It started like any other weekday morning. I headed to the Utica subway station in Brooklyn, bagel in hand, mentally running down my to-do list. Just as I approached the turnstile, I saw a cop accost a young preteen boy who’d jumped a turnstile and shove him towards a wall. This briefly blocked my path, forcing me to witness the horrific incident up close. As I fumbled with my phone to capture the moment, people around me pushed and shoved to get to the trains carrying them to their usual 9-5. I was numb with shock and felt helpless to do anything, passing through the turnstiles without seeing how the incident resolved. This wasn’t the first time that I’d witnessed a young person of color being roughed up by the cops for trying to skip the fare. But many of New York's working poor have few other options, so they continue to risk it.

In recent years, New York City riders have seen transit prices repeatedly hiked with no perceptible reduction in subway malfunctions and subsequent delays. I found myself wondering if any actual spending was going towards fixing transit issues, and if not, where is our money being spent? In part, it’s going towards a crackdown on fare evasion. According to New York Daily News, The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) spent approximately $60,000 printing ads for a controversial ad campaign urging people to pay for their rides, and a whopping $249 million over four years to hire 500 new transit cops. The additional police are only expected to save $200 million in fare evasion, according to Gothamist. This at a time when the MTA’s 2020 preliminary budget plan released in July indicated the cumulative deficit could grow to $443 billion by 2023, as reported by Crain’s New York Business. Governor Andrew Cuomo and the MTA’s plan is for the additional police to address “homelessness” and “quality-of-life” issues.” A September Gothamist report on MTA data found that customer complaints about homeless incidents rank ninth (at 2%) out of the top 10 issues, compared to the top concern: “real-time service” issues (at 62%).

Teen Vogue reached out to the MTA and NYPD for comment.

Research shows that geographic mobility is linked to economic mobility. A 2014 study from the Rudin Center for Transportation at NYU’s Wagner School found that higher rates of unemployment and decreased income are linked to poor public-transit access in New York City. Rather than address the underlying transit issues, the city and state, through increased policing, appear to have declared a war on poor communities enforced through fines and arrests.

Stories of rough arrests of unlicensed subway food vendors and teenagers are common. This penalizing of poor, primarily black and brown folks is by no means just a Brooklyn or New York problem. Public transportation fare hikes and increased police enforcement in metro areas such as Seattle and San Francisco have plagued low-income households. It also raises the larger issue of cities relying on punitive fines as a convenient, growing source of revenue. In New York City, the fine for evading a $2.75 subway is $100. A poor person who can’t afford the fare certainly can’t afford this fine, and failure to pay leaves the person vulnerable to a possible misdemeanor charge and court appearance — which, in turn, can result in the loss of a day’s wages. Cities such as Seattle provide reduced-price tickets to those who live at or below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines. While New York City has a Fair Fares NYC program that offers transit tickets at half price to those below the poverty line who meet certain conditions, according to a Gothamist article in June, it only serves 130,000 of the 750,000 of the city’s residents who live at or below the poverty line. And as of June, only 6,000 of those who are eligible had enrolled.After this latest round of social media clamoring subsides, my neighbors in Brooklyn and other working class folks will still be struggling to afford their commute. Even while we organize and agitate for meaningful action from our governments — city, state and federal — the working poor cannot wait. So we need to act now.

The Swipe It Forward campaign is one such resistance tool and safety mechanism for the poor. While there are fines for asking for one, it is legal to offer to swipe someone with your MetroCard on your way out. When you swipe someone in, you could save them from paying a hefty fine, a night in jail, a record or a potentially harmful interaction with a police officer.

Until we can all figure out and put in place a comprehensive solution, fellow New Yorkers and I will continue to Swipe It Forward as one small step towards addressing poverty.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Brooklyn Teen Anaila Muhammad Plans to Sue the MTA After She Says She Was Put in a Headlock by One of Its Employees