Railing over subway nabs
Twenty-five City Council members are calling on the MTA to provide discounted fares to more riders and to train officers in cultura l competence in the wake of caught-on-video incidents of allegedly heavyhanded law enforcement.
“Many New Yorkers were greatly disturbed by October’s incidents of overpolicing in our Brooklyn subway stations,” Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo (D-Brooklyn) and her colleagues wrote MTA Chairman Patrick Foye earlier this week.
“We propose a system that targets and ameliorates the contributing factors that lead to fare evasion.”
The lawmakers were referencing a pair of Oct. 25 incidents in which critics say police overreacted.
At the Jay St.-MetroTech station in Brooklyn, a police officer was caught on video slugging a teen as officers struggled to contain a brawl.
In the other incident, about 10 officers surrounded a farebeater suspected of carrying a gun and drew their service weapons on him at the Franklin St. stop.
Cumbo and her colleagues proposed a swath of measures to reduce the “overpolicing.”
In their letter to Foye, in which city Transportation Commissioner Polly
Trottenberg was copied, they called for an expansion of programs like Fair Fares. It has provided half-price MetroCards to 80,000 low-income New Yorkers, and the lawmakers want more commuters to benefit.
“These programs aim to alleviate the economic barriers present for many New Yorkers, which ultimately … deter fare evasion,” the Council members wrote.
They also called for cards to be usable for more swipes, allowing them to be shared among riders more frequently, and for more free or reducedfare transfers between transit systems.
Further, the lawmakers want MTA officers to receive “communitybased deescalation training with community partners” including “much-needed conversations [about] race, cultural competence and respect between residents and law enforcement.”
They rebuked the MTA’s plans to hire 500 transit cops to tackle fare evasion, homelessness and other issues, writing, “overpolicing of black and brown neighborhoods is simply not the answer.”
MTA spokesman Shams Tarek insisted the extra cops come at the request of passengers and employees.
“Our multipronged approach to public safety and combating fare evasion is just one part of [MTA’s] efforts, with deescalation and implicitbias training, programs to educate the public about how fare evasion hurts all riders, and our strong support for progressive programs such as Fair Fares,” he said in a statement.
Mayor de Blasio “has taken multiple steps to increase transit access for low-income New Yorkers,” his spokesman William Baskin-Gerwitz said. “He hopes the MTA will show it shares this goal in the next capital plan.”