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I have to say that disagree with Manhattan Contrarian and am prepared to defend the New York Post's take.
If you start from the supposition that humans are (for the most part at least) individuals who exercise personal agency it doesn't really matter to the transportation agency what color the free-rider is or how they justify thier actions. The motives of the finance bro who can't be bothered to pay, the edgy teen jumping turnstiles for a thrill, and the homeless bum who just doesn't give a shit about your rules (but will shit on your floor), all ultimately boil down to the same thing. They do it because they beleive they'll get away with it. Thus the clear solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it.
As I was telling @The_Nybbler a couple weeks back, the reason for unchecked crime is that people have chosen to allow crime to go unchecked.
Or to riff off of your own post from down-thread, I think the reason New York has these sort of problems is that woke Democrats, and the people who elect them, are getting the system they deserve.
Want to live in a safe, well-ordered, high-trust society? Try prosecuting trouble-makers and promoting men like Daniel Penney instead of the reciprocal.
There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate, not necessarily severity. The problem in the USA and Europe is that the disproportionate arrest rates of minorities is attributed to societal failures that one of the competing dominant political arms can use to attack the other in order to further their own political interests. So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.
The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.
The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements. Disproportionate amounts of resources are invested in cleaning up after noncooperatives, and even more are invested in resources to gently nudge them into being cooperative of their own recognizance or accommodating their preferences through rehabilitation and custodial services. Some people get off on being as difficult as possible because they fundamentally hate the people offering them help to begin with, and self-flagellating to absolve the noncooperative of their responsibility does not lead to greater resource utilization efficacy.
Just like how drug-testing welfare recipients does not meaningfully capture significant amounts of drug abusers or signalling immigration crackdowns does not actually catch many illegals, these programs are meant as signals to the noncompliant that mercy is no longer guaranteed. Less fare evaders will use the services on offer to begin with, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
Maybe the answer is the Tom Paris rebuttal.
That's without counting the effects downstream from Broken Windows Theory. Which despite mainstream academia trying for decades to tarnish it, is so obvious from observation of humans and human nature that it still holds a quasi-tautological position in my thinking on this.
It is often a private choice, and it is harder to notice if this has any downstream effect because ressources are deployed to clean up, as you've mentionned. I've started to prefer bus queues to point out antisocial elements. Who, when coming up to wait at a bus stop that has an obvious, clear, nonambiguous line of people queueing up for the bus, decides to ignore the queue entirely, without any mitigating factors (joining a friend being barely acceptable). There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.
Why is it sad?
Are you happy when someonetakes cuts in front of you to get a limited resource (like a seat on a filling bus)? When people line up in order of arrival there's a certain fairness.
Yeah -- not what I was asking about. The question is why it's sad that there are patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues. To me this implies some 'ought'-style thinking that I can neither model nor understand. Should cultures or people all be identical? If not, doesn't that imply differences? Is the sentiment of the person to whom I was responding merely a reflexive genuflection toward prevailing political ideology, or did he mean something else by it?
I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.
It's also interesting to note that for the bus queues, the demographics at fault are not exclusively those you're probably thinking about. Yes, they are overrepresented, but some of the most frequently offending demographic I notice are elderly women (of all races).
As for the reason elderly women are often taking antisocial actions, I would hasard the reason is the same as anyone else. People, but men especially, are quickly thaught in life that them taking antisocial actions will usually make people around them angry. Sometimes this anger will turn to confrontation, and rarely (but sometimes) that confrontation will turn to violence. Minorities in majority white countries know that they could potentially turn it around if confronted by a white person by claiming it's racism so some of them abuse that. And elderly women (of any race) are the most oblivious demographic of all, because they are completely insulated from the consequences of antisocial actions as anyone confronting them immediately looks like the bad guy in the situation. If they had the physical ability to jump turnstiles, I have no doubt they would.
Alternatively, instead of thinking about elderly women as antisocial turnstile jumpers, you could think about the reasons an elderly woman might want to have first dibs for seats on a bus — like being elderly and frail and needing to sit down.
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