NYC Makes It Just Slightly Easier To Be a Human Being

Getting swiped into the subway no longer carries risk of prison

Forget giving coffee and a bagel to a guy asking for food or a dollar to a kid dancing on the Q train; the most New York form of charity is swiping someone onto the subway. It’s also the most painless way to be a mensch. If you have an unlimited card, it costs you nothing to let a stranger in as you leave the station, and yet someone else gets to get where they need to go. Win-win.

Sure, one could argue that swiping in a rider costs a city agency $2.75 in much needed revenue. But the MTA isn’t funded by riders anyway, no matter how high it hikes the fares. Besides, the fact that all of the links related to the most recent batch of financial information on MTA’s website lead to “404, File Not Found” pages is a testament to, and only one small example of, the organization’s endemic dysfunction.

Get your house in order, MTA, and then ask me to do my part to help support it. Meanwhile I’ll keep swiping in people who can’t spare nearly three bucks every time they need to get from Train A to Train B.

And New York’s finest are now on my side! Or at least they’re less adversarial. According to a write up in the Times, cops are no longer cracking down on people who ask for a swipe:

For years, the police have been arresting people for asking for swipes in front of the turnstiles. That changed last month, when the police decided to try a more lenient approach against swipe-beggars and other low-level rule breakers, at least in Manhattan. Now officers are supposed to issue a ticket or court summons rather than make an arrest.

Just how many of these low-level rule breakers were pounced upon by the boys in blue? Would you be surprised to hear that the answer is, Way too many? I kind of was! Because apparently there is no limit to the depth of my naïveté.

Since 2013, the police have made more than 10,000 arrests of people for asking for swipes and, therefore, impeding the flow of subway passengers, according to statistics from the police. There were 800 arrests this year alone, before the policy change.

Broken Windows policing in action, I guess. Well, at least the law, “in reducing unnecessary incarceration” under new DA Cyrus Vance, is beginning to make this right. Now hopefully Vance can focus on prosecuting the real bad guys: scammers selling forged tickets to “Hamilton.”

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