Want to save Metro? Dare to re-criminalize fare beating – Washington Examiner

The Washington, D.C., Metro system has a problem, and its new general manager is on it.

To much praise, including from the Washington Post, Randy Clarke rolled out the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority's plan to deal with mass-scale turnstile-jumping.

DC DECRIMINALIZED FARE-JUMPING, AND YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

You see, in Maryland and Virginia, fare evasion remains a criminal offense. But Washington, D.C., decriminalized it in 2018. In practice, this means that turnstile jumping is accepted and permitted in most of the transit system. On buses, it might actually be more uncommon for people to pay fares, at least in many Washington neighborhoods. Either way, if you refuse to pay, bus drivers have been instructed to let it slide after a number of them were beaten after asking riders to pay their fare.

This is not a victimless crime er, civil offense. As a consequence of fare evasion, Metro just lost $40 million in the fiscal year that just concluded Sept. 30.

Everybody who knows anything about Metro knows that it is chronically short of cash. This is mostly due to the bad decisions of its management and the greed of the union that represents its employees. But those aren't the only factors, and it is only right that suburban communities refuse to provide subsidies as long as district residents are permitted to ride illegally for free. This decriminalization, based as it is on woke ideas about so-called systemic racism and the potential for disproportionate arrests of black fare evaders, is driving the transit system into fiscal ruin, toward an eventual bailout that Maryland, Virginia, and federal taxpayers should not be forced to provide.

Clarke's ideas for stopping fare beaters are mostly shrug-worthy. They range from the laughably ineffective (signs telling people to pay to ride the bus) to the ridiculously expensive (newly designed unjumpable subway gates). At least they will include officers ticketing offenders, for a change.

But how effective will those officers be if they are not allowed to detain anyone? In the long run, there's only one real answer: re-criminalize fare evasion. The penalties don't have to be excessive, but a criminal sanction means real consequences for this kind of dishonest, antisocial behavior.

Something similar has happened in New York City. Also in 2018, Manhattan's district attorney announced that he would no longer prosecute turnstile jumpers. Although fare-beating technically remains a criminal offense in New York, it is unenforced. Stand outside the gate of any subway station in New York City for just a few minutes, and you will see dozens and dozens of people jumping or ducking under turnstiles.

Fare beating has cost New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion, of dollars over the last several years. And a tragic byproduct is that the subway has become increasingly unsafe, populated by people with mental illnesses and criminal intent. Every time someone is beaten or pushed in front of a train, you have to ask whether the perpetrator might have stayed out of the system had he or she only been made to pay the fare.

In the 1990s, New York City was famously cleaned up by the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. One of the discoveries at that time was that life in the big city could become manageable again but only if quality-of-life offenses were strictly enforced. Police not only enforced the laws against more serious crimes, but they also intervened to stop the squeegee men on the street corners. They confronted and ticketed dog walkers who failed to clean up after their pets. They stopped and arrested turnstile jumpers, in the process catching many criminals who had multiple outstanding warrants.

This one policing trick, simply enforcing the law, helped immensely in transforming New York City from an ungovernable, eternally filthy mess with 2,600 murders a year, into a clean and orderly urban paradise with 70% less violent crime and 80% fewer murders.

New York has been backsliding in recent years, unfortunately. The return to lawless turnstile-jumping is one of many symptoms. But in both New York City and Washington, it's an extremely expensive symptom, costing huge sums of money that the cities' respective transportation systems cannot afford.

If WMATA wants to stop fare beating, the answer is to criminalize it again. The penalty doesn't have to be excessively harsh it just has to be certain and serious. Please should detain, ticket, and check the records of anyone who jumps the turnstile. Not only will it help them catch more serious criminals, of whom there are many in Washington, but it will deter everyone from cheating their fellow passengers by stealing Metro's services.

When you encourage people to break small laws, they start to break bigger ones. And if you want to restore the rule of law, start enforcing the laws again.

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Want to save Metro? Dare to re-criminalize fare beating - Washington Examiner