Cheats Beware
NYPD won’t surrender subway to farebeaters
POPULAR rumors hold that the New York Police Department has stopped enforcing the laws against fare evasion in the subway. Some are also suggesting that crime is climbing steeply in the transit system. As commissioner of the NYPD, I can tell you that both claims are false.
Manhattan and Brooklyn district attorneys have ceased prosecuting most fare-evasion arrests. In response, we have cut back on those arrests in favor of criminal and civil summonses. We continue to believe that arrests are the most effective way of deterring chronic fare evaders, but if two district attorneys won’t prosecute arrests, issuing a ticket is the tool we have left.
That is why Criminal Court summonses are up 62 percent and civil Transit Adjudication Bureau summonses are up more than 53 percent. Overall, enforcement is up 50 percent, even with fewer arrests. We have issued about 21,000 more civil summonses for fare evasion so far in 2019 than we did in 2018.
The NYPD has no intention of ceasing to police the entryways to our transit system.
As for alleged increases in crime, there have been a total of 31 additional robberies so far this year. But there have been 92
fewer grand-larceny incidents this year than last.
Those two crime categories make up the lion’s share of all serious crime in the subway. All told, serious crime is down 3 percent, and making the subway ever safer for every rider remains our mission.
To place these numbers in context, the total increase of robberies for the first 10 months of this year is actually lower than the number of serious subway crimes committed per day in 1990. To characterize the current uptick as some kind of crime crisis is inaccurate and irresponsible.
I started my police career as a transit cop and witnessed the turnaround in the subway in the early 1990s, when we scored major successes against fare evasion, subway robbery and disorder underground. Fareevasion arrests and summonses were a big part of those successes, not only because they deterred fare evasion, but because they stopped lawbreakers at the turnstiles.
The subway has been a managed environment ever since, with extremely positive results. Serious-crime incidents have fallen to six per day so far this year, from 47 per day in 1990 — even though there are at least 2 million more subway riders per day now than there were in 1990. For nearly 6 million weekday riders, the chances of being a victim of a serious crime are about one in a million.
The police are responding vigorously even to small upticks in subway crime. Although fareevasion arrests are down, felony arrests are up in virtually every category: robbery arrests by 23 percent, grand-larceny arrests by 13 percent and felony assault arrests by 12 percent. Robbery enforcement this year has increased by 64 arrests, more than twice the 31-incident increase in actual robberies. Increased arrests don’t indicate increased crime but are a sign of successful police activity that is taking perpetrators out of the system.
Fare evasion has been increasing in recent years and is shrinking the revenues the Metropolitan Transportation Authority needs to maintain and restore the Big Apple’s vital transit network.
With fewer arrests and less effective deterrent options available, the key is to prevent the growth of casual farebeating by people who wouldn’t ordinarily evade the fare but who begin to do so because they see others doing it. That is why we have stepped up the use of civil summonses.
Equally important, many chronic fare evaders are also chronic criminals. Robbers, repeat sexual offenders and thieves often start their crimes with a leap over the turnstile or passage through a gate. And since subway platforms are inherently dangerous places due to proximity to the tracks and moving trains, we want to keep offenders who make the system unsafe off the trains by fare-evasion enforcement — or any other legal means.
That is why we have joined the MTA in seeking the authority to ban chronic criminals from the system. With such a ban, we could stop these offenders as trespassers before they prey on MTA customers.
Make no mistake: The NYPD will never, ever allow the subway turnstile to become a gateway to crime.