Invitation to Trouble

Even as the MTA says turnstile-jumping is on the rise and costing the transit system millions, the NYPD has just announced a shift to reduce the number of subway farebeating arrests.

In recent months, district attorneys like Manhattan’s Cy Vance and Brooklyn’s Eric Gonzalez have moved to stop prosecuting most fare-beating cases. Now police — who opposed the DAs’ leniency — will no longer arrest even most violators who also have an open summons for low-level crimes, including fare evasion.

Instead, cops will drive those people to court to settle both the old summons and the new one. This, the NYPD says, will free officers to spend more time on patrol.

In fact, fare-beating arrests are way down: 63 percent this year, to 4,200, while summonses dropped 22 percent.

That should please the activists who’ve been pushing for the city to abandon all fare-beating arrests (and all Broken Win- dows policing, in fact), saying they’re racially biased and target “a crime of poverty.”

The City Council buys that charge: It’s been obsessed with forcing the NYPD to comply with a new law requiring public disclosure of comprehensive demographic data on fare-evasion.

Yet the council should be more concerned with the rapid drop in paid subway ridership, in which fare-beating is a significant factor. The MTA hasn’t broken down the numbers, but experts like the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas put lost revenue at $100 million a year.

Statistics have long suggested that most fare-beaters just don’t want to obey the law: Last year, 42 percent had at least one outstanding criminal warrant.

For all the NYPD’s arguments about time-efficiency, we remain leery of making fare evasion even easier. Mayor de Blasio not long ago called that a prescription for chaos, and it’s hard to see how that’s changed.