Add The New York Post on Google Last weekend brought another subway pushing, again showing that the city’s leadership, from Mayor Zohran Mamdani on down, refuses to get obviously dangerous people off the streets.
On Saturday afternoon, Zaki Smith allegedly shoved a 70-year-old woman into the trackbed at the 7th Avenue/57th Street station.
Thankfully, fellow straphangers got the victim back on the platform in time; she suffered only a gash to her head.
Zaki Smith, 36, was charged with attempted murder for allegedly tossing an elderly woman onto Midtown subway tracks in a terrifying weekend attack. Smith’s rap sheet includes multiple felony convictions; he was out on parole on Saturday despite at least three clear violations after his release last year.
He’d been in prison for a 2022 assault on a female guard at Rikers Island, where he was already locked up pending trial for another charge: He threw the officer to the ground and beat her face with closed fists, causing significant injuries.
Yet he was paroled in 2025, and not thrown back in prison after one arrest for robbing an MTA employee, nor another for selling drugs, nor a third (in June) for stealing cleaning supplies from a Chelsea apartment building.
Why bother pretending that “parole,” “diversion,” or “post-release supervision” are meaningful categories that work better than incarceration at achieving what the left calls “true public safety,” when blatant violation of the rules has no consequences?
For all the whining from the city’s extensive and well-funded legal services complex about how the criminal justice system arbitrarily vacuums up young minority men, it takes a special kind of person to wind up at Rikers in the first place.
The alleged shover was out on parole despite at least three clear violations after his release last year. Robert Miller for NY Post Between mental health and drug diversion courts, bail reform and the “presumption of non-incarceration and pretrial non-detention” that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his counterparts in the other boroughs pack for lunch each day, you really have to step over the line to get sent to Rikers.
And multiple arrests — including robbery — weren’t enough to get Smith sent back, even though he was on parole.
As an assemblyman, Mayor Mamdani voted for the “Less is More Act,” which reformed parole, making it harder to return reoffenders to prison, and easier for parolees to escape supervision.
The mayor, who likes to attend religious feasts and watch soccer games with his buddies at Rikers, seems less inclined to visit their victims in the hospital.
Zaki Smith had no business being on the streets, period. But it’s not worth getting angry at him for being a violent predator.
Save your rage for the judges, prosecutors and legislators who decided that protecting criminals from the consequences of their own bad choices is more important than keeping the streets and subways safe.
