MBTA POLICE officers who refuse to issue tickets for fare evasion are setting back transit policing by 20 years. The issue goes a lot deeper than the theft of a $1.70 service. It goes all the way to what T general manager Dan Grabauskas rightly calls the "core part of transit policing."
In the late 1980s, transit police nationally started to learn the value of targeting seemingly minor infractions, including fare jumping and smoking on platforms, as a way to create a sense of order on subway systems that resembled subterranean skid rows. Ticketing fare jumpers, it turned out, deterred many scofflaws before they escalated to more serious crimes. Ridership increased as passengers started to believe that a subway ride would not necessarily lead to an assault on their sensibilities or worse. Crime on the New York transit system fell especially sharply while other transit police departments wisely got onboard.
This proven tactic was abandoned on the MBTA in April and May. T officers stopped citing fare jumpers, claiming that they needed to focus on violent crime. But the stoppage wasn't a result of an order from acting chief Paul MacMillan. Instead, veteran officers had complained about fare-evasion work during a March meeting of the T police union. Younger officers fell into line as citations for fare jumping suddenly dropped from more than 100 per month to just a handful. If this continues, the system will not only lose a crime-fighting tool but encourage even more fare evasion, which in a good year costs the T more than $11 million, by transit industry estimates. Riders can only hope that MacMillan is right when he says he is on the case and that June statistics will reveal a resolution to the problem.
Writing up fare evaders may not be the most glamorous duty. And police work will always involve some element of officer discretion. But the act of writing just seven citations over eight weeks borders on dereliction of duty.
The T police union is also hurting itself. The union is pushing a bill to merge the MBTA police with the better-paid State Police. But it is unimaginable that state lawmakers would see a refusal to cite fare jumpers in a favorable light. The T police action would be akin, in fact, to a refusal by State Police officers to enforce traffic laws.
Robert Marino, the president of the T union, insists that the fall-off in tickets is not a job action of any kind. He says that some plainclothes T officers resent fare-jumping duty because they are mistaken for civilians. But a badge in the face of a fare jumper would seem to be an obvious solution. Of course, it should also be obvious that T police should never ignore fare jumpers.
