Man Wanted For Groping 12-Year-Old Girl At Brooklyn Subway Station
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Police are looking for a man they say groped a 12-year-old girl at a Brooklyn subway station earlier this month.
The incident occurred at the Stillwell Avenue station back on June 9.
Police have released a surveillance photo of the suspect and ask anyone with information to call the NYPD Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS, visit the Crime Stoppers website, or text tips to 274637 (CRIMES) and enter TIP577.
This comes as reports of sex crimes in the subway system are up nearly 57 percent.
But police say that doesn't necessarily mean there's more groping, grinding and lewd acts going on. They instead credit an orchestrated campaign by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to encourage riders to report sex crimes, including posters and automated announcements in subway stations, a web page for victims to document encounters and a new smartphone app that makes it easier to send in pictures of perpetrators in the act.
Chief Joseph Fox, who commands the NYPD's Transit Bureau, said the campaign was bolstered by more plainclothes officers, many of them women, looking specifically for subway lewdness, and more assurances that complaints will be taken seriously.
New York police say there were 431 reports of sex crimes from lewdness to forcible touching in the subway from mid-2015 to mid-2016, up from 275 over the same period the previous year. There were also 72 more arrests for such crimes over the same period.
Such numbers pale in comparison to transit systems around the world, such as Japan, where nearly 64 percent of women in their 20s and 30s reported being groped on trains or in transit stations, or India, where the problem has prompted separate cars just for women.
But they were enough to draw the ire of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who sent a letter to the MTA asking the agency to take all the steps it can to increase patrols and work with the police department to "crack down on this sort of depraved behavior.''
MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast said the agency needs to continue reducing the frequency of the offenses and raise the awareness of them among the public and its employees.
"Perception is reality, and we need to deal with it at that level,'' he said at an MTA board meeting Wednesday.
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