We Analyzed

204,445

Likely arrests for subway fare evasion from 2010 to 2018

Fare evasion is the act of using public transportation without paying. In New York, repeat fare evaders can be arrested and charged with theft of services, a class A misdemeanor. We have compiled a dataset of these arrests and identified those likely to be subway fare evasion rather than taxi or bus fare evasion and assigned them to the subway station where they occurred. What follows is our analysis of the results, you can investigate the data yourself here. The arrests analyzed below are those made by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) at Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) subway stations during the time period that we have station usage data (2010 to 2018).

Those arrested for fare evasion were disproportionately likely to be Black or Latino.

Data from the Census’ American Community Survey shows that all races made up relatively similar proportions of the city’s population and those who ride transit to work. This means that Black transit riders were 10.2 times more likely than Whites to be arrested. Latinos were 5.2 times more likely. Asians, on the other hand, were 1.6 times less likely to be arrested than Whites.

Those arrested for fare evasion were disproportionately Male.

In the same data, males were slightly less likely than females to ride transit to work but male transit commuters were about 5 times more likely than female commuters to be arrested for fare evasion. Data from both the NYPD and the Census Bureau classify all people as either male or female and make no distinction for gender non-conforming people.

Those arrested for fare evasion were disproportionately likely to be under 25.

The ACS commuting data doesn’t include schoolchildren and workers under 16 so instead we estimate differences in how likely all New Yorkers are to be arrested for fare evasion. New Yorkers under 25 were 1.4 times more likely than New Yorkers 25-44 years of age to be arrested for fare evasion and New Yorkers 45+ years old were 2.9 times less likely to be arrested.

Fare Evasion arrests happen more often in The Bronx and Manhattan than their share of transit riders would suggest.

There is significant geographic variation in arrests in addition to demographic disparities. The above plot shows where New Yorkers and NYC transit commuters live as well as where fare evasion arrests occur. Manhattan and the Bronx have higher portions of the arrests than they do transit commuters living there while Brooklyn and Queens have fewer arrests than commuters.

Manhattan likely hosts a larger share of fare evasion arrests than it does transit riding residents due to it having many of the largest transit hubs in the city and it being the destination for many commuters. The Bronx also experiences a much larger share of the arrests in relation to its share of New York’s population and transit riders.

In fact, the difference in arrest rates between stations is enormous.

A histogram of the arrest rate at every station is shown to the right. The majority of stations see less than 1 arrest in 100,000 entries to that station (four saw none at all) while some stations see as many as 15.

This means that a rider (assuming that all riders are equally likely to evade) is more than 17 times more likely to be arrested at the most heavily policed station than at the majority of stations.

The most heavily policed stations are concentrated in high poverty Black and Latino neighborhoods

As we can see in the maps below, the most heavily policed stations do not lie in every poor or Black or Latino community, but in those where multiple factors overlap. The Bronx in particular has high poverty rates, is heavily Black and Latino and has the largest concentration of heavily policed stations. Brooklyn’s poor communities of color are also heavily impacted by fare evasion policing. In particular the Black communities of Crown Heights, East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant as well as the Latino neighborhood of Bushwick.

The correlation between the arrest rate at a subway station and the demographics of its surrounding neighborhood is statistically significant for the Latino, poor Black,and poor Latino rates. Each percentage point increase in poor Black or poor Latino rates corresponds with an 8.69% or 8.23% increase in arrest rates from the mean. Each percentage point increase in Latino rate corresponds to a 1.3% decrease in the same value.

: Arrests per 100k and poverty rates. While there are high poverty areas across the city, many do not contain heavily policed stops.

: Arrests per 100k and percent of residents who are Black. Most Black neighborhoods do have high rates of arrest but several do not.

: Arrests per 100k entries and percent of residents who are Latino. Many highly policed stations lie in heavy Latino areas but also outside of them.

: Arrests per 100k entries and percent of residents who are Black or Latino and poor. Nearly every heavily policed stop lies within a poor, Black or Latino neighborhood.

Even within a given station, Black New Yorkers are systematically over represented in those arrested when compared to the surrounding area

The plots above show the demographics of those arrested at a given station plotted against the demographics of the neighborhood surrounding the station. We would expect that as the percentage of a given race increases in the surrounding neighborhood, the percent of those arrested belong to that race would increase as well.

As we can see in the plots, while this behavior is generally followed, different races are treated differently. Black New Yorkers are over represented among arrestees at almost every station in New York City while White and Asian arrestees are under represented at almost every station.

This pattern could be explained in one of two ways: either Black New Yorkers evade fair at much higher rates than the average and White and Asian New Yorkers evade at much lower rates, or the NYPD are using arrests to enforce against fare evasion in a biased manner. One commander in the NYPD’s transit bureau has been accused of making that bias an explicit priority in a lawsuit filed last year and the department is now under investigation by the New York Attorney General for possible discriminatory practice. Without ground truth data about who evades fare it is impossible to say which of these explanations is correct but there is at least circumstantial evidence that the NYPD may be enforcing fare evasion in a biased manner

Arrests for fare evasion have decreased in the last few years, New York City should consider the consequences of reversing that trend.

While MTA data showing rising fare evasion in New York City has created an appetite to move toward an enforcement model that cracks down on fare evaders, its clear from the data that arrests for fare evasion disproportionately effect poor Black and Latino New Yorkers. For any person, an arrest, even if it doesn’t result in a criminal charge or conviction, can be a major disruption. If arrests are being unfairly targeted toward certain communities, that should give major pause to anyone hoping to restart this practice.