Pro-crime Democrats are propelling New York toward anarchy and financial ruin.
The seven candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for Gotham’s mayor unanimously oppose increasing penalties for farebeaters. That includes frontrunners Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani. Their refusal to crack down on farebeaters — all by itself — disqualifies them for the city’s top job.
These pols do not regard law-abiding New Yorkers as their constituents. Instead they’re siding with criminals and left-wing ideologues who excuse crime as a side effect of society’s imperfections.
Stopping farebeating keeps dangerous criminals out of the subway, explains Ray Kelly, the longest-serving New York Police Department commissioner. “In previous administrations, proactive fare evasion enforcement has been a powerful tool in reducing overall subway crime.”
Thieves and assailants don’t swipe a card to get to the trains before preying on riders. Their first lawless act is jumping the turnstile. And many have rap sheets.
Though arrests are infrequent, 45% of those arrested for farebeating in 2023 were already wanted for other crimes, and about 10% were carrying weapons. Clearly more farebeating enforcement would make the subways safer.
A crackdown is also needed to fill the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s empty coffers and eliminate the financial rationale for congestion pricing. Some 14% of subway riders and nearly half of bus riders beat the fare, adding up to a $800 million-per-year shortfall in MTA revenue.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s congestion pricing is one way to offset the shortfall. But that’s a gut punch to people driving into Manhattan who obey the law and work for a living.
As President Donald Trump reminded Hochul when they met at the White House in February, “If you let the police do their job” against farebeaters, the congestion pricing revenue isn’t needed.
“The way it is now,” said the president, “you feel like a sucker if you pay the fare.”
New York state law makes farebeating a Class A misdemeanor, allowing police officers to issue a criminal summons or make an arrest. But arrests are rare, and district attorneys almost never prosecute.
In January, MTA head Janno Lieber called on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and Bronx Attorney Darcel Clark to change course and prosecute persistent farebeaters. Lieber calls fare evasion “the No.1 existential threat.”
In March, the government watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission also called for more prosecutions.
Good luck with that. Democrats have been moving in the opposite direction for years.
In 2017 Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced he would stop prosecuting fare evasion. Other DAs followed. From 2019 to 2024, fare evasion roughly doubled, according to MTA data.
No surprise that violent subway felonies rose 14% during the same time period.
A year ago, Hochul eliminated the civil fine for first-time offenders from $100 to zero as part of her state budget proposal. What’s her thinking, that it’s OK to steal the first time?
Worse, a bill currently in the New York state legislature, sponsored by state Sen. Cordell Cleare from Harlem, would wipe the criminal penalty off the books entirely.
Decriminalizing farebeating is crazy. “Civil summonses have proven not to be a deterrent,” says Kelly.
As for the refusal of DAs to prosecute, Kelly says “district attorney discretion was never meant to allow refusal to prosecute an entire category of crime such as fare evasion.”
Prosecuting fare evasion should be a litmus test for voters. New Yorkers live in many different areas, but the subway is everybody’s neighborhood.
The Democrats are failing the test.
Voters need to consider other candidates. Mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent, is for tougher enforcement.
“If we start saying it’s all right for you to jump the turnstile, we are creating an environment where any- and everything goes,” he warned in 2022. Since then, he’s lacked the political capital to get much done.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican mayoral candidate, also calls for “aggressive enforcement.”
Richie Barsamian, a former cop running as a Republican and Conservative for the city council from Brooklyn, cautions that tolerating fare evasion “opens the window to normalizing crime.”
Normalizing crime is the Democrats’ agenda. They tolerate lawlessness and philosophize about the root causes of crime.
New Yorkers can’t wait until society fixes root causes. They need safety now. When it comes to subway crime, that means electing leaders who will crack down on farebeaters.
Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and founder of SAVENYC @SAVENYC.org. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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Pro-crime Democrats are propelling New York toward anarchy and financial ruin.
As an ex NYer now living in a very Conservative Red State I say this….
You get the gov you deserve… Enjoy NY !!
” WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, ME, OR YOUR LYING EYES.” GROUCO MARX.
BECAUSE they, themselves are criminals. And birds of a feather, as the saying goes.
“The Democrats are failing the test.” And failing at everything else!
Yet the fools in the destructive, corrupt, unlawful Democrat Party ruled cities and states keep voting for their own Democrat destruction!
So who’s more the fool. THOSE who are voted for, OR THOSE DOING the voting!?
” IT’S NOT THE VOTER THAT COUNTS, IT’S THE ONES WHO COUNT THE VOTES.”
AUTHOR UNKNOWN.
” IF HILLARY CLINTON WOULD GIVE ONE OF HER BALLS TO BARACK H. OBAMA HE WOULD HAVE TWO.
AUTHOR UNKNOWN.
Politicians, especially the Leftist Liberal Progressive Woke Wonks, have become people who spend millions, fight vicious battles of words and deeds, in order to win a job that, once they acquire it, so often refuse to do.
It’s bad enough when it is members of Congress, or a President.
But it has been the proliferation of corrupt, lazy State and Local office holders, the most egregious being high raking law enforcement officials.
DAs who refuse to prosecute known criminals. Judges who refuse to try cases based on a perverted sense of “compassion”. Mayors who allow this, condoning this lack of integrity from from the Courts. And Ultimately, the Governors capitulate, and instrumentally coordinate the increasing lawlessness that is financially crippling their cities, and ultimately their state, while these opportunistic power mongers throw their constituents under the bus, and to the growing vicious pack of wolves. Foreign and domestic.
And yet this all could have been avoided, and could still be reversed, if the blind, gullible Democrat voting base would actually pay attention to what is happening, and why it is happening, and just stop listening to the liberal woke propaganda, and realize exactly who is causing the circumstances that are making their live so difficult and so dangerous are the very people they voted into office to protect them and make their lives safer and more worth living.
I often say, that THOSE judges and DA’s who refuse to do their job, SHOULD BE CRIMINALLY AND civilly held liable, for ALL the crime, the repeat offenders they keep letting go, commit.
” WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, ME, OR YOUR LYING EYES.” GROUCO MARX.