“The New York miracle, if you will, began with fare evasion — fare evasion enforcement on the subway 25 years ago,” Mr. Bratton said in February 2014, when he was newly appointed by Mr. de Blasio as commissioner. “We’re still at it.”
Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton on the significance of policing fare evasion to New York City's revival in the 1990s.
Mr. de Blasio, a champion of improving the lot of poor New Yorkers, has adamantly defended the police practice of using evasion of the $2.75 fare as a means for officers to check the names and warrants of those they stop, most of whom are black or Hispanic.He has been unpersuaded by critics on the left who believe the approach — pioneered in the 1990s by William J. Bratton, Mr. de Blasio’s first police commissioner — is a form of biased and overly aggressive policing akin to stop-and-frisk. And he does not think most are motivated by poverty.“A lot of people who commit fare evasion and the police encounter have a lot of money on them,” Mr. de Blasio said during a news conference at Police Headquarters on Tuesday. “I think I have a lot of validity on the question of income inequality and how we fight it, but you never heard me say, you know, open up the gates of the subway for free. That’s chaos.”
Former Mayor de Blasio making a terrific point about the importance of policing fare evasion, an issue he understood despite not always acting in accordance with his correct statements.
The firefox hypothes.is bookmarklet I use doesn’t seem to play nice with archive.org. There’s another I haven’t tested yet.
I noticed the same thing. Does hypothes.is work with the Internet Archive in any scenario? I think it's a great tool and concept, but link rot limits it compared to saving pages and annotations locally (my preferred solution for that is Mark-It to turn a page into markdown or SingeFile to turn it into HTML and then adding highlights).
A short piece on setting up an independent website, reasons for doing so, and useful resources.
RSS and podcasting are a crucial part of what I call (and others have called) the “independent web” (websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it (also an IndieWeb principle)). The two areas (IndieWeb and independent web) share some features, but in my opinion, should not be considered “the same” – there are differences.
I agree fully. I think that aspects of the IndieWeb, potentially Webmentions, have great potential and should be used by more sites. But RSS/ATOM feeds are an essential way of consuming content, regardless of whether the reader maintains his or her own site.
Yes! My IndieBlocks plugin is now up on WP.org. Current version offers a single “Context” block, and, optionally, (1) some custom post types, and (2) the ability to add microformats2 to block-based (!) themes.
Very interesting project to add IndieWeb blocks to WordPress's Gutenberg editor. I will be following it, although I am not keen on its adding custom post types - something I prefer to do with my own plugins.
Current IndieWeb set-ups do not support the Gutenberg editor in WordPress as blocks are not supported. Jan’s plugin is created for blocks. Will need to try this out (also because my recent presentation at WordCamp on making WP IndieWeb compatible by default played a small role). Nice timing Jan, releasing it just so it can dominate my weekend
An IndieWeb plugin for implementing IndieWeb functionality in WordPress blocks. I have added some IndieWeb functionality to my site, although it does not support it by default. I am curious how it would work on my theme - but I will wait until information about its effect on page speed and its options/database tables (if applicable) are available. Also not keen on its adding two custom post types - I prefer to not tie that to a plugin I may have to uninstall.
nd another population that both our mayor and governor have spoken passionately about protecting would stand to suffer greatly as a result of a new enforcement policy: immigrants. Immigrants who have even minor contact with the criminal justice system face far more drastic consequences. Under the Trump administration, an arrest for jumping a turnstile or even a criminal summons could result in deportation, family separation, and destroyed lives.
If a foreign national who is in the United States without legal authorization does something stupid and is required to appear in Court as a result, he or she may be more likely to come to the attention of immigration authorities. As an initial matter, the solution is to not violate the immigration laws of the United States. However, if one chooses to violate the immigration laws, he or she ought to avoid doing things like jumping turnstyles. Many Americans likely avoid taking certain liberties that they do in the United States when they are traveling in foreign countries.
