Many American cities like New York struggle to rein in losses from fare evasion, in part because the cost of penalizing transit users can exceed the amount of money collected from fining them.
For New York, police enforcement is “part of the solution in the long run,” Janno Lieber, the authority’s chairman, said during a news conference about the new study.
Police officials declared a crackdown on so-called quality-of-life offenses in March 2022, and enforcement rose by about 28 percent to 80,000 fare evasion summonses that year compared with 62,380 in 2021, according to the M.T.A.
Arrests and summonses for fare evasion have disproportionately fallen on Black and Latino New Yorkers, giving fuel to critics of the approach.
During 2022, they accounted for 73 percent of people arrested and given a summons for fare evasion among all incidents in which race and ethnicity were reported by the police, according to an analysis by Harold Stolper, an economist at Columbia University who studies fare evasion policing patterns in the city.
Persons:
” Janno Lieber, Harold Stolper, ”, Molly Griffard
Organizations:
Police, Yorkers, Columbia University, Legal Aid Society
Locations:
New York, San Francisco, Seattle, York, “, New York City