BART’s big crime wave

After the recent slaying of 18-year-old Nia Wilson at an Oakland BART station, followed by the revelation that it was possibly the system’s third fatal attack in less than a week, agency representatives pointed out that this was a rare series of events for the commuter rail. That much, fortunately, appears to be true: Over the past 10 years, BART has reported six homicides.

A broader look at crime on the system, however, is less reassuring. BART’s total violent crime — a less volatile and more useful measure than homicides alone — has risen dramatically over the past decade, The Chronicle reported. Worse, the BART crime wave has defied state and regional trends and outpaced ridership.

The data suggest Wilson’s death — allegedly at the hands of a man who was riding the rails again the next day — is not just a horrific anomaly. Rather, BART has a serious and endemic public safety problem.

The system saw 428 violent crimes last year, according to the state Department of Justice, an increase of 28 percent from the year before and 69 percent from 2007. In the first half of this year, BART reported 222 violent crimes, approximating last year’s pace.

Ridership has grown over the past decade, too, but at a more modest rate. From 2007 to 2017, the number of annual trips increased by only 22 percent, and ridership was slumping last year even as crime was spiking.

The growing danger to BART commuters is at odds with what’s happening outside the system’s trains and stations. Violent crime statewide fell by nearly 7 percent over the past decade. Similarly, while violent crime in San Francisco fell slightly during that period, it more than doubled on the city’s portion of the BART system. And while the same crimes decreased 27 percent in Oakland, they jumped 62 percent on BART property within Alameda County.

BART has taken steps that could help. It has reduced vacancies on its police force over the past year and a half from 41 to 25 of 176 positions. It replaced fake security cameras with real ones after The Chronicle revealed the decoys. And it has belatedly begun to address an estimated $25 million a year in fare cheating. Still, the statistics show the agency has a lot more work to do, and BART’s repeated failures of transparency about major crimes show officials aren’t taking the problem seriously enough.

Granted, offenses committed within the transit system represent a small fraction of violent crime overall. But given its importance to a region with too much traffic and too little housing, BART shouldn’t be growing more dangerous while the Bay Area is getting safer.