• Subway Policing in New York City Still Has A Race Problem.
    https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/09/12/subway-policing-in-new-york-city-still-has-a-race-problem
    https://external.fham1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQDwYIwTyBduVL7Q&w=540&h=282&url=https%

    or New York City police, turnstile jumping has long been much more than a class A misdemeanor. The strict policing of people evading the fare on public transit was justified as an all-purpose solution to the rampant crime that plagued the city’s subways in the 1980s. It became one of the first examples for the New York Police Department that cracking down on minor offenses—the controversial “broken windows” theory of policing—might restore order to the city.

    This story was produced in partnership with Gothamist.
    But New York might be changing its mind about turnstile jumping. With broken windows strategies increasingly discredited by many criminologists, a more lenient approach to this minor offense has taken root in New York’s courts, and perhaps from there found its way onto subway platforms across the city. Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced that his office would stop prosecuting most cases of fare evasion, which includes riding public transit without paying the fare through any number of means: jumping over or under a subway turnstile, boarding a bus through the back door or failing to pay for a cab. Public defenders across the city observe that the vast majority of fare evasion cases come from the subways. Since Vance’s announcement, such arrests dropped from a high of 25,000 in 2016 and are now on track to be fewer than 10,000 this year. The NYPD has said that the majority of turnstile jumpers are issued civil summonses, not arrested. Some city leaders wonder though—should turnstile jumping be a crime at all?