Under a new Washington, D.C., law, Metro rail fare jumpers who are stopped must provide identification and pay a $50 fine. If they refuse to cooperate, they can be charged $100. The transit system estimated that as many as one-seventh of rail trips were going unpaid, denying the system about $40 million a year, reports Governing. There was a growing sense that decriminalized fare evasion was an insult to the majority of riders who willingly obeyed the law. There were complaints that fare jumping was leading to a whole array of other minor crimes. More than 60 percent of the crimes committed on Metro came from people jumping over or around the fare gates. Minor crimes are becoming an issue elsewhere. In March, the Vermont House passed a bill that would make life tougher for retail thieves by allowing prosecutors to convert multiple shoplifting misdemeanors into a single felony, encouraging stiffer penalties. Oregon has ended its three-year-old decriminalization of drug possession. It enacted legislation imposing sentences of up to six months in jail for those caught with even small amounts of heroin, methamphetamines or cocaine.
All of this is part of the anti-crime crackdown that is reacting against the broad-based easing of minor-crime penalties after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020. A Gallup Poll in November found that 77 percent of respondents believed national crime rates rose in 2023, and 63 percent felt that crime was a very serious or extremely serious problem. The newly heated crime debate raises much larger questions about what transgressions should be punished, and how stringently. In decriminalizing farebox jumpers six years ago, D.C.’s more-progressive councilmembers argued that most of these violators were among the city’s poor and minority population, and that many were breaking the rules because they didn’t have the money to pay for rides. The implicit point was that tough farebox laws could be seen as a brand of racism. The broader implication was that this was an activity for which the perpetrators could not be held morally responsible.