The crime problem in New York City’s subways has become legendary over the past few years, fueled in part by the invasion of illegal migrants flooding the city. The Governor and the Mayor have already sent in the National Guard and the State Police in an attempt to combat the problem. Now the Metropolitan Transit Department and the NYPD have announced that an additional 800 uniformed police officers will be heading into the tunnels. But their focus won’t initially be on the knife-wielding muggers or the maniacs shoving people onto the tracks. They will be dispatched to the subway platforms to watch out for turnstile jumpers who evade paying their subway fares. That may sound rather trivial at first glance, but it’s actually not, as we’ll discuss below. (Associated Press)
New York City plans to intensify a crackdown on subway fare-beating by sending at least 800 police officers specifically to keep watch on turnstiles, officials announced Monday.
It’s the latest in a string of recent moves to address concerns about safety and unruliness in the nation’s busiest subway system. Now, the New York Police Department plans to deploy hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes officers this week to deter fare evasion.
“The tone of law and order starts at the turnstiles,” department Transit Chief Michael Kemper said at a news conference. Chief of Patrol John Chell said the additional officers would fan out to various stations, based on crime, ridership statistics and community complaints.
Fare evasion obviously sounds like a far less serious threat to society than armed robbery or attempted murder. (Turnstile jumpers can be charged with Theft of Services, a misdemeanor offense that can bring a one-year jail term, though few are ever punished that way without prior offenses.) But this type of law enforcement approach can actually pay significant dividends. It’s an example of the “broken windows” type of law enforcement that sent crime rates plunging back when Rudy Giuliani was the Mayor.
If someone is willing to disregard the signs and jump over a turnstile without paying, it’s possible that they were just short of cash and in a hurry. (That’s not much of an excuse, since the turnstiles all accept contactless credit and debit cards.) But many of the people who do that are probably going to be willing to break other laws and may be entering the tunnels with that purpose in mind. If you can shut them down before they even make it to the platform, you might be preventing a far worse crime from taking place.
Something clearly needed to be done. Despite previous efforts to enhance enforcement, the NYPD reports that crime rates in the subway system are up 20% over the same period in 2023. The surge in robberies and assaults has been particularly bad. In 2022, crime rates dropped significantly after Mayor Eric Adams implemented the “subway surge” in policing, but by the following year, the funding for that program ran out. The results have been obvious. Just last week, a gang of 13 criminals assaulted and robbed multiple people of their wallets, phones, and even shoes. As you’ll see in this video, none of them paid their fare at the turnstiles.
The current surge in law enforcement in the tunnels is already starting to pay off. The NYPD reports that more than 1,700 people have been arrested on a charge of turnstile-jumping so far this year. That’s nearly double the rate seen in the first three months of 2023. Additionally, over 28,000 evasion tickets have been issued. Will that bring the crime rates back down? Time will tell, but it may not be that simple. We are currently living in an era of widespread insanity and lawlessness. The problems are being exacerbated by the flood of illegal migrants. The cops have their hands full and New York is still far short of its law enforcement recruitment goals. We should give them credit for making the effort, but they’ve got a lot on their plates at the moment.