Many New York City subway riders are worried about crime, especially after a shooting on a crowded N train in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in April, and an ongoing homicide wave in the city at large. What are our mayor and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) doing to address these complex problems and help people feel safer riding the subways? Hassling people who don’t pay their subway fares — in other words, they are waging class and race war as usual.

Two weeks after that Sunset Park shooting, the MTA promised to address subway crime by cracking down on fare evasion, which isn’t a violent crime and has nothing to do with what happened on the N train. It won’t help. In fact, fare evasion was already a pet cause of the Eric Adams administration: in April the NYPD announced that arrests for fare evasion had increased by 51 percent over the past year, with 301 arrests during the first quarter of 2022. The cops also wrote 10,818 summonses for the offense during that time. An MIT study of the issue found that during 2010 to 2018 those arrested for farebeating were disproportionately male, under twenty-five, black, and Latino. This is not serious crime prevention: it’s relentless persecution of the poor — simply for being poor.

In fact, fare evasion is a crime that shouldn’t even exist, because the subway should be free to all.