Poor black and brown people should not take the fall for the sins of politicians who have allowed the MTA to become a laughing stock. Arrests won’t solve the MTA’s problems, but they could devastate New Yorkers.
It is unclear to me how the MTA's own incompetence exonerates people from stealing public services. I am confident that fare beaters, black, brown, white, or anything else, are stealing public services because the MTA is a train-wreck. Both issues contribute to the current mess in the NYC Subway system, but they are not otherwise related.
Years of grappling with the ripple effects of Broken Windows policing have shown us that arrests are not the way to deal with minor offenses, like riding your bike on the sidewalk, having an open container of alcohol, smoking marijuana, or jumping a turnstile. An uptick in enforcement would reverse the recent positive trend of fewer fare evasion arrests. Through October, police have made 5,236 arrests for fare evasion. That is still 5,236 arrests too many, but it represents a 66 percent drop compared to the same period last year.
Not prosecuting crimes is a positive trend, apparently. This disregards how NYC transformed itself in the 90s and 00s under the leadership of Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, and how that success was maintained at least when former Mayor de Blasio wisely chose William Bratton as NYPD Commissioner.
An analysis of New York Division of Criminal Justice Services data from the last four years by the Marshall Project shows that nearly 90 percent of people arrested for turnstile jumping were black or Hispanic. Given the NYPD’s history of targeting people of color for arrests and summonses for low-level offenses, let’s call the new proposal to crack down on fare evasion what it is: a plan that would funnel thousands more black and brown New Yorkers into the criminal justice system, and to scapegoat people of color for the decades of underfunding and mismanagement that are responsible for the MTA’s current problems.
This must be it. There are no alternative explanations such as the possibility that certain crimes may be disproportionately committed by people who share one characteristic and not another (see NYC homicide statistics). Moreover, it is unclear to me why the writer is lumping "black and Hispanic" people together since, if this is purely a race-based claim against the NYPD, there may be different statistics for these two very broad groups.
Police resources must be spent on working with the community and identifying the types of behaviors that cause the most harm—not physically harmless fare evasion.
This disregards the fact that there is a high correlation between "behaviors that cause the most harm" and "fare evasion," lest the author would suggest that of people who commit crimes on transit, a meaningful number of them pay the fare.
The MTA claims that fare evasion is robbing the agency of $215 million a year, though how it actually reached that number is lacking in clarity and validity. The transit authority appears determined to pin the blame for its precarious financial position on poor black and Latinx people who, history tells us, will suffer the most from any increase in fare evasion arrests.
This bizarre passage appears to argue that if more people of certain races or ethnicities are arrested or cited for a specific crime, the crime itself and the enforcement thereof is presumptively illegitimate - without any consideration of whether the arrests and citations may correlate to the number of actual offenders.
The MTA and NYPD pledged last week to crack down on fare evaders. The MTA’s plan is to send agency executives and NYPD officers to subway stations and bus stops across the city. The executives will stand at subway turnstiles and on busses to create body blockades to bar anyone trying to get in without a Metrocard. More armed police officers at subway stations make an already harrowing commute for New Yorkers even more intolerable, and for many, will serve to add unnecessary fear into the way they start or end their day.
I will venture that most New Yorkers are more concerned about lawless behavior on subways than by the presence of uniformed police.
The authority’s latest excuse is that poor people who jump turnstiles are responsible for the MTA’s financial woes. The MTA and the politicians and bureaucrats who control it should take responsibility for their own actions -- and inactions -- that have led to the city’s mass transit decline. Instead, the MTA seems to want to pit New Yorkers against each other.
The MTA, for all of its faults, is not "pit[ting] New Yorkers against each other by highlighting fare evasion." Those who are stealing public services are pitting themselves against law-abiding New Yorkers through "their own actions."
“Fare beating places a burden on law-abiding transit customers who do pay the fare, including low-income citizens who despite financial challenges, still respect the rule of law and their obligation to pay their way,” wrote Lhota. “Further, it seems reasonable to expect your policy will increase fare beating, not only in your jurisdiction, but elsewhere, emboldening fare beaters in subways and buses across the city.”
