The NYPD issued more than 100K fare evasion tickets last year. See how many were at your stop.

At the Livonia Avenue L train station on the border of Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, police issued six times more fare evasion summonses than average last year, according to a data analysis by Gothamist.

The station is one of about 100 citywide where fare evasion summonses were concentrated. Although they represent only about a quarter of New York City's subway stations, they account for almost 70% of fare evasion tickets.

Riders at Livonia Avenue described seeing uniformed and plainclothes officers stop, ticket or arrest people on fare evasion charges almost every day. Some officers were even dressed as MTA employees – an enforcement technique confirmed by a police spokesperson.

“They’ll act like they’re from the MTA and then just whip out the badge,” said Cary Bereijo, a lifelong Brownville resident whose son has been caught jumping the turnstile.

Fare jumping arrests have more than doubled since Mayor Eric Adams took office, and fare jumping tickets have spiked 160%. In October 2022, Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a plan to flood the city’s subway system with more police. More than 1,000 additional police officers were deployed in the subways each day as part of the plan, which Gothamist reported cost the city and state an additional $151 million in overtime.

Now, Gothamist has mapped fare evasion tickets and arrests per 100,000 riders from January to September 2023. Readers can check how many tickets and arrests there were at the stations they frequent.

Even accounting for the number of riders that use each station, the analysis found a huge disparity in the number of tickets and arrests for fare jumping at different stations. A majority of fare evasion tickets were issued at just a quarter of the city's stations — with Livonia Avenue, Far Rockaway-Mott Avenue and Aqueduct Racetrack in Ozone Park tallying between 50 and 60 tickets per 100,000 riders. On the other hand, at about half the city’s stations, police gave out fewer than five tickets per 100,000 riders between January and September 2023.

Police issued zero fare evasion summonses per 100,000 riders between January and September 2023 at 26 stations, including Lexington Ave-63 St and 15th St-Prospect Park. Those stations were in neighborhoods representing a range of income levels and crime rates.

Harold Stolper, an economist at Columbia University who’s spent years tracking fare evasion enforcement patterns , said that police concentrate fare evasion enforcement in high-poverty neighborhoods — especially those with predominantly Black and Latino residents.

After viewing Gothamist’s data, Stolper said, “It seems like poverty is effectively being policed or punished more ... It’s not just telling where enforcement is, but where it’s not.”

Police say fare evasion enforcement is necessary because most people who commit felonies in the transit system don’t pay their fare. The NYPD confiscated 24 guns last year during fare evasion stops, the New York Post reported .

“It’s about correcting behavior,” NYPD Chief of Transit Michael Kemper previously told Gothamist. “Stopping fare evaders sets the tone of law and order.”

When asked about New Yorkers who simply can’t afford the subway fare, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard said police have to enforce the law equally. New Yorkers who make $18,000 or less may be eligible to get 50% off their subway rides through the city’s Fair Fares program .

“A lot of people are buying tickets with their last couple of dollars,” Sheppard said. “But we cannot ignore that the general public expects people to pay their fare if they have to pay theirs.”

“It’s either legal or it’s not,” Sheppard continued.

At the Alabama Avenue station in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, 39-year-old Travis Bryant agreed that fare evasion needs to be enforced.

“If some people are paying to get into the station, everybody should do the same,” Bryant said.

The MTA launched a blue ribbon panel in 2022 to reduce fare and toll evasion, which the agency said caused a $500 million shortfall in its budget. Last month, city officials installed the first set of “fare evasion-proof” fare gates in Queens. But TikTok is already brimming with videos of people simply tapping their hand to open the gates.

Jacqueline Gosdigian, senior policy counsel with Brooklyn Defender Services, said that paying officers overtime rates to enforce fare evasion and then prosecuting cases in the court system is a waste of the city’s time and money.

“Cycling folks through the criminal legal system is a complete waste of time,” she said.

“Think of how much cheaper it would be to give someone a free Metrocard.”

MTA Chair Janno Lieber has maintained that fare evasion comes from rule-breaking behavior rather than unaffordability, stressing that 26% of his agency’s $19.3 billion operating budget comes from fares.

“This is a fundamental existential threat to our ability to provide first class public transit,” he said at an MTA board meeting on Wednesday.

Fare evasion arrests also uneven

One of the stops where police issued a lot of tickets also had the highest rate of fare evasion arrests in the city. At the Atlantic Avenue L stop in Brownsville, police made 40 times more fare evasion arrests than average. Police arrested 64 people there for fare evasion from January through September 2023. Meanwhile, police made only one fare evasion arrest during the same period at the 86th Street station on the Upper West Side — where ridership was 30% higher than at the Brownsville stop

Sheppard said fare evaders are arrested rather than ticketed if police find them on a list of people who meet certain criteria, such as being repeat offenders or being on probation or parole. He said that interviewing the people they arrest in those cases often yields information about unsolved crimes or gang patterns.

Gosdigian said arresting people for fare evasion is unnecessary.

Tickets and arrests were also higher at stops at the end of subway lines, like Far Rockaway-Mott Avenue. Police say that’s because more officers are assigned to patrol those stations to escort homeless people off the trains at the end of the night — and more officers means more fare evasion tickets.

Gothamist reporter Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky contributed reporting.