NYC Mayor Backs NYPD Officers Who Ticketed Churro Vendor

New York City Mayor

Bill de Blasio

on Monday defended NYPD officers who ticketed a woman for selling churros in the subway, as street-vendor advocates and some politicians seized on the incident to decry a surge in policing on mass transit.

Video of

Elsa Morochoduchi,

43 years old, receiving a summons went viral on Saturday after it was shared on Twitter. The footage showed police officers at the Broadway Junction subway station in Brooklyn confiscate her churros and chocolate.

It is illegal to sell food without a license from the city. It also is illegal to conduct commercial activity in the subway without authorization from the state-controlled Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“She was there multiple times and was told multiple times that’s not a place you can be, and it’s against the law and it’s creating congestion, and she shouldn’t have been there,” said Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, on Monday after marching in the Veterans Day parade in Manhattan. He said the officers acted appropriately.

Edward Delatorre,

chief of transit for the NYPD, said Sunday in a series of tweets that the vendor was ticketed for illegally selling churros, and that she has received 10 summonses in the past six months. But street-vendor advocates and some politicians said the incident is an example of over-policing in the subway.

Brooklyn City Councilman

Brad Lander

said at a rally outside the Broadway Junction subway station on Monday that the police action toward the churro seller and other recent incidents in the subway show “how cruel and corrosive criminalizing poverty is.”

“The MTA is in desperate need of investment in better buses and more train service, not more cops and criminalization,” he added.

At the rally, Ms. Morochoduchi said through a translator that her interaction with the officers became “very aggressive.”

“They grabbed the cart from me,” she said.

The MTA’s subway chief,

Andy Byford,

said in a television interview on Monday that he couldn’t comment on the churro-seller’s case because he understands litigation is pending. He said he supports the NYPD’s work in the transit system, but emphasized that officers should act fairly and compassionately.

Danna Dennis,

a community organizer with the transit-advocacy group Riders Alliance, said in a statement that subway crime is falling and the MTA should focus on better service, not policing.

“More cops will bust the MTA’s budget and hurt vulnerable populations,” she said.

This past summer the MTA, following an intervention by

Gov. Andrew Cuomo,

reassigned 500 NYPD and MTA police officers to the city’s subway and bus systems to address quality-of-life issues such as fare evasion, homelessness and assaults on transit workers. The MTA has said it would hire an additional 500 officers to boost such efforts.

The stepped-up enforcement and policing comes as serious crime in the subway has fallen. Major felonies—which include serious assaults and theft—were down 3.3% for the year through October, from 2,045 crimes in 2018 to 1,978 this year.

Write to Katie Honan at Katie.Honan@wsj.com and Paul Berger at Paul.Berger@wsj.com

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