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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23067 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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I gotta know. What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement? Here's an article from the AP written March this year talking about NYC sending an "additional" 800 NYPD officers specifically to check for turnstile fare evasion. According to the NYPD Police Officer benefits page the starting salary for an officer is $58580/year and grows to $121589/year at 5.5 years of experience. So the total cost to the city of just these officers is somewhere between $47M and $97M per year (assuming all are between 0 and 5.5 years experience). The fine for jumping a turnstile starts at $100. So in order to justify the cost of these officers they are going to need to ticket between 470k and 970k people. According to that same AP article 28k people had been ticketed so far that year. Here's a Gothamist article from September this year that claims about 70k tickets were issued for fare evasion in the first 6 months of the year. So those 800 officers turned a presumptive 28k tickets/3 months into 42k tickets/4 months, a gain of 14k tickets (or, $1.4M in fines). Set this against the payout of NYPD salaries in the neighborhood of $12-24M. A steal! As long as you're the NYPD.

You're looking at this wrong. The policy isn't expected or intended primarily to pay for itself via fines. The policy is intended to pay for itself by deterring fare evaders from evading fares i.e. a visible police presence will encourage people to buy tickets who otherwise would not have bought them.

Let's take the middle of your cost estimate, $72m/year. Per the NYT, the typical New York subway fare is $2.90. To get a return on investment, in the course of a calendar year, 24,827,586 passengers who would otherwise have avoided paying the fare need to pay the fare. That works out at 68,021 passengers a day.

3.6 million people ride the NYC subway every day, of whom (again per NYT) 14% refuse to pay the fare - 504,000 people a day. If a visible police presence convinces 68,021 of those people (a mere 13.5% of the total number of daily fare evaders) to pay the fare, the policy has paid for itself. Sounds doable, frankly.

Using the lower bound of your cost estimate works out at 44,402 passengers a day (8.8% of people currently evading fares on the subway); the upper bound, 91,639 (18.2%). None of these sound like fantastical pie-in-the-sky figures: at most, you have to persuade a fifth of people currently jumping the turnstiles not to do so, and you're done. Anything above that is pure profit.

Enforcement changes habits. Right now 'everyone' does it, so everyone does it. If 'everyone' stopped doing it, it'd feel weird to do it, and many fewer people would do it, and enforcement costs go down. It's like smoking, or littering, or drunk driving. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-driving-was-won/

Two underappreciated ideas stick out from this experience. First, deterrence works: incentives matter to offenders much more than many scholars found initially plausible. Second, the long-run impact that successful criminal justice interventions have is not primarily in rehabilitation, incapacitation, or even deterrence, but in altering the social norms around acceptable behavior.

You don’t need to catch all of them. You need to catch enough to make turnstile jumping too risky for the potential gain. If you’re catching 28K, you’re probably missing at least the same number of people maybe more.

So in order to justify the cost of these officers they are going to need to ticket between 470k and 970k people.

Wait, you were being literal when you asked about the Return on Investment? I'm sure that the 11 Insanely Corrupt Speed-Trap Towns have great ROI figures for their police forces.

The "return" for proper policework is non-financial.

This is just the usual "haha we've made it impossible to enforce the law, better give up and let us do whatever we want forever."
The same argument could be (and is) made for bike theft: the value of the bikes stolen in a 6 month period is far less than the cost of catching and prosecuting the bike thieves. Better just to give up and let it happen, right?
This argument is of course only deployed by people who approve of the criminal element in question. Even if the math wasn't incorrect, it should be rejected as a bad faith manipulation attempt. There should be a sudden brutal crackdown on both the criminals and the anarcho-tyrants supporting them, and when we are finished with them the problem will be solved. The long term reduction of bike theft by obliterating the theft rings, fences, and their leftist enablers is worth far more than the few months of stolen bikes the criminal accomplices would prefer to compare the enforcement cost to.

The cost of fare enforcement will decrease as over time, so why not use the cost of fare enforcement in Tokyo as a baseline for our cost comparison? But the value of enforcing law on the lawless (and their supporters) is what really matters.

so why not use the cost of fare enforcement in Tokyo as a baseline for our cost comparison?

Because New York isn't full of Japanese people.

Fun fact: Subway gates don't even have turnstiles in Japan. You can just walk right through without paying. I think they beep or something if you don't pay, but I've never seen anyone just keep on walking, so I don't know if they keep beeping.

The gates slam shut if they detect you trying to walk through without paying. I've occasionally been in a rush and slapped down my card without checking if there was money on it - having the gates knock you back in an instant is a pretty big shock.

There are downstream effects that go beyond the financial loss. Basically not enforcing laws for petty crimes can encourage lawbreakers to escalate to more serious crimes. More police means more natural surveillance and deterrence for opportunistic lawbreakers.

You may as well ask 'why pay for any police to enforce any crime that doesn't directly recoup cash into the cities coffers?'

I notice that that cost question never gets asked when the time comes to prosecute Daniel Penny.

Who? Whom?

What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement?

It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.

What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement?

Keeping actual psychopaths off the subway. Not putting innocent people through the kafkaeque nightmare of defending themselves and then having the state come down on them like a brick of shit.

Fare evasion costs the MTA $600 million a year, according to the Post article. The ROI, of course, depends on how much evasion the enforcement stops, which is hard to know.

Also, not enforcing rules against fare evasion makes honest people into chumps. Why should Joe Commuter pay $116/month for the subway when Johnny Lowlife rides for free?

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