NYC MTA hires private security guards to crack down fare evasion
New York City NY October 28 2022
The MTA has quietly contracted unarmed private security guards to crack down on turnstile jumping — as a way to help tackle the recent wave of crime in the subway system, officials said Wednesday.
MTA CEO Janno Lieber said the pilot program was launched at six stations a couple of weeks ago, with the guards stationed at emergency exits.
“Overwhelmingly, the criminals are fare evaders, so if we do a decent job of discouraging fare evasion and stopping people who are engaged in it, we’re going to catch a lot of criminals,” he told authority board members during their monthly meeting, echoing the “broken windows theory” of policing rejected by many of his fellow Democrats.
“It is very much first and foremost a safety initiative,” Lieber said of the farebeating crackdown.
He added, without offering statistics, “Not every fare evader is a criminal, but experience has shown that virtually every criminal is a fare evader.”
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, straphangers are more likely to be victims of felony crime, while homicides underground have skyrocketed, according to NYPD statistics.
Recent subway crime victims include a good Samaritan who was stabbed trying to break up a fight, a woman robbed of her cellphone by a group of teen girls and a grandfather who was shoved onto the subway tracks.
“I paid $2.75 to the MTA so a guy could bash me in the head and throw me in the middle of the tracks,” the grandpa, 62-year-old Ronald Baptiste, railed to The Post on Tuesday.
“I want to be able to walk into the subway system and feel safe.”
Lieber said the introduction of unarmed guards came as a result of the work of a “blue-ribbon panel” he formed in May to tackle fare evasion, but did not have underlying data readily available.
The initial pilot, which launched at a half-dozen stations including the Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Ave/74th St. and West 4th St. stations, has resulted in fewer far evaders, officials said. It will be expanded at a pace of 50 additional guards per month.
“Across those six stations, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in fares being paid in just the last six to eight weeks,” MTA New York City Transit President Rich Davey told MTA board members regarding what he described as “a pilot that we have quietly been doing the last few months without much fanfare.”
Transit officials did not immediately provide a cost estimate for the unarmed guards, who are being paid through a third-party contractor.
As of May, the MTA estimated it was on track to lose $500 million to fare evasion this year.
Pressed on whether the MTA had been able to reduce the amount of money lost to turnstile jumping since the launch of the panel, Lieber said it was “too soon” to say.
MTA board member David Jones, who runs the anti-poverty organization Community Service Society, welcomed the shift away from NYPD taking the lead on fare enforcement.
“I’ve been calling for unarmed personnel for six years,” Jones said. “It’s consistent with other systems through the world, where this kind of way of dealing with fare evasion is not given over to highly paid and high experienced and trained police officers.”
Lieber on Saturday stood with his boss Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams to announce the “Cops, Cameras, Care” initiative amid a record-setting year for transit homicide.
The announcement was one of several in recent years in which officials pledged to add more police patrols to the subway — but Lieber begged the public for patience.
“This is a process,” he said. “Some of this has been tried before, but it has been incremental.
“We’ve got to make the riders feel safe again — that’s the bottom line — what they’re telling us [is] they want to see more police. That’s what they’re telling us.”
