Photo: Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD at a June 22, 2023 press conference at an MTA station. Credit: Flickr/MTAphotos (CC BY 2.0)
On the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 15, two NYPD officers opened fire in a train car at the Sutter Ave. L Train station in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Four people were shot, including one of the firing officers and a bystander who was shot in the head, who is now in critical condition. What started this bout of extreme police violence? Officers reported they witnessed someone skip the turnstile.
The NYPD shooting on Sunday exposes the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars on a hyper-militarized police force that neither protects us or keeps our communities safe. Brownsville is a Black neighborhood with a poverty rate of 39% — the highest in New York City. Instead of addressing the root causes of poverty, the city’s solution is to divert more funding to the police and make public services, like transit, even harder to access.
Eric Adams, former NYPD captain, as well as Governor Kathy Hochul, have flooded the MTA with police officers since 2022, most recently adding National Guard troops to major hubs. In August 2023, the city raised the base MTA fare from $2.75 to $2.90. Meanwhile, Adams’ renewed campaign to crack down on crimes of survival like fare evasion has cost taxpayers $151 million dollars in NYPD overtime. This latest increase in policing is especially hard on Brownsville riders, who are nearly 40x more likely than average to be ticketed by the NYPD for fare evasion.
There is no clearer example than what happened on Sunday to show that the NYPD do not protect and serve the people of New York, but instead defend the private property interests of the wealthy elite. These are the solutions that the capitalist system offers our communities: instead of addressing why $2.90 subway fare is unaffordable for so many New Yorkers, the police flood our subway stations and bus stops to harass and criminalize poor and neglected neighborhoods. Rather than tax the hundreds of billionaires and millionaires that live in this city, the working class is expected to pay a regressive tax in the form of transit fares to maintain essential infrastructure, risking their lives if they don’t do so.
The people of New York deserve affordable transit that is free from relentless state surveillance and repression. We demand the immediate firing and full prosecution of the officers involved, removal of all cops from the MTA, and making transit free in New York City. Racist police brutality must end!
