Press Release
State Attorney General’s Probe of Subway Policing: Right on Time
Statement by David R. Jones, President of the Community Service Society and MTA Board Member
In 2016 when I joined the MTA board, I was presented with documents indicating that more than 90 percent of individuals stopped and arrested for fare evasion in our subway system were of people of color. Since then, it has become clear that fare evasion enforcement is deliberately concentrated in low income communities, and targets black and Latinx commuters.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced yesterday that she is investigating the city’s policing of the subways to determine if the NYPD is acting with bias. As part of her investigation she wants to see directives on training, notices, and officer deployment as well as data on arrests and summonses broken down by race and age.
We applaud the AG for taking this important step to protect the civil rights of New Yorkers. It’s unfortunate that the NYPD’s behavior has led her to this pass. For three years, the NYPD has refused to comply with Local Law 147, which requires it to publicly release data on the number of arrests and summonses for fare evasion by race, sex and age for every subway station. The intent of this law: to determine whether the NYPD’s practice of targeting black and brown communities for fare evasion enforcement in low income Brooklyn communities – a practice documented by my organization, the Community Service Society (CSS), after analyzing client data provided by public defenders – extends to the city at large.
Last year, CSS and City Council Justice System Committee Chair Rory Lancman, dismayed at the NYPD’s failure to comply with Local Law 147, filed a FOIL request for the fare evasion arrest data that the NYPD was supposed to provide under the law. Not surprisingly, the NYPD refused to comply with the FOIL. Undeterred, we brought suit challenging this clear violation of law.
We won that suit. Last September a State Supreme court judge ordered the NYPD to release data it was legally required to provide. But it took the NYPD months to comply with the court order. It eventually released data for the period covered by the FOIL request, but nothing more recent than the first quarter of 2018. Meanwhile the data released to the public, currently available through the second quarter of 2019, remains largely useless for looking at specific stations as intended by Local Law 147. The quarterly public data only includes totals for ten stations, but it’s often unclear what subway station they are referring to: e.g. all data for any station on 125th Street in Manhattan was reported in one total, not split among the four stations on that street, each of which is located in a separate Manhattan neighborhood with different racial, income and other demographics.
Mayor de Blasio has said he supports the AG’s inquiry. That’s good. It would be even better if the mayor directed his police department to comply with Local Law 147 on an ongoing basis, and end both the stonewalling and – more important - its longstanding practice of aggressive fare evasion enforcement in communities of color.