Comment by aorloff

I think public transport should be free. That solves the whole problem because it makes no sense to dis-incentivize the use of public transport to begin with and the fares are disproportionally hard on the lowest earners.

Or make the transportation free, then you don't have to worry about policing infractions and instead spend the low effort policing money on cleaning, security, and improvement.

Fare jumpers absolutely need jail - the sort of person who jumps the faregate is also much more likely than the average person to be a nuisance or a violent threat to other people on public transit. I think it's more important to jail fare jumpers than a lot of other types of petty criminal, because enclosed public transit is one of the most important areas in a city to control crime; people need to feel safe on public transit in order to want to use it to get around. The sort of person who fare-jumps is extremely often homeless, mentally-ill, or a gang member - not someone who is capable of being compelled to do a minor chore for the station without way more coercive effort than the station employees can be expected to provide. The right response to fare-jumpers is to have police - uniformed specialists in using violence or the threat of violence to enforce public order - physically remove them from the public transit station and keep them in a locked room under guard where they can't harm someone else.

The cop made me call my mom on a pay phone and 40 years later I still have to hear about it. Cruel and unusual.

Then charge them cleanly and don't artificially try to inflate charges. It is the duty of any jury to let someone off when they feel its malicious prosecution.

Police, Prosecutors, and Judges all openly use their discretion. Each of them could have quashed the charge before it got to a jury. The jury is the last line of discretion. Police, prosecutors, and judges love to call it "jury nullification" but its the same power that police, prosecutors, and judges use multiple times a day.

The only crime I see is that police arrested an innocent person on false evidence, prosecutors charged someone based on false evidence, and a judge is actually allowing this case to proceed all based on evidence that everyone knows is false.

No the punishment should be harsher, not for an hour but 40-60 hours, or fine of $1000-2000. Otherwise they will never learn to respect rules. Especially in the subway where you cannot "accidentally" jump over the turnstile.

I regularly see how people are not paying the bus fare (here in Russia). And the only reason why they do not pay is because the punishment is light (fine of ~25 USD) and chance of being caught and actually prosecuted is close to zero. So paying does not make economical sense.

> Make them clean the station and pick up trash...

This should just be an established way to pay your fare.

"it's unfair to law-abiding people" is a terrible reason to force more people to abide the law if you think the law is unfair

The real crime is you thinking public transportation should cost the individual money.

There should be some teeth, but also we should be prepared for a small amount of "unfairness" baked into the system. If there are no controls, everyone will cheat. But if there's too many obstacles (turnstiles, checkpoints, conductors, cameras, etc) then people won't want to ride.

Or we can all just agree that maybe basic transit in a city should be subsidized, maybe say... To the same degree that road construction is?

At which point no one would need to pay a fare, and we'd all still save money trying to prosecute broke teenagers trying to move around a city?

In the off chance this is a genuine question, this thought experiment is always resolved with "reasonable payments are only effective if many people contribute, and that is probably okay".

Consider the extremes: - No one does anything. The cause fails. No one goes broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - One average citizen donates everything to a worthy cause. No one else donates. The cause fails and the donor is broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - Everyone donates a small fee to a worthy cause. The cause achieves its aim. Some people do not benefit, and are modestly inconvenienced.

The choice, when given these two extremes, is clearly to decide by some consensus whether the interests of many (who would otherwise be modestly inconvenienced) outweigh the interests of the few (who would be modestly financially inconvenienced).

But it assumes the cause is truly worthy, the money is handled faithfully, and the survey method is fair and accurate.

False dichotomy?

Ignoring smaller crimes just because they're under $1,000 isn't the answer. things can quickly spiral. How many times do you wake up to your car scratched window broken or whatever and would be ok ?

By the way, the stat you mention counts consensual arrangements as wage theft, probably the large majority of it (e.g. hiring illegal immigrants for under the minimum wage). Calling that "theft" is a rhetorical move, much like libertarians calling taxation "theft": it borrows the moral weight of stealing for something that's legally and morally quite different. If the stat had been calculated from asking workers, "does your employer owe you money that they refuse to pay?", I suspect the number would drop dramatically.

Gotta keep the poors in line.

To be clear, you're claiming that wrongdoing by one party justifies wrongdoing by another, and your enabling of the latter because you're ideologically aligned with it?

I'd also be interested to know what the crime they were trying to get a lead on was. If it's another case of minor tagging then I can empathize more with the concerns about the prosecution, but if it's something more dire then frankly using judicial leverage strikes me as entirely appropriate.

The interesting thing about thresholds is that antisocial behavior models itself to the threshold, whether by conscious awareness or by an evolutionary pattern.

  The pair is accused of stealing around $3,200 worth of merchandise, primarily meat, seafood, and produce, from one or more Safeway locations across 14 separate incidents.

https://sfist.com/2026/05/14/police-arrest-man-accused-of-re...

Criminals have some brains. What do you think they'll do when they figure out that crimes under $1k go unpunished?

Look what happened with shoplifters.

> let's start with the ones above $1,000 first, hm?

The criminals start with the ones below $1,000 and then progress above. If you start punishing it earlier, you won't have to deal with as many above $1,000 crimes in the first place.

So mug a rich person, deal with it. Mug a normal person and ignore it.

If you go further down this line of argumentation you will end up at what will be cheaper capital punishment or prison for life.

Not sure where you got that idea. No where did I express interest in punishing the perpetrator for anything more than what they were caught. My point is that their "solution" to justice does not solve vandalism the way that it they think it does.

If the punishment is equal to the value of the crime then as long as the rate at which you are caught is less than 100% crime is a profitable option.

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