“First and foremost, I avoid all confrontation,” Robert Freeman, a 47-year-old bus driver in Queens, remarked to the New York Times. “Me, I just concentrate on driving, and I don’t say nothing.” It was an apt summary of the city’s attitude towards petty criminals, who have been all too happy to take advantage of New York’s deteriorating public order — including in Freeman’s line of work.
The idea, in short, was that “‘untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls.”
Today, the Times reports that nearly half of all bus riders in the city are now simply neglecting to pay the fare. New York is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year to fare evasion in the bus system alone, but if its leaders intend to do anything serious about it, they haven’t said so.
In fact, the issue appears to have substantially worsened in recent years. In 2018, prior to the pandemic, the fare evasion rate on New York buses was 18 percent, costing the city about $128 million that year. That rate was approximately double the city’s historical levels, and “at least double the rate of other cities across the world,” the Times reported. (At the time, the rate of fare evasion was 11 percent in Paris, 5 percent in Toronto, and just 1.5 percent in London).
By 2022, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was hemorrhaging $315 million annually in bus fare evasion. By the first quarter of 2024, the share of riders who were fleecing the city had jumped to nearly 48 percent.
“Transit experts,” writes the Times, “say some New Yorkers don’t pay to board the bus because they cannot afford the fare.” This seems to be the experts’ explanation for any and all crime, no matter the context; the idea that crime is enabled by criminality has long since fallen out of fashion. (The responsibility always lies with society, which inflicted criminality upon the guiltless criminal). (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Two’s a Crowd When It Comes to Citizenship)
But the “root cause” theory of fare evasion — like the “root cause” theory of all crime — fails to stand up to a few moments of scrutiny. No serious person believes that the share of New York bus riders who are too desperately poor to afford the $2.90 fare has increased by 40 percent over the past five years.
A more coherent explanation can be found in a passing aside later on in the Times report: “The pandemic also reinforced the perception that fares were optional, after the authority made bus rides free for a few months in 2020.” Riders were given a taste of free fare, and city authorities gave them no real reason to let it go.
The simple and obvious truth is that New York’s dilemma — not just with fare evasion, but for serious felony offenses, which continue to climb to record levels despite Mayor Eric Adams’ insistence that “crime is down” — is the result of a city that has lost the will to enforce its own laws. The widespread belief — sometimes explicit, always implicit — that the act of policing crime is far worse than crime itself animates both New York’s politicians and the activists, journalists, and intellectuals who they answer to.
New York City Transit President Andy Byford learned this the hard way in 2019, when he made the fatal mistake of suggesting “cops on buses” to fight the fare evasion crisis. The backlash was swift and unforgiving. Byford’s “comment,” reported a local outlet, “raised the specter of the NYPD’s reviled, repudiated, and ultimately rejected stop-and-frisk program from the Bloomberg Administration.” (Although Byford “came to New York only last year after stints in Canada and Australia and might not be fully aware of the NYPD’s legacy of racially biased enforcement,” the paper reasoned).
Just a few days later, “facing an outcry from transit and equity advocates,” the MTA hurriedly walked back its plan.
It is impossible to imagine a city doing anything meaningful to reduce crime — petty or serious — in such political conditions. (Even Mayor Adams, a former police captain and ostensibly a moderate on crime and policing, “appears to have been stymied by the Democratic establishment” on his calls “for a tougher criminal justice system,” the New York Post noted earlier this year). And if a city cannot enforce a basic public order, it can’t hope to do much of anything else, either.
Decline is often more of a whimper than a bang. It is a slow death, enacted by a thousand small cuts. Between the periodic spasms of violent riots or other high-profile dramas, decline looks and feels like the constant drumbeat of little things getting worse in little ways. It’s profane graffiti appearing in public spaces; the smell of a subway station worsening, just slightly, with every passing month; neighborhoods where the street cleaners no longer show up to scrub the pavement. (READ MORE: Tim Walz: The Mogadishuan Candidate)
This was the simple-yet-brilliant premise behind the “broken windows” theory of crime — a phrase that is used as something akin to a cuss word in liberal criminal justice circles today. The idea, in short, was that “‘untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls,” wrote George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, the authors of the theory, in their seminal 1982 essay on the topic. Kelling and Wilson continue:
A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in.
Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.
Anyone who has visited New York City over the past few years will immediately recognize the authors’ description, for it is precisely what is taking place in the Big Apple. If city leaders are serious about cracking down on fare evasion, they might consider getting serious about enforcing the law. But don’t hold your breath.