In recent years, fare evasion in New York City transit systems has been on the rise. So have dangerous encounters, in many cases involving unhoused people with untreated mental illnesses, some of which have led to deaths on often crowded subway platforms. Under direct orders from Mayor Eric Adams, cops have recently become a regular sight in subway stations and on trains.
Two weeks ago, NYPD officers followed a fare evader they suspected of having a knife. Fifteen minutes later, the man was shot and bleeding on the floor of a subway car. In the process, one of the officers managed to shoot the other, and two passengers were also shot, even though one of them was in an entirely different car. That passenger was shot in the head and was brought to the hospital alive but in critical condition. The platform and the train had not been crowded at the time, otherwise more might have been injured or even killed.
In the days following the shooting, a number of protests took place in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. Although all raged at the recklessness of the shooting, the cops’ use of excessive force, and how it endangered innocent bystanders, at least two also took aim at subway fares. One protester connected the two issues: “$2.90 is not worth a bullet shot to the head.” Others criticized the criminalization of fare evasion for working-class and poor New Yorkers, who are the vast majority of the system’s users. Others openly demanded free public transit.
This shooting happens as working-class people have been squeezed harder and harder with loss of unionized jobs, as it’s become less and less affordable to attend college, and as inflation has eaten into working-class incomes. It happens as rents in New York City are impossible for anyone not making hundreds of thousands per year. It happens as mental illnesses and drug addiction, both often caused or made worse by economic insecurity, ravage poor and working-class people. It happens as people of color, who make up a large chunk of the working class, are the first to feel the violent force of police in almost every situation. It happens in a system that forces working people to pay for their own transportation to a job that exploits their labor for the profit of another. It happens in a transit system that has been underfunded and not improved for decades, even as the rich have gotten richer and their politicians spend trillions on their military.
The protesters are right. We shouldn’t have to live like this, and the world can and should be much different. And to get there, free public transit is only a start to the changes that we need to make.
