SBPDL – Nov 19, 2018
Previously on SBPDL: Because 90% of Fare Evaders of Washington D.C. Metro are Black, Campaign Underway to Decriminalize Fare Evasion to Fight “Racism”
It’s obvious we are nearing the point where a municipality passes a law making it illegal for police to arrest black or brown people. [Subway Policing In New York City Still Has A Race Problem, Gothamist, 10-12-18]:
For New York City police, turnstile jumping has long been much more than a class A misdemeanor. The strict policing of people evading the fare on public transit was justified as an all-purpose solution to the rampant crime that plagued the city’s subways in the 1980s. It became one of the first examples for the New York Police Department that cracking down on minor offenses—the controversial “broken windows” theory of policing—might restore order to the city.
In NYC, black and brown people are now free to turnstile jump (fare evade) without any repercussions.
But New York might be changing its mind about turnstile jumping. With broken windows strategies increasingly discredited by many criminologists, a more lenient approach to this minor offense has taken root in New York’s courts, and perhaps from there found its way onto subway platforms across the city. Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced that his office would stop prosecuting most cases of fare evasion, which includes riding public transit without paying the fare through any means such as jumping a subway turnstile, slipping through an emergency gate or sliding onto a bus through the back door without paying. Since Vance’s announcement, such arrests dropped from a high of 25,000 in 2016 and are now on track to be fewer than 10,000 this year. The NYPD has said that the majority of turnstile jumpers are now issued civil summonses, not arrested.
Some city leaders wonder though—should turnstile jumping be a crime at all?
“We’re making progress,” says City Councilman Rory Lancman, whose office has been advocating that fare evasion always be considered a civil offense, like a traffic violation that would result in a ticket, not a criminal record. He said that “arresting 10,000 people a year … is still 10,000 people too many.”
A Marshall Project analysis of New York Division of Criminal Justice Services data from 2014 through June of this year shows that while the numbers of turnstile arrests have decreased significantly, what has not changed is who gets arrested: 89 percent of those arrested this year are black or Hispanic, virtually the same proportion since 2014. Across the city, neighborhoods with the most turnstile arrests per subway card swipe tend to be predominantly black or Hispanic.
Crime is the new entitlement for black and brown people in what’s left of the United States of America, as white people fear being called a “racist” more than they do losing their civilization.