TIME TO CHANGE CHECKERED PAST
NEW TLC HONCHO CRACKS DOWN ON CABBIES WHO REFUSE BLACK RIDERS
Like many black people in New York, Malcolm Cain needs another hand or two to count on his fingers the number of times a cab driver refused to pick him up.
His first memory of the indignity was as a 6-year-old boy in the city for the first time with his parents for a Thanksgiving holiday visit.
“We were in Chinatown,” Cain says. “Yellow cabs were passing us by, like, a good four or five were passing us by, and picking up white passengers. And it took an actual police officer, a black female police officer, to come pull an available taxi door open for us to actually get in the cab and go to our destination uptown.”
Cain, 27, tells that story two or three times a week. As the African-American director of the Taxi & Limousine Commission’s new Office of Inclusion, it is his way of letting drivers and passengers know he’s serious about tackling discrimination in public transportation.
According to city data, the number of yellow taxi service refusal complaints is back on the rise after a couple of years of steady decline. Among green and yellow taxis, there were 2,278 refusal complaints in 2018, compared with 1,834 the year before. Among forhire vehicles there were 445 refusal complaints in 2018, compared with 343 the year before.
Cain is cracking down on them all, and has no shortage of stories to show how pervasive the problem is.
The best — or worst — discrimination tale involves Janai Nelson, a civil rights attorney, who is the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Nelson was returning last week from Washington, where she was involved in, of all things, a congressional hearing on reparations, when a yellow cab driver passed her up on Seventh Ave. in favor of a white passenger, according to her complaint.
Not long before that, Nelson was ignored by a cabbie after a trip to Broadway to see “To Kill a Mockingbird,” an American classic built on themes of racial inequality.
Others snubbed in recent months include Hazel Dukes, state president of the NAACP.
“It still happens despite the number of trips going down and the economic crisis going on,” Cain said, referring to the money woes cabbies have experienced because of changes in the industry.
Cain has launched a citywide campaign to educate passengers about their rights. TLC street teams have been handing out information cards, and Cain has visited block parties and street fairs telling travelers about TLC procedures.
He’s also been meeting with as many drivers as possible to discuss the do’s and don’ts of public service. App operators, for instance, are not permitted to inquire about a passenger’s destination before a pickup. And all drivers must pick up passengers regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability or destination.
A first offense can result in a $300 fine. A second offense can cost cabbies $500, plus a suspension. A third offense can result in a license revocation and a three-year ban.
But many of Cain’s discourses with drivers about discrimination quickly turn into gripe sessions, with cabbies telling him about their grievances and justifying their reasons for not picking up passengers.
Drivers told Cain last week during a meeting in the Bronx that if they refuse a rider— and, thus, the rider’s money —it’s for a good reason. Abdulah Kromah, a 45-year-old taxi driver, insists he only denies riders when he feels they are going to cause trouble.
“You have to be your own security as a cab driver,” said Kromah, a driver for 12 years. “You don’t want to wait until things happen before you call the police to come.”
Lassana Musa Konneh, 54, a livery cab driver, said he has had to drive away from a few would-be passengers, who often respond with aggression.
“Most of them punch the car, break the windshield and you do nothing about it,” Konneh said. “Some of the things we go through, it’s too much. It’s too much. “We sign up to this license, we give our life to it.”
Cain listens. He said it is helpful to hear from drivers, but said discrimination will not be tolerated.
“They try to validate their reasons for refusing fares,” Cain said. “It’s so deeply embedded. It’s a tough issue to take on. In the end, it’s all discrimination.”