Weeks after NYPD Commissioner Bratton said he was instructing police officers to wake up sleeping subway passengers as a way to combat crime, a man who has been implicated in several subway thefts has been arrested.
Sidney Phifer, 72, was arrested Saturday after police officers saw him passing between two subway cars.
Authorities said Wednesday that Phifer has a long rap sheet. He has multiple arrests dating back to 1984. In all, he has 22 transit arrests and 12 of those involved theft, according to police.
He has been cuffed throughout the city — as far north as Inwood/207th Street and as far east as Flushing/Main Street and Jamaica/179th Street.
He has been arrested multiple times at the Times Square station, which is where officers encountered him Saturday.
Phifer’s most recent arrest for theft was in 2013, when he was accused of stealing a cellphone from a sleeping passenger on an L train at the Eighth Avenue station in Manhattan, police said.
More than half of all subway crime in the past year involved a sleeping victim, according to the NYPD.
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Bratton said earlier this month that he was instructing NYPD officers to wake up sleeping passengers so that they wouldn’t become victims of theft or other crimes.
"If you are sleeping on the subway, you make yourself a very easy victim," Bratton said earlier this month. "Why would you put yourself at that risk?"
Most recently, a 47-year-old man allegedly sprayed a 22-year-old man in the face with an irritant and stole his cellphone.
