This week, the NYPD released camera footage of a police officer in a subway car shooting 37-year-old Derrell Mickles, a shooting which also injured two bystanders and another cop on Sept. 15.
Fierce debates on fare-evasion enforcement sprung from the incident as transit patrol officers Edmund Mays and Alex Wong followed Mickles into the station after he allegedly hopped a turnstile at Brownsville’s Sutter Avenue Subway Station, which services the L Train. As the cops turn him away, CCTV footage shows two other people climbing over the turnstile.
Mickles allegedly attempted to farebeat again, this time by walking through the exit door. The footage shows him allegedly holding a foldable knife. Mickles continues walking away, keeps his hands behind his back and pleads with officers to leave him alone.
The train arrives during the confrontation and he backs into the car, where the cops tase him, to little effect. A few passengers are seen sitting. Mickles exits the car and is shown running at Mays through the officer’s body-worn camera. He freezes when the guns come out. The officers fired a combined nine shots.
Dr. Christopher Mercado, a retired NYPD lieutenant and adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College, believes focusing the shooting simply on fare evasion is reductive. He points to outdated NYPD firearms training and the need for officers to interact with clearly-distressed individuals.
“Nothing we can do, people fare-evade all the time, that’s not [the] issue,” Mercado said. “I hate when folks go, ‘well, he got shot for $2.90,’ that’s banal and surface-level.”
Additionally, he believes the five days between the shooting and the camera footage release was “a mistake,” saying how critical transparency is after such a shooting.
Even during the press conference on the shooting, Chief of Transit Michael Kemper credited fare evasion stops for more than 20 gun arrests and 490 knife recoveries this year.
Black New Yorkers are significantly more likely to be arrested for thefts of services — the misdemeanor for fare evasion — than white New Yorkers based on New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services data obtained by Police Reform Organizing Project founder Robert Gangi. Yet, white New Yorkers are significantly more likely to have a weapon during a stop than Black New Yorkers based on 2013 research from the Office of the Public Advocate.
Longtime NYPD critic Gangi believes fare evasion is a problem rooted in income inequality rather than crime.
“We need to find responses to problems that are essentially social or economic in nature, not by the use of the police department, but by providing sufficient funding and support to programs and services that are going to help people who are living below the poverty line in New York City,” Gangi said.
Mercado, on the other hand, believes such incidents would be better resolved if officers were better trained in mental health responses to prevent escalation.
“New York City cops get paid pretty well, we have a nice insurance package — let’s leverage that,” he said. “Let’s really be selective in the cops we get. And [cops are] de facto crisis counsel, whether you want to be or not. A lot of policing has a huge mental health component. I think we dropped the ball on that.”
There’s also the question of whether fare evasion enforcement by armed police is necessary. Of course, funding the MTA’s services remains a concern. Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani called current fare enforcement practices “ham-fisted” and pointed to a reduction in violence through a free bus pilot he helped push.
“Fare-free transit is safer transit,” Mamdani said in his statement. “In the fare-free bus pilot Senator Gianaris and I spearheaded last year, assaults on bus operators on fare-free routes dropped by 38.9%.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