Former MTA Chairman Lhota was correct to note that fare-beaters burden low-income New Yorkers by stealing public services and contributing to subsequent fare increases. However, the unfairness applies regardless of income and regardless of whether one uses the MTA at all.
In the context of public schools, it would make sense for the City to consider merging student IDs with travel Metro Cards... well it would if the City wasn't moving away from Metro Cards. Issue would be extending the solution to private schools. However, in this case, the issue is just general NYC incompetence.
“If we start saying it’s alright for you to jump the turnstile, we are creating an environment where any and everything goes,” the mayor warned. “It’s a crime. Now, you could defer prosecution, you could people in programs, you could do all sorts of things, but let’s not ignore it, and that’s what’s happening to our subway system.”
Mayor Adams was correct to the extent that he noted that turnstyle jumping is a crime and should not be permitted - however, he has not used all of tools at his disposal to police the Subways against the opposition of the District Attorneys.
At least fifty-six New Yorkers have been pushed onto subway tracks over the past two years. Subway crimes have more than doubled, so far, this year, compared with the same time last year. According to MTA board member Andrew Albert, another major issue is turnstile jumping. 99.99% of people that are committing crimes in the subways did not pay their fare. If we can stop that at the turnstiles, we've not only helped the MTA bottom line, but we've stopped crime in its tracks.
This is a very important point. Policing fare evasion is not only a financial issue or a fairness question, it is a matter of public safety. It is true that not every person who engages in theft of public services is violent, but as Andrew Albert notes, violent felons are overwhelmingly likely to not pay MTA fares.
Now, though, Vance’s office is voicing its displeasure with the fact that the NYPD has continued to arrest turnstile-jumpers. But how can Vance deter people from farebeating through diversion or dropped charges, and see if this approach yields better results for everyone—particularly the public—if police never arrest fare evaders in the first place?
This is a very interesting passage. It highlights that the NYPD is free to enforce the law and make arrests notwithstanding the efforts of District Attorneys to rewrite the law through the refusal to prosecute laws that they do not like. Former DA Vance's "displeasure" highlights that the NYPD and Mayor are not helpless - and that they can put pressure on lawless District Attorneys by continuing to enforce the law. The refusal of the Mayor and the NYPD leadership to use the tools in their toolbox has been a driving force in the increase in fare-beating.
Deterring people from stealing from the MTA keeps mass transit safe and improves the lives of everyone who rides.
Well said.
The DA’s reasoning is that this misdemeanor charge—called theft of services for transit—can carry a punishment of up to a year in jail. The misdemeanor conviction, so the argument goes, victimizes otherwise law-abiding people too poor to afford the subway fare, burdening them with a criminal record as they seek employment or housing.
Theft of public services, like other kinds of theft, does have the potential to "burden" offenders with a criminal record.
Some transit advocates say a far bigger factor in the agency’s projected deficits is riders fleeing the system because of poor service.
One reason that people are fleeing the trains is because a lack of law enforcement contributes to making the trains something to avoid.
"The problem is people are not paying,” MTA Board Member Larry Schwartz said. “And that is not fair to the people that are paying."
That allowing fare-beating is unfair to paying, law-abiding commuters should go without saying.
The NYPD also has eased enforcement, issuing civil summonses to the majority of turnstile jumpers instead of arresting them, focusing instead on more serious crimes.
It was an error by the NYPD to allow the District Attorneys to dictate policing priorities.
They say fare-beating increased after the Manhattan District Attorney last year stopped prosecuting most cases, a response to concerns that black and Latino violators were being disproportionally singled out.
The Manhattan DA"s policy to ignore NY law and to de facto legalize fare evasion based on strange premise that there is a cosmic rule that the race/ethnicity of criminal offenders for a particular offense must reflect NYC demographic statistics. No explanation for why this is so was provided.
NYPD numbers show more than 10,000 fewer arrests for fare-beating since January, compared to the same period last year, a decline of more than 66 percent.
