In a horrifying instant, a man walked up to a 40-year-old woman waiting for the subway in Times Square on Saturday morning and shoved her to the tracks as a train screeched into the station, killing her, the police said.

The attack, which appeared to be random, and which the police said had been committed by a man with a history of mental illness who may have been homeless, immediately brought new urgency to several of the city’s most pressing concerns: a rise in some forms of violent crime, in areas including the subway; a debate about how to deal with the hundreds of homeless people who seek refuge there; and a transit system in desperate financial straits struggling mightily to lure back riders.

Kathy Hochul a plan to achieve police “omnipresence” in the subways while also stepping up outreach to homeless people by trained mental health professionals.

Martial then rode the subway to Lower Manhattan and told officers at the Canal Street station that he had pushed a woman onto the tracks, the police said.

In February 2021, after a man who lived in a homeless shelter stabbed four homeless people in and near subway stations, Mayor Bill de Blasio sent an extra 500 police officers to patrol the system.

de Blasio sent 250 more officers and said it would bring the number of police personnel patrolling the subway system to the highest level in the police transit bureau’s history.

To advocates for the homeless and the mentally ill, the confrontations have laid bare a crisis they have warned of for years: that the city’s systems for helping people with serious mental illness are woefully broken and under-resourced.

Unstable and even violent people are often taken to hospital emergency rooms and then discharged because there is no place for them, some advocates for the homeless have alleged.

While the killing is likely to spur calls for a heavier police presence in the subway, the advocates cautioned against using it as an excuse to harass some of the most vulnerable people in the city.

“The presence of more police doesn’t necessarily mean more safety, and for many homeless people, it means less safety.”.

Adams vowed to find a way to make more psychiatric beds available, both hospital beds and so-called respite beds for people with mental illness who are not deemed sick enough to be admitted to a hospital but are too sick to return to a shelter or to the streets.

Officials have said that transit officers will make referrals to those teams, with an aim of better addressing the needs of people who are homeless or who have mental illnesses.