Ethnicity is often ambiguous or complicated or both, especially in big American cities. If we knew this guy was the child of a Polish Filipino and a Chinese Irish parent would that help us? Thinking that ethnicity is simple and allows people to be easily sorted into meaningful groups is dramatically false.
NYC is not some small town somewhere. It can be a little difficult to get ethnicity correct. For instance, is that robbery suspect white with a tan? Latino? Or just a mixed black guy maybe?
Oh wow! Turns out he was Armenian and the other was Arab. Who knew?
That sort of nuance may not be important in a place like small town, Flyover Country, but it's critical in a place like NYC. That's why places like NYC are so big on police artist sketches. They are more helpful in that context than, "White looking guy, medium height, medium build."
People think it's racism that police tended to state the race when the suspect was black. The reality is that blacks were one of the only race groups that would not be easily confused by laymen. (Asians as well.) But we even messed that up because of unreliable witnesses, etc.
Now a days with cameras everywhere we can just blast the suspect's face over the local news and we don't have to worry about figuring out if the suspect is white, or arab, or latino or what have you. With video evidence, you don't run that same risk of people in, say, the Bronx being less vigilant because, "They're looking for a white guy."
The way I understand it is that emergency brakes are for when the train desperately needs to not leave the station. Either someone very sick is on the train, or someone dangerous gets on, or there is some other emergency. When that happens, you need a way to absolutely 100% prevent the train from leaving the station, where help is most readily available. Unfortunately this requires trusting passengers to not pull the emergency brake on a whim
