A 7000-series Metro train.

John Brighenti / Flickr

The D.C. Council is poised to decriminalize Metro fare evasion with just one more council-wide vote, and WMATA isn’t taking it lying down. The transit agency took to Twitter on Monday to express its displeasure with the measure, which would officially eliminate the possibility of arrest and jail time for people who jump the turnstiles on the Metro system, instituting a maximum $50 fine for the offense instead. Since 1978, fare evasion in D.C. has been punishable by a fine of up to $300, a ten-day jail sentence, or both.

The bill, which passed its first council-wide vote 11 to 2 last week, would also decriminalize other minor infractions, like eating food or playing music from speakers on Metro, both of which are currently technically illegal activities.

Metro tweeted Monday outlining the financial cost of fare evasion on the system: On the Metrobus system alone, there were 9.3 million cases of fare evasion in the first 10 months of 2018, adding up to $25 million annually in lost fares. Metrobus operators can record fare evasion cases by pressing a button on their on-board computer, according to Metro’s Twitter account. Around 80 percent of the cases in the chart come from within D.C., Metro tweeted.

Metro found some Twitter users sympathetic to its positions, and did not hold back in its agreement.

A spokesperson for Metro told DCist on Tuesday that the bill is unfair to the majority of Metro riders who do pay their fares.

“We are all mindful of the financial difficulties that so many Metro riders face, and we agree that ‘poverty is not a crime,'” Metro spokesperson Ron Holzer said via email, referencing an often-repeated phrase by supporters of the bill. “However, if someone can’t afford groceries, we have programs in place that provide assistance so individuals can purchase the food they need at the checkout counter, like everyone else. The decriminalization proposal is akin to telling those who can’t afford groceries to shoplift because we’ll all look the other way. We urge DC Council to consider options that treat low-income residents with dignity, such as a District-funded program to subsidize fares for those who cannot afford to pay.”

Holzer also said that Metro’s position is not that people should be imprisoned for evading their fares.

“We agree that the penalty for fare evasion need not include the threat of imprisonment to be effective,” he said. “If removing the threat of imprisonment is the Council’s intent, they only need to modify the penalty section of existing law. However, that is not what the legislation does. By converting the offense to a civil infraction, the Council would make theft of service effectively unenforceable, tie the hands of law enforcement, put rider safety at risk, and deprive DC residents of better Metro service.”

Councilmember Charles Allen, who shepherded the bill through his committee and helped bring it to a floor vote, has compared fare evasion to failing to pay a parking meter. “There’s no world in which if you don’t drop a quarter in the parking meter, you walk away in handcuffs,” Allen told DCist in October.

According to Holzer, 92 percent of people stopped for fare evasion get only a citation, and many of those who end up getting arrested have warrants for some other crime. He said that crime on Metro has gone down since enforcement measures have ramped up, and crime on Metro is at its lowest point in a decade.

The Metro Transit Police have incurred some harsh criticism this year for the way officers have handled cases of fare evasion. In one incident, a bystander reported that Metro officers pepper sprayed a group of young teenagers who jumped the turnstiles. Metro, however, says the incident didn’t involve turnstile jumping–officers were reportedly trying to apprehend a teenager wanted for multiple robberies around the system. In another incident, police body slammed a young woman to the ground and chipped her teeth for evading her bus fare. In September, the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs found that the overwhelming majority of fare evasion citations are handed out to black people: Seventy-two percent of the citations were handed out to black men, 20 percent to black women, and 46 percent to black young people under 25 over a two year period, according to the report. Police on Metro have even stopped and cited children as young as seven.

Councilmembers Jack Evans and Phil Mendelson were the two votes against the bill last week.

This story has been updated to reflect Metro’s account of why a group of teenagers was pepper sprayed in September.

Filed Under: fare evasion, fare evasion decriminalization, metro, wmata,