Subway crime starts at the turnstile — and Democrats fail the test

Pro-crime Democrats are propelling New York toward anarchy and financial ruin by refusing to grapple with the city’s most prevalent crime.

All the candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for Gotham’s mayor — including front-runners Andrew Cuomo and Zohrab Mamdani — unanimously oppose increasing penalties for farebeaters.   

Their soft-on-crime positions make them unfit 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 system, explains former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.

“In previous administrations, proactive fare evasion enforcement has been a powerful tool in reducing overall subway crime,” Kelly told me.

Thieves and assailants don’t swipe a card to get onto the train before they prey on innocent riders. 

Their first lawless act is jumping the turnstile. 

And many have rap sheets.

Arrests are infrequent, but 45% of those arrested for farebeating in 2023 were already wanted for other crimes — and about 10% of them were carrying weapons.  

Clearly, consistent farebeating enforcement would keep thugs out of the subways. 

A crackdown would also fill the MTA’s empty coffers, eliminating the financial rationale for congestion pricing.

Some 14% of subway riders and nearly half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, adding up to an annual $800 million shortfall in MTA revenue.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s congestion-tax scheme is one way to offset those yearly losses — but it’s a gut punch to law-abiding people driving into Manhattan who work for a living.

“If you let the police do their job” against turnstile jumpers, President Donald Trump reminded Hochul when they met at the White House in February, congestion-pricing revenue isn’t needed.

“The way it is now,” the president told her, “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 criminal summonses or to arrest offenders.   

But arrests are rare, and the city’s district attorneys almost never prosecute.

In January, MTA head Janno Lieber called on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez and Bronx DA Darcelle Clark to change course and prosecute persistent fare dodgers. 

Lieber calls fare evasion “the No.1 existential threat” to safety and order underground.

The Citizens Budget Commission, an esteemed government watchdog group, also called for more prosecutions this spring.

Good luck with that. 

Democrats have been moving in the opposite direction for years.

In 2017 Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance announced he would stop prosecuting fare evasion. Other boroughs’ DAs followed.

From 2019 to 2024, fare evasion roughly doubled, according to MTA data.

And no surprise, violent subway felonies rose 14% during the same time period.

A year ago, Hochul eliminated the $100 civil fine for first-time fare-dodgers as part of the state budget she proposed and signed. 

What’s her logic — that it’s OK to steal the first time?

Worse, a bill proposed in the Legislature by state Sen. Cordell Cleare of Harlem would wipe criminal penalties for farebeating off the books entirely.  

Decriminalization is crazy. 

“Civil summonses have proven not to be a deterrent,” Kelly says.

And DAs’ long-running refusal to go after farebeaters distorts the law, Kelly adds.

“District attorney discretion was never meant to allow refusal to prosecute an entire category of crime such as fare evasion,” he notes.

Across the five boroughs, New Yorkers live in many different circumstances, but the subway is everybody’s neighborhood. 

Prosecuting farebeaters should be a litmus test for every candidate — and Democrats are failing the test.

Voters need to consider other candidates. Mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent, says he wants 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. 

But since then, he’s lacked the political capital to get much done.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican mayoral candidate, also calls for “aggressive enforcement” in his platform.

And we should look beyond the mayor’s race to seek out common-sense candidates throughout city government

Richie Barsamian, a former cop running for a Brooklyn City Council seat as a Republican and Conservative, cautions that tolerating fare evasion “opens the window to normalizing crime.”

He’s right — normalizing crime is at the core of the Democrats’ agenda. 

They tolerate lawlessness and philosophize about crime’s “root causes.”

New Yorkers can’t wait for society to fix 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 lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.