Move by DAs to refuse fare evasion cases led to sharp decrease in enforcement.
Cuomo, who effectively controls the MTA, thanked the authority for the resolution and called for the "strictest penalties possible" for such criminals.
Former Governor Cuomo was correct here - which makes it all the more depressing that he went on to make his request impossible by signing the bail reform law shortly after this was published.
“The difficulty is unless we characterize this extraordinarily narrowly, we’re going to end up sweeping in people and make it almost certain they’re going to return to the life of crime because they won’t have any transportation options,” Jones said.
This concern is misguided. David Jones prioritizes criminals and fare-beaters in expressing concerns about preventing criminals from using the Subways with impunity. The primary concern should be the safety of the law-abiding tax-paying citizens in New York City.
Feinberg also helped usher in a new resolution Monday that called for an authority-wide ban on criminal recidivists.
Banning recidivist fare-beating offenders from the Subway is unlikely realistic - key is having police monitoring the entrances to Subway stations.
The MTA estimates that it lost about $225 million in potential revenue from fare evasion in 2018. But critics argue the authority’s method for tracking fare dodging — monitoring specific stations and buses and applying that data more broadly — is flawed and that the board’s focus on the crime is a distraction from more pervasive management issues.
Debate over MTA fare-beating statistics.
“I would like to see us capture this behavior on camera and then posting it publicly, whether on our YouTube channel or what,” said Sarah Feinberg, a fairly recent Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointee who chairs the MTA board’s Transit Committee. “That is important to me because when people are publicly embarrassed by this kind of behavior, it helps address it.”
A good, but not sufficient, idea for discouraging fare-beating in NYC subways.
Article on MTA montage of fare-beaters.
Perhaps realizing that harassing poor people and charging them with hundreds of thousands of misdemeanors is a suboptimal use of government resources, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced last year that his office would limit its prosecutions of fare evasion to repeat offenders. For everyone else, turnstile jumping is a civil infraction—akin to a parking ticket—that carries a $100 fine and does not otherwise involve the criminal-justice system. You wouldn't glean any of this from this bit of quasi-propaganda, though, which limits itself to the sort of gratuitous public shaming that serves only to outrage viewers at home without providing any useful information of note.
That this was written in 2019, prior to the rapid deterioration of the MTA post-2020, is remarkable.
Inside Edition's treatment of the subject also calls to mind the notorious "broken windows" theory of policing, which posits that evidence of unaddressed minor criminal activity signals to would-be criminals that cops will tolerate more serious crimes, too—and therefore that cracking down on things like turnstile jumping, graffiti, and public urination will prevent such crimes from occurring in the first place. The broken-windows theory was pioneered by former New York City Transit Police commissioner Bill Bratton in the early 1990s, and became the city's dominant law-enforcement philosophy after newly elected mayor Rudy Giuliani promoted Bratton to NYPD commissioner in 1993. There is, in other words, a gross history in New York City associated with the stigmatization of fare beating; it will probably not surprise you to learn that although the efficacy of broken-windows policing is, at best, debatable, its discriminatory impact on low-income people and communities of color is not.
Broken windows policing is the "notorious" theory which drove New York City's revival under former Mayor Giuliani in the 1990s.
Generally, paying for the use of goods and services is something people should do. The problem with Inside Edition's stunt, however, is that it frames fare evasion as the root cause of the system's problems, dramatically noting that the practice cost an estimated $215 million in 2018. This narrative omits, for example, that the MTA expects to face a billion-dollar annual deficit by 2022, and that its president has warned that the system will go into a "death spiral" unless state lawmakers find $40 billion to invest in its crumbling infrastructure. It breathes no word of Governor Andrew Cuomo's staunch refusal to consider raising funds via, say, the imposition of a "millionaires tax" on the city's wealthiest residents.
The MTA's chronic mismanagement is one of the "root causes" of the MTA's problems, but the decision of the New York State and City governments to permit large-scale fare beating and stick law abiding citizens with the bill is also a root problem - certainly much more than questions about the top tax rate.
