3% increase in public lewdness cases, where men are found pleasuring themselves on the train.

By the end of 2015, cops responded to 223 public lewdness cases, 19 more than the 204 reported in 2014, cops said.

Overall, sex crimes on the subway climbed from 620 in 2014 to 738 last year — an increase of 19% — officials said. More than half of these cases ended in arrests.

The eye-popping surge in sex attack reports isn’t a disturbing new trend on the city’s 2,069 miles of track, cops say, but the result of a nearly year-long campaign to hunt down and capture subway sex predators..

“We are convinced that the increase is a direct result of us talking more about it and communicating more about it,” said NYPD Chief of Transit Joseph Fox, who said sex abuse cases had been woefully underreported. The subway is just as safe as it has been in years past, he said.

“It’s more dangerous for sex predators themselves, because now they’re put on notice,” Fox said. “Every report gives us an opportunity to make an arrest and determines where we should deploy our operations.”

 

The NYPD, teaming with the MTA, retooled its enforcement strategies in March 2015 after Fox and his team traveled to England for a briefing on how British transit police handle sex crimes in the London underground.

At the end of 2014, the MTA began encouraging women to report sex abuse cases through a new portal on the MTA.info website, officials said.

Through Dec. 1, 2015, 325 complaints emails were left on the MTA website, leading the NYPD to launch about 60 investigations, officials said.

Fox said he tries to deal with each complaint.

“You’re reading the victim’s own statement,” he said. “You can feel the anger, the rage, and sometimes the embarrassment that these women feel.