Press Release
Findings from New CSS Analysis Show Racial Disparities in Fare Evasion Enforcement Disproportionately Impacting High-Poverty Communities of Color
Report urges transparency in police enforcement and compliance with Local Law 147
Fare evasion enforcement by the police is more commonplace at MTA subway stations located in the city’s high-poverty communities. Not surprisingly, fare evasion enforcement actions are more likely to take the form of arrests instead of summonses in high-poverty neighborhoods that are predominantly black and Latinx compared to white neighborhoods. These are the preliminary findings of a Community Service Society (CSS) analysis of recent data obtained from the NYPD.
Although Local Law 147 requires the NYPD to publicly release information on subway fare evasion enforcement by race, sex and age for every subway station, the police department did not provide the data voluntarily: it had to be ordered to do so by a State Supreme Court judge after having ignored CSS President and CEO David R. Jones and City Council Member Rory Lancman’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for months.
“It took a prolonged fight to get this data, which shows that fare evasion enforcement in our transit system is deliberately concentrated in poor communities, and targets black and Latinx commuters,” said Jones. “No amount of police can address economic need. Criminalizing poverty only makes it harder for struggling New Yorkers to find work or affordable housing and diverts public resources away from the neediest New Yorkers. The city and the MTA need to work together to give low-income New Yorkers more options, such as Fair Fares. What we should not do is use the transit system as a tool to shame and criminalize.”
"The data confirms in granular detail the racist nature of the NYPD's fare evasion enforcement; that poor communities of color are significantly more likely to be policed, and that people of color in those poor communities are far more likely than white people to be arrested rather than given a civil summons,” said Lancman, who chairs the Council’s Committee on the Justice System. “It is a clarion call for reform, and I hope the mayor hears it, and acts.”
“The findings confirm some basic observations that are missing from the fare evasion narrative being peddled by the MTA,” said CSS Senior Economist Harold Stolper, who conducted the analysis. “Fare evasion is driven in large part by poverty, and enforcement relative to ridership is more intensive in communities of color. This sort of `broken windows’ policing does not begin to address any of the root problems playing out at the turnstile. It does not make transit more affordable. It does not make it easier for riders to pay. It does not reduce police bias, but rather enables it.”
Analyzing Arrests, Summonses and Ridership
CSS analyzed 24,788 subway fare evasion enforcement actions from the 4th Quarter of 2017 to the 1st Quarter of 2018, including 19,512 summonses and 5,276 arrests, along with demographic data found in the 2018 Five-Year American Community Survey. In order to focus on the relationship between racial/ethnic neighborhood composition and enforcement, the station-level analysis excluded the 29 busiest stations with more than 10,000,000 in annual ridership, because riders converge at these stations from other neighborhoods).
Fare evasion enforcement relative to ridership is higher in high-poverty neighborhoods
Among other findings, CSS determined that rates of enforcement (total summonses and arrests relative to annual ridership) in the city’s 130 stations in high-poverty neighborhoods (with poverty rates of at least 25 percent) were more than twice as high as the remaining 262 stations: 4.8 enforcement actions per 100,000 MetroCard swipes in high-poverty stations compared to 2.2 elsewhere.
There is more fare evasion enforcement in high-poverty neighborhoods that are predominantly black and Latinx compared to high-poverty white and Asian neighborhoods
CSS found that enforcement relative to ridership at the 109 stations in high-poverty black and Latinx neighborhoods was more than 60 percent higher than at the 21 stations in high-poverty white neighborhoods. Enforcement at stations in high-poverty areas was also more likely to take the form of an arrest in a black or Latinx neighborhood than in a white neighborhood. Fare evasion arrests occurred at a rate of 1.5 per 100,000 MetroCard swipes at stations in high-poverty black and Latinx neighborhoods: more than 31 percent of all enforcement actions at these stations resulted in an arrest, the other 69 percent resulted in issuance of summonses. Comparing that to a high-poverty station in a neighborhood with a plurality that identified as white or Asian: there were 0.49 arrests per 100,000 MetroCard swipes, only 16 percent of all enforcement. This means that among people stopped for fare evasion enforcement, those in high-poverty black and Latinx neighborhoods are twice as likely to be arrested as those in high-poverty white and Asian neighborhoods.
Enforcement patterns also varied dramatically across the NYPD’s 12 transit districts. TD23 in Queens, spanning from Rockaway up to Jamaica and Ozone Park, had far and away the highest enforcement relative to ridership: TD23 had the lowest ridership of any transit district, but more than twice as many enforcement actions per MetroCard swipe as any other district, and more than four times the citywide rate. By contrast, the lowest enforcement rate was in TD2, spanning most of downtown Manhattan, from the west side of 34th street down to City Hall and Wall Street.
These findings indicate that enforcement decisions have a disparate impact by race/ethnicity. This is hardly surprising when roughly 90 percent of those arrested are people of color. The sworn statements of former police officers confirm the existence and ongoing scope of explicitly race-based enforcement and quota-driven tactics.
Main problem at the turnstile: Entrenched Economic Inequality and Misguided Policy Priorities
The findings make clear that New York City faces fundamental problems at the turnstile that more policing cannot fix. First, there’s a poverty problem: fare evasion enforcement is more common in areas of high poverty, and survey evidence indicates that as many as two out of five low-income New Yorkers say they are often unable to afford subway and bus fares. Second, there’s the problem of inadequate fare collection systems. Those who can easily afford the fare are still far less likely to pay it if there are no nearby MetroCard machines that actually work.
Third, there’s the longstanding problem of racially biased fare evasion enforcement that disproportionately impacts low-income communities of color. The data show that this problem is not confined to Brooklyn, but rampant throughout the transit system.
The MTA is hiring 500 more police officers as part of its crackdown on fare evasion in the subways. But policing strategies that criminalize the poor at the turnstile do not begin to address the socio-economic issues at the root of these problems. Instead, real solutions start with fully implementing programs like “Fair Fares” which went into effect this month and offers targeted fare subsidies to needy New Yorkers; with increased transparency in police enforcement, including continued compliance with Local Law 147; and with investing in improving fare collection systems.