Via Flickr
New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) says it has a problem: people not paying their bus and/or subway fares.
They’ve sent out hundreds of police to subway stations, and even installed surveillance cameras. The real problem they have, though? Racism.
Fare evasion isn’t actually as big a deal as they make it sound. The MTA doesn’t even have reliable data on how much fare evasion occurs, but estimates say it costs about $200 million per year. That sounds like a lot, but it’s less than 1.5% of the MTA’s overall $16 billion budget.
And they apparently want to spend over $250 million on extra policing. Those numbers just don’t add up.
Bad management has tanked the MTA’s revenue, not fare evasion. But they’re coming after the low-income people who can’t pay - most of whom are Black or Latinx.
Arresting and giving tickets to people who already can’t afford the subway is criminalizing poverty, and it doesn’t work.
Michael Sisitzky of the ACLU says it’s just “a guise to aggressively police low-income and homeless New Yorkers… the city would be better served diverting resources toward solutions that would address poverty, not criminalize it.”
Instead of increasing policing of Black and brown people, the MTA could actually fix its problems. But apparently that’s too much to ask.