Having an armed guard tear my ticket stub and direct me to “Theatre 2, on your left” altered my view about how we deal with policing and social problems in our culture. This was the mid 1990s, and I had been visiting San Francisco with a couple of friends. You might question why we couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do on a vacation than go to the movies, but nothing on that trip left an impression as indelible as the man with the gun taking movie tickets.
I didn’t doubt he was there for a reason. It was probably a bad neighbourhood, the theatre likely had some ongoing problems with violence, and this is what it came to. But I still treated this as a sociological benchmark of sorts: When a society needs armed men to take tickets at a movie theatre, that society is fucked up.
And of course, the subtext of that thought was: Thank god I live in Canada, where that kind of thing would never be seen.Flash forward to 2005, and Vancouver hits that benchmark. Armed police start performing the routine administrative work of Translink, our transit authority – checking tickets on trains and buses. This caused me a bit of intellectual angst. I had to either adjust my benchmark and admit that there was nothing wrong with arming our civil servants to conduct bureaucratic work – that it was okay to threaten bus passengers with potential violence for not paying a $2.25 fare – or I had to admit that Canada was going down the toilet.
I ended up justifying the existence of the transit cops. I figured, well, sometimes there's crime on the train, and the police probably make the system safer for everyone. But I could never wrap my head around how non-payment of a fare of less than $3 necessitates being threatened with 9mm pistols, tasers, batons, and pepper spray – weapons carried by Vancouver’s transit police.
You might take exception to my use of the word “threatened.” After all, transit police don’t actually pull out their weapons during fare checks. But isn’t the mere presence of a weapon a threat? If your neighbour knocked on your door and asked you to turn down your stereo, and he made a point of drawing back his jacket to reveal a gun in his belt, wouldn’t that be a threat? Well, of course, the police are supposed to have weapons. But the fact that they have weapons is exactly why they are put on the transit system. It’s Translink’s way of drawing back their jacket and revealing a gun in their belt. This isn’t to say that the transit police have no business patrolling our transit system. There are incidents on the system that require a prompt, effective response by the police. They do have a legitimate role in public safety. That said, when those moments occur when you'd want police intervention, it's certain they won't be present – you'd still need to press the emergency call button. When we do see police on the transit system, it's most commonly (always, in my observation) to check fares, not to perform safety patrols.
What I find disturbing is that unarmed civilian Translink staff can be seen on almost every train platform far more frequently than the police, but they mostly seem engaged in socializing with one another. These are the employees who should be checking fares on a routine basis. The fact that Translink has confidence in these employees to perform fare checks on rare occasions is evidence that there are no real concerns about the safety or efficacy of civilian fare checks. When you consider that Translink has the staff and resources to conduct ongoing fare checks on passengers before they enter the system (fewer police would also free up more resources for this as well), one might conclude that Translink is intentionally encouraging fare cheating as a form of entrapment, preferring the cheaters be engaged in police confrontations rather than be prevented from entering the system in the first place.
If fares were checked on the system by civilian employees who have the authority to deliver fines – in the same manner as a parking enforcement officer (“meter maid”) – we would have an equitable response to what is essentially a bylaw infraction. Should a fare evader run away from a civilian enforcer, then all we have is an individual who got away with a theft of a service worth pocket change – and a service at that, not a possession, not a theft that caused anyone a direct hardship.The chance that fines would even have to be doled out would be greatly mitigated by fare checks at station entrances.
Yes, this type of system would require more staff, yet it would also require fewer police officers, who are paid roughly three times as much as civilian Translink staff. But of course, the more staff you have on payroll and the fewer weapons present, the more difficult things become for administrators.
David Graeber is an anthropologist who has studied and written about bureaucracies and their relationship with violence and law enforcement. In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, he writes:
“…violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant.”Having civilians enforce fares and fines would require what Graeber refers to as "interpretive labour," the emotional and intellectual work required to understand a person's motives, habits, and circumstances. Weapons eliminate the need for interpretive labour on the part of everyone involved, from the civilian employees (who can carry on socializing with colleagues on the platforms) to the board of Translink (who are left with more streamlined budgets and black-and-white solutions to the politics of social problems that make their way onto the trains).
Bus drivers, on the other