Arrests for turnstile-jumping in the subways are down 26 percent since last September, but that’s still not enough for Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr.
So he’s announced that his office will no longer prosecute the vast majority of fare-beaters, unless they pose a clear risk to public safety.
How wrong-headed is the move? Well, even Mayor de Blasio, who’s championed the move to decriminalize other low-level offenses, is against letting fare-beaters walk.
Last fall, Vance began offering diversion programs and adjournments in most fare-beating cases in hopes of keeping offenders out of the criminal-justice system.
The DA says the problem is that the vast majority of those arrested are minorities, and turnstile-jumping is a crime of poverty.
But as the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas has noted on these pages, decriminalization advocates can never point to anyone specific whose life was ruined for evading the fare for a trip he just had to take.
Indeed, statistics bolster the very reason the NYPD began cracking down on that crime in the first place: Fare-beaters tend to be people with a generally lax attitude toward obeying the law.
Of those actually arrested last year for fare-beating, reported Gelinas, 45 percent were past offenders, 42 percent had at least one outstanding criminal warrant and 5 percent were wanted for questioning in other cases.
Fare-beating was one of those quality-of-life crimes where lack of enforcement symbolized New York’s pre-Giuliani standing as a national symbol of urban blight. Cracking down not only made subways safer, it caught criminals before they moved on to larger crimes.
Yes, we understand this isn’t the ’80s — crime is at historically low levels, thanks to the NYPD. But New York didn’t decline overnight, nor was it rescued that quickly.
And publicly declaring that nearly all fare-beaters will be getting a “get out of jail free” card sends a dangerous signal.
We’re with the mayor on this one. As he said last year: “There’s no way in hell anyone should be evading the fare. That would cause chaos.”