Fight subway crime by actually enforcing the law
Washington Examiner
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“This bill does not say that crime is OK,” Washington, D.C., Councilman Vincent Gray said in 2019 as he voted to decriminalize turnstile jumping in the Metro system. “This bill does not advocate lawlessness,” he insisted. “Rather, it advocates for fairness.”
Decriminalize the petty crime of fare evasion, the council reasoned, and you make everyone happier and safer for the cost of a few purloined Metro rides.
AMID CRIME WAVE, DC TRANSIT CHIEF BEGS DC GOVERNMENT TO CRACK DOWN ON FARE HOPPERS
That was the theory of a handful of politicians whose ideology had brought them to believe the real threat to the people of Washington, particularly to poor black residents, was encounters with the police. While it is still illegal to ride Metro without paying, the police are barred from actually enforcing the law.
“It was a good theory,” new Washington Councilwoman Brooke Pinto says these days, but it helped fuel the crime wave that is making Metro more dangerous every day.
We disagree that it was a good theory, but we do applaud Pinto for introducing the Metro Safety Amendment Act of 2023.
Pinto’s bill would give police in Washington the power to enforce fare evasion laws not through arrests but through enforceable citations. This isn’t primarily an effort to collect more fares. It’s an effort to stanch a deadly crime wave.
Eighteen-year-old Tenneson Vaughn Leslie Jr. was fatally shot on a Metro platform in mid-May as he tried to run from assailants. Two weeks later, 17-year-old Brendan Ofori was shot and killed aboard a Metro train. In between these two killings, someone was stabbed at a Metro station but lived.
Pinto pointed out that the killers in both of the recent homicides were fare jumpers, and the governing body of Metro says this is part of a pattern.
“Since the decriminalization of fare evasion,” wrote Randy Clarke, Metro’s general manager, “[Metro] has seen an increase in Part I crime,” meaning assault, murder, rape, robbery, and other serious crimes.
“Crime data shows that when we increase fare enforcement, our Part I crime number is lower, and when we decrease enforcement, Part I crime increases,” he added.
What Metro found is the flip side of what every city found that implemented “broken windows” policing: Petty crime creates disorder, and disorder breeds violent crime.
Violent crime on Metro began rising as soon as the district council gave turnstile jumpers the green light in 2019. The COVID lockdowns exacerbated the situation. Crime on Metro has continued to rise since COVID, too.
And yes, legalizing petty lawbreaking does seem to be a cause. Metro provides something of a natural experiment on fare-evasion enforcement because it runs through the district, Virginia, and Maryland. In Virginia, police can issue tickets to turnstile jumpers and also — and this is the key — actually demand ID from the offender.
One result: Police arrested 24-year-old turnstile jumper DeMarcus Henderson in late May when he refused to produce his ID. They found he was also illegally carrying two guns and brass knuckles.
This is the purpose of enforcing the law even on petty crimes: fighting against disorder.
Ticketing fare dodgers won’t be enough to reverse the four-year crime increase, but it’s a start. There’s plenty more Washington needs to do to change course and take back the subways, buses, and sidewalks for law-abiding residents and visitors.
The underlying problem, of course, is the ideology: the belief that police are the threat to the vulnerable of Washington. The awful experiment of the past four years has shown us this totally unsurprising finding: Actually, the criminals are the problem.