Opinion | Mei W.
Brownsville, Brooklyn – On September 15, the NYPD shot and severely wounded Derell Mickles, a 37-year-old Black man, for taking the subway without paying the $2.90 fare. The police shot two other commuters and another officer. New York City Mayor Eric Adams praised the officers involved: “I think that those officers should be commended for how they really showed a great level of restraint.” Mickles remains in critical condition after being shot in the stomach and handcuffed. The NYPD notified his mother of the shooting by slipping a business card under her apartment door, which she found the next morning. Protests are planned in the city throughout the week.
This shooting is only the continuation of the NYPD’s anti-worker and racist aggression on subways. In 2021, the NYPD tasered David Crowell, a 29-year-old Black man, after police saw Crowell pay his own subway fare and let his cousin through the emergency gate. Police attacked Crowell with a stun gun after his cousin paid for his fare when confronted by the police.
In 2019, the NYPD punched a young Black man on the subway platform who was an onlooker of a fight. In the same year, 7 NYPD officers tackled and arrested Adrian Napier, a Black 19-year-old man, citing that he had a gun; investigators did not find any guns. In response, hundreds of protesters flooded a subway station and jumped the turnstiles to protest the racist police aggression. In the same year, 500 officers were deployed in the subway, increasing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) police force by 64%. This decision was led by former Democrat New York Governor Andrew Mark Cuomo, who pushed the annual spending to over $50 million a year on deploying new police to crack down on fare evasions. Following this decision, protesters held demonstrations, shutting down the city’s streets and subways.
The NYPD and city officials, including former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and current Mayor Eric Adams, have championed cracking down on fare evasions, flooding the subway system with police to counter “crime” and stop financial losses they argue come from fare evasion. In other words, they blame the problems of public transit on the masses and then turn this into an excuse for reactionary violence. Adams’s new turnstiles and increased police presence also act as de facto checkpoints, where arrests for fare evasion are used to search for people with outstanding warrants, according to a Columbia University law professor.
In March of this year, an additional 800 police were sent by Mayor Adams to the subways, adding millions of dollars to the $250 million that has been spent on deployments to the subway over the past four years. This was in addition to the national guard deployed by Governor Kathy Hochul and her call for a massive expansion of surveillance at the stations. Although Adams claimed it was due to reports of “increasing” numbers of fare evasion, the deployment coincided with the escalation of police repression against pro-Palestine protesters in the city.
Poor and working class residents are burdened with a double tax, in which they have to pay out of pocket for public transportation while also paying some of the highest tax rates in the country, money that is then used to fund police deployments. Fare evasion arrest rates are found to be significantly higher at subway stations located in poor and predominantly Black neighborhoods, with some officers even resigning and exposing their police commissioners for demanding them to target Black and Hispanic commuters with fare evasion arrests. Arrest rates in the city’s 130 stations located in poor neighborhoods are twice as high as those of the remaining 262 stations.
Last year, the increase in subway fares from $2.75 to $2.90 was met with protests demanding the reversal of the hike, citing that those most impacted by the fare increase are poor and working class people who make up the majority of public transit users. Fare increases throughout the past 70 years of the city’s transit system have been met with resistance. In the 1970s, when the fare was raised to 30 cents and later to 50 cents, hundreds protested, using chains to open the gates and setting off firecrackers inside phone booths. Protests erupted again in 1981, when fares were raised despite the mayor’s promises that they would not be raised until the following year. Demonstrators during these protests expressed the need for “a violent overthrow of the government.” Fare strikes were organized in 1986 following a fare raise to $1, with protesters stuffing debris into the token slot of subway turnstiles and throwing dimes at MTA officials. In the 1990s, an MTA vote for fare hikes was disrupted by protesters who carried caricatures of former Mayor Giuliani and former Governor Pataki with the title: “The Monsters Who Ate Mass Transit.”
According to the MTA, the next fare hike is set to start in 2025, increasing 4% from the current $2.90 to approximately $3. This is amidst the continued rise of living costs in NYC which have pushed larger numbers of people into oppressive living conditions. The median rent for a family of four in the city is around $54,000 annually, which is 123% higher than the national median. A 2021 report found that 36% of all households in the city did not have enough money to pay for their basic needs. For those living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford to pay up front for weekly or monthly unlimited passes, a year’s worth of daily, round-trip pay-per-ride MetroCards exceeds 11% of the annual income for someone below the official poverty line. On top of this, in 2021, the city cut $65 million—almost a third—of the funding for “Fair Fares,” a program that was purportedly designed to cover half of the fares of those under the poverty line.
NYC’s transit system leads the country in their reliance on fare costs for covering their operations, in contrast to other cities’ systems which are covered by taxes and government funding. The MTA has a debt of about $48 billion, most of which is owned by firms such as BlackRock, a major investor and profiteer of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
The reactionaries’ formula is this: raise transit fares for the people already straining under the rising cost of living in the capitalist economic crisis while militarizing transit—a choke-point for millions of people going to work, school, childcare, etc.—under the guise of stopping the “criminals” who are skipping out on the criminally-high fares. The people’s just response to this has been the decades of militant protests in defense of dignified living standards and against police terror, demonstrations that find their ultimate expression in exceeding the bounds of legality and challenging the profit-driven system that is rooted in private ownership, exploitation and oppression. The task of revolutionaries and class-conscious workers is to organize this expression, combining the struggle against police terror and the rising cost of living with the conquest of power.
This article has been edited for accuracy on 09/18/2024.
Photo: Protesters occupy a subway tunnel after the killing of 23-year-old Michael Griffith, a Black man who was beaten to death by a white mob in 1986. This tactic would be repeated in 2023 following the murder of Jordan Neely by former Marine Daniel Penny, halting train operations for nearly an hour. Photo Credit: Ricky Flores.
