COURIER L 30 IFE, DEC. 21–27, 2018 M B G
ooking to save some cash
this holiday season?
Here’s a suggestion:
Ditch your MetroCard and
simply jump subway turnstiles
when you are in Manhattan,
where that borough’s
District Attorney, Cy Vance,
continues to uphold his lunatic
policy of not criminally
prosecuting fare beaters.
You don’t need a degree
from Harvard to figure out
that if there is really no threat
of prosecution for jumping
a turnstile, more people
will do it. Sure enough, data
presented to Metropolitan
Transportation Authority
board members earlier this
month showed that fare evasion
has more than doubled
since Vance announced his
no-prosecution policy in February.
In Brooklyn, District
Attorney Eric Gonzalez came
out in support of Vance’s policy
after he announced it, but
Gonzalez has not yet stopped
prosecuting fare beaters altogether.
Kudos to him.
Officials at the state-run
Authority estimated that
those who skip paying fares
on our buses and subways
will cost the systems a whopping
$215 million. As agency
leader Tim Mulligan — the
executive vice president of
the authority’s local arm,
New York City Transit — recently
said, “The gates are the
number-one problem.”
That $215 million in lost
fare revenue accounts for
well more than two-thirds of
the agency’s projected budget
deficit next year, when straphangers
are expected to be
hit with another hike in tolls
and mass-transit fares. And
when those increases come,
law-abiding riders will be
paying to cover trips taken by
those who chose to abuse the
system and ride for free because
there are no real consequences.
Of course, some on the far
left still commend and defend
Vance in spite of this evidence.
Journalist Ross Barkan
— who lost his bid to become
a Democratic state Senator
from Brooklyn when he failed
to defeat state Sen.–elect Andrew
Gounardes in the June
primaries — recently wrote
that “fare evasion has nothing
to do with the MTA’s catastrophic
budget woes or its
poor spending practices.”
But what Barkan fails to
understand is that an extra
$215 million in the Authority’s
coffers would put a big
dent in its deficit, and reduce
the need for fare hikes.
One reason Barkan and
other progressives argue
against enforcing fare laws is
because they claim the policies
discriminate against locals
who cannot afford to pay
for a swipe. But would they
also say we should not prosecute
low-income individuals
who steal from supermarkets
or mom-and-pop shops?
For evidence of brazen
acts of fare beating, locals
need just to turn to social media,
where more and more
residents are sharing eyewitness
accounts of the rulebreaking.
For instance, Facebook
user John. K last week
declared to members of a Bay
Ridge–based group that “I am
going to start fare jumping. I
am tired of being the one idiot
who pays. Waiting for my girlfriend
at the 59th Street station,
in the first two minutes
I counted 15 fare jumpers. Fifteen.
Gee, I wonder why they
need a fare increase.”
This columnist couldn’t
have said it better himself!
Vance and his supporters
seem to forget that part of the
district attorney’s job is to
uphold laws currently on the
books, and prosecute those
who break them. Fare beating
is still a crime, despite how he
has decided to treat it.
Indeed, section 165.15 of
New York State penal law
states a person is guilty of
“theft of services” when he
has the “intent to obtain railroad,
subway, bus, air, taxi,
or any other public transportation
method without payment
of the lawful charge”
— a crime the law defines as
a Class A criminal misdemeanor.
Former New York Police
Department Commissioner
Bill Bratton described the
days before officials aggressively
enforced fare-beating
laws for our mass-transit
system decades ago, writing
in his memoir “The Turnaround,”
that “legitimate riders
felt that they were entering
a place of lawlessness and
disorder … they saw people
going in for free and began to
question the wisdom of abiding
by the law.”
Unfortunately for today’s
riders, those days now seem
to be repeating — and will
likely continue to, unless all
officials continue to threaten
criminal prosecution of fare
beaters.
Bob Capano is the chairman
of the Brooklyn Reform
Party and a professor of political
science.
THE RIGHT
VIEW