The confrontations the show chose to air are laced with exactly the sort of things you'd expect from busy New Yorkers who are suddenly confronted by a giant television camera over $2.75: a mix of irritation, incredulousness, and outright scorn. After careful consideration, I have determined that the award for best response shall be shared by the woman who calmly asks, "Are you going to arrest me? Are you going to give me a ticket? So what are you going to do?" and the man who says, "You guys aren't cops, right? Okay, excuse me," and then walks away from the microphone in the middle of the reporter's sentence.
It says something about this author at GQ that he thinks the real problem in a report on mass theft of public services in NYC Subways is reporting on it.
On the other end, there was The Good Phone Foundation, a not-for-profit organization founded with a mission to create an open, transparent, and secure mobile ecosystem outside of Big Tech’s reach, who just released their own Android-based mobile OS and were looking for apps to rely on. They contacted me, and after a couple of calls, we realized that partnering up on the smartphone makes a lot of sense for both of us. So, here we are, introducing you to our brand new Simple Phone. Only having control over both software and hardware ensures the ultimate privacy and security. The target audience consists of more privacy-oriented people that do not want to be tracked or rely on big corporations, Google Play, etc. It focuses on people who just want to get things done in a simple way without having to keep closing ads and wondering what does the system do in the background. Not to mention consistency again as the core apps are developed by us. Hope you will like it just like we do 🙂
Simple Phone's effort to release its own mobile OS is promising for ordinary users. Because Simple Mobile Tools represents a full suite of basic Android applications, in can, ideally, provide a privacy-friendly and user-friendly alternative to stock Android by providing a unified suite of apps. /e/ OS (aka Murena) is attempting something similar, but its app collection is not quite as unified as the Simple Mobile suite.
In my mind, there are three prerequisites to shift the Hoverton window. First, the speaker must have sufficient intellectual gravitas. Specifically, he must be able to generate a novel idea, that departs sufficiently from conventional wisdom, but also anticipates and preempts the most likely response. He must also have a reputation which warrants his ideas being taken seriously. Second, the speaker must have secure tenure-in-office. To challenge the status quo, you need decisional independence. No one can override your position, or worse, tell you to stand down after an uproar emerges. (Tenured academics and Article III judges are among the few people who fit in this category.) Third, the speaker must have courage. You must be willing to publicly articulate your principle, knowing full well that you will be savagely attacked from all corners. (Very few academics and Article III judges fit in this category.)
Criteria for being well-positioned to advance an idea that is an affront to elite legal sensibilities:
Very interesting perspective. In the specific context of changing policies at law schools, the argument is well-reasoned. The premises have been considered in the broader debate about the limitations of populism in effecting changes in culture and policies (see e.g., Curtis Yarvin's You Can Only Lose the Culture War vs Jeremy Carl's response).
Now, if involved families want to reach out to a teacher, they have to rely on the school or hope an online staff directory is updated. And if teachers want to reach out to families and let them know how their students are doing in school, they need to look up their contact information and hope its up-to-date — or find alternate messaging platforms.
I completed high school about 15 years ago. Back then, most communication between parents and teachers was done by phone and mail. The default assumption by the NYCDOE that every problem needs an app or program is unexplained. Using phones and keeping contact directories up to date is something that had to be done not long ago.
Some class time has also been lost to teachers sitting down with students to manually show them their grades, a teacher at the school added.
Throughout my time in middle school, high school, and college, grades for tests were handed out in class and teachers had office hours for students to discuss their grades or any other issues. It is unclear to me from this article what time is being lost. Teachers can hand out grades to students just as well as they did before, and I presume that students who have questions or need additional guidance should be able to contact their teachers.
The Department of Education has been rolling out its own free grades, attendance and messaging applications, to replace banned third-party software that was involved in a data breach of more than 800,000 students last school year.
The NYCDOE was correct to sever its tie with third-party services, but why was the default response to build its own service? It was not long ago that there were no mobile applications for grades, attendance, and messaging.