The policing of fare evasion reveals the twisted agenda of our politicians

What do you do in a city that is beset by terrible housing, social and transit issues due to decades of mismanagement and underfunding by politicians on all different levels of government?

Well, in Toronto you propose a police budget for 2020 that is going to top $1 billion and that will see the hiring of hundreds of new officers. This represents a 3.9% increase over 2019. While the police claim these new cops are needed they always say this, of course, and these are funds that could be put to much better use in meeting essential human needs.

Meanwhile in Kansas City, Missouri lawmakers unanimously voted to make public transit fare free in a visionary step that makes it the first major city in North America to do so. This led Matt Haugen, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America environmental steering committee, to tweet "Now let's do this everywhere".

How are policing and free transit related?

They are closely related as when transit is not free transit riders are invariably subject to policing that is not simply aimed at keeping the system supposedly safe but at catching alleged "fare evaders".  In some cities this is done by departments of the regular police and in others by special police forces dedicated to transit or fare evasion.

Needless to say fare policing ends up reflecting the biases and systemic issues that are seen throughout policing generally. With transit these can be even more greatly pronounced given that transit riders are more likely to be young or to come from racialized, marginalized or working class communities that are already unduly targeted and harassed by law enforcement.

Sometimes the outcomes can be egregious as in the scandal unfolding now in New York City where a police commander is alleged to have specifically instructed officers to target transit users who were black or Latino.

While this is a particularly heinous example it is just at the more extreme end of daily practice. In New York where hundreds of officers have been added to "police" the subway system it has resulted in:

...a wave of overpolicing and violent policing, chronicled in bystander videos that show NYPD officers arresting a woman who makes her livelihood selling churros in a subway station, officers chasing a teenager who hopped a turnstile and then drawing their weapons on him in a crowded subway car, and officers beating teenagers. 

There is also the question of why fare evasion on transit systems is often treated so much more harshly than, say, illegal parking by car drivers.

 In Toronto, for example: 

If you hop aboard a Toronto public transit vehicle without paying the requisite $3.25, transit enforcement officers could ding you with a $425 fine.
Drivers, on the other hand, would get a measly $30 ticket for parking in a Green P spot without paying for it.
It's ludicrous when you think about it, and a lot of people are in fact thinking about it right now.

Car drivers also don't have to generally deal with a confrontational wanna-be-cop. They normally simply return eventually to find the ticket. Selective enforcement is made much harder as well given that unlike fare police, traffic enforcement officers will in most cases have no way of knowing the racial, cultural or socio-economic background of the specific driver (though some neighbourhoods can be targeted more than others).

The other fact that politicians hate to talk about is that fare policing is not free. Far from it. In fact tens of millions of dollars will be spent to make the lives of all transit riders more miserable to catch the very small percentage (in Toronto an estimated 5% of riders at the most even if you believe the likely highly inflated speculative estimates) of actual evaders.

The absurdity of spending large sums on policing fares was never more clearly shown than with the Kafkaesque reality that in New York at one point the plan was that the "MTA Will Spend $249M On New Cops to Save $200M on Fare Evasion".

This led Vaidya Gullapalli to note in The Appeal:

The rapid deployment of hundreds of officers at the cost of tens of millions of dollars each year has also raised questions about why the state and city could not find the money to more fully fund a program meant to make subway rides affordable for people living below the poverty line. Fair Fares, a program that anti-poverty advocates pushed for and the City Council passed to make fares half-price for people living in poverty, was rolled out this year. But only 30,000 of 800,000 people who live in poverty are eligible, and the program only received funding for its first six months.

The reality is that mainstream politicians as a rule greatly prefer the narratives around the alleged need for more cops and more enforcement as opposed to working towards fare free transit or investing in housing or poverty reduction strategies. They prefer them even if these efforts would have the same or comparable costs or even if the more progressive options would reduce social and budgetary costs in the long run.

They prefer the boot to the face.

As I have noted before in "The "fare evasion" narrative on the TTC is a total fraud. Here's why" most of the lines that politicians trot out around this are false and amount to the scapegoating of transit riders. Almost all projections of monetary "loss" due to fare evasion are based on myths and are basically wrong. Pretty much every dollar spent policing fare evasion would have been better spent elsewhere.

Of the many strong arguments for fare free transit -- including its importance in the fight against the climate emergency and for greater social equality -- the fact that it would eliminate this layer of policing, harassment and intimidation of transit users ranks right up there.

Imagine a trip on transit that was not simply fare free but where you knew there was no chance that some goon would get in your face about a $3.25 (or less) fare.

Kansas City is making this happen and other cities can and must too.