The Evergreen, Cop-Curated, Anti-Poor, Faux Investigative “Fare Evasion” Story
As the effects of car culture on catastrophic climate change become more acute, local reporters use influential platforms to scaremonger about poor people taking mass transit for free.
There are few genres of reportage local TV news loves more than the “welfare fraud” story. As we documented in episode 156 of Citations Needed, this mode of journalism has all the aesthetic trappings of an “investigative reporting” while, in practice, serving those in power. It ostensibly uncovers corruption or crime, but in the most nickel ante and small time way possible. And its inevitable policy effects are to tighten the government faucet’s already meager leak of aid to the poor. It’s the sweet spot for careerist reporting: looking Serious and Newsy and Investigative while being little more than stenography for police and other pro-carceral elements in the city government.
A popular, evergreen variation of “welfare fraud” stories is the “fare evasion” exposé that breathlessly announces to viewers how much money “the taxpayers” are “losing” due to unpaid fares for public transit. Fare evasion is the textbook definition of a victimless crime. As is the case of most victimless crimes in need of a victim, the harmed party, we are told by our gumshoe reporters, is the nebulous, always-put-upon “taxpayer.” Never mind that this is illogical and a squishy, arbitrarily-applied dog whistle—but more on this later.
For now, let’s look at one recent example of media meltdown over supposed “fare evasions” helping bankrupt the Washington, D.C. transit system.
We see this story every month nonstop, especially with the “post-Covid” austerity regimes currently in fashion.
Fox News Feb 2022: NYC fare beaters on bus, subway lines costing taxpayers millions Fare beaters are costing the Big Apple more than $300 million a year
The whole moral framing as fare evasion “costing taxpayers” is, upon closer inspection, a total sieve. As Streetsblog noted in 2019, one plan proposed by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo saw the MTA spending $249 million on new cops to save the city $200 million in “fare evasion.” This isn’t even including the costs of arrests and jailing, and public defenders, which almost certainly puts the total much higher. Public services like mass transit are subject to constant scarcity frameworks, whereas criminalization is simply Factored In. The NYPD casually exceeded its allotted overtime budget by $155 million in FY2022, but literally no media reported on this as “costing taxpayers” millions. The $762 million overtime budget handed out to the NYPD every year is more than twice what “fare evasion” allegedly “costs taxpayers.” But it’s rubber stamped with no breathless coverage lamenting the poor, overburden taxpayer. It’s just seen as a law of nature, like the tides or gravity. Nothing anyone can or should do anything to rein it in.
But “saving money” isn’t really the point. The federal government could subsidize city transportation budgets to offer free rides to everyone and it’d be a rounding error in the 1 trillion+ military budget that gets passed with no public debate every year. Indeed, during the early days of the pandemic, many city governments did just this and the data overwhelmingly showed it increased ridership, reduced incarceration and arrests, and was much better for carbon emissions.
The goal of fare enforcement has little to do with dollars and cents or protecting the moral virtue of the all-holy “taxpayer.” The goal is to police who can and cannot be in public spaces, namely underground public transit spaces when the temperatures drop. In addition to a backdoor form of warrant checking and stop-and-frisk, a primary goal of transit fare enforcement is to make sure those Annoying, Smelly Homeless don’t bother the Good, Upstanding Taxpayers on the subway. But explicitly arguing for this is unseemly, so we have a steady stream of hand wringing about “fare evasion” “costing the city” as a PR-friendly workaround.
This is what makes the faux investigative framing by local reporters so tedious. They “got a hold of” data, “new numbers,” show “a News4 I-Team investigation” uncovers. The reality is the numbers were fed to them by either the police, metro transit authorities or pro-police elements within city government. These reporters aren’t meeting whistleblowers in parking garages in Foggy Bottom, it’s effectively an evergreen press release handed to them by anyone who wants more fare enforcement, knowing full well beat reporters and TV anchors will uncritically echo them as if they’re an existential scandal in urgent need of more policing.
Set against the backdrop of catastrophic climate change, this go-to panicked story about transit freeloaders is even more difficult to comprehend. Mass transit is one of the few readily available and useful tools we have to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions and incentivize more ridership—like we saw during the early days of the covid pandemic— is an immediate, low-cost way of combating rising global temperatures. The government should be paying people to take the subway and bus, not charging them what is, in effect, a regressive tax for the privilege of not riding in carbon-intensive personal cars.
But, again, the “fare evasion” story has little to do with utility or any cost-benefit analysis. It’s about criminalizing poverty in a politically correct way that plays to bog standard “welfare fraud” tropes. It’s a liberal variation on then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s infamous “strapping young buck” speech from 1976, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, tickling the same part of the reptilian brain:
“All of those freeloading fare evaders just skip right past while you, the hard working American, got to pay your $3 dollars every day.”
TV anchors, programmed to be morally incurious JCPenney models, never bother asking any bigger questions. It’s simply taken for granted that we, the viewer, are supposed to be outraged and indignant at the thought of fare evasion. No bigger questions about whether this is just or logical. No mention that, in jurisdictions like New York, 86 percent of those arrested for fare evasion are black or brown. No discussion of how using police to gatekeep mass transit increase criminalization and arrests. No mention that fare evasion is almost uniformly a product of poverty. No mention of how we need to increase access to car alternatives to help combat climate change. No mention of how police enforcement of fare beating increases the likelihood of violent encounters like this one from 2019;
Just uncritical stenography fed to them by either the police departments or their allies in city government—decontextualized numbers about how much cities are said to be “missing out on.”