While arrests for fare beating (also referred to as turnstile jumping) are down, they are still higher in Manhattan than Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's office had hoped following the change in September. | AP Photo Manhattan DA will no longer prosecute turnstile jumping

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance will decline to prosecute most cases of subway turnstile jumping starting Thursday, his office said.

In September, Vance's office began offering diversion programs and adjournments for most cases of subway fare evasion, but the NYPD continued making arrests at a pace greater than the DA had hoped. Under the new policy, Vance's office will still prosecute if the person is on a list as a known public safety risk, but hopes to significantly tamp down arrests, which tend to inordinately target low-income and minority residents.


“They are still making more arrests than we’d like," Chief Assistant District Attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo said in an interview with POLITICO. "So we said to them, 'We are no longer in the process of prosecuting fare beating.'”

While arrests for fare beating (also referred to as turnstile jumping) are down, they are still higher in Manhattan than Vance's office had hoped following the change in September. Stats from the DA’s office show that arrests have decreased 25.7 percent, comparing the most recent four months since the policy took effect to the same time period last year.

Stats from the Manhattan DA’s office show that since September, pleas are down 82 percent and the number of arrests that lead to convictions with jail time are down 72 percent.

Instead, more cases went to a diversion program or received an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, or ACD. In the case of diversion, if the person who was arrested completes the program, the arrest is dismissed. In an ACD, if the person is not arrested during the agreed time period — usually three to six months — the arrest is dismissed. Almost three times as many cases have received an ACD since the policy took effect.

The data compare Sep. 5, 2017, through Jan. 19, 2018, to the same time period in 2016 to 2017. The data are preliminary since not all of the arrests in 2017 and 2018 have been resolved.

Tina Luongo, attorney in charge of the criminal practice at the Legal Aid Society, one of the public defender organizations in Manhattan, applauded the DA's move, saying fare evasion is a crime of poverty that carries catastrophic collateral consequences, but said the police department is still arresting too many people.

“This news is welcome and long overdue, but the root of the problem lies with the New York City Police Department’s overzealous enforcement of this crime. Until that is resolved, these prosecutorial changes will only address a portion of the real problem,” she said.

Friedman Agnifilo said that the change came under an effort by the office to rethink consequences for certain types of crime.

“When DA Vance took office in 2010, we inherited a system where we basically took whatever the police department brought to us. We had about 100,000 misdemeanors at the time," she said. "We just sort of said to ourselves, 'What if we decided ourselves what we thought was worthy of the criminal justice system?'”

She said the system couldn’t handle the cases that were brought in.

“We were finding that thousands of cases every year were being adjourned because there was no available court part," she said.

Sometimes, for example, a fare beating case might get a court assignment while a domestic violence case would be adjourned because there wasn’t an available court.

Friedman Agnifilo said fare beating doesn't have to warrant a criminal justice response, with a judge, a public defender and all the other things that come with it, including other collateral consequences like the arrestee losing their job.

“We don’t think it’s a fair use of this power of the criminal justice system,” she said.

Austin Finan, a spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, defended the NYPD’s record so far, saying, “Cheating the fare isn’t fair to anyone. But by only arresting those caught doing it several times, we believe the police department has struck a wise balance in enforcement."

The NYPD pointed out that fare evasion arrests decreased 28 percent year to date, and 40 percent compared to the same time period two years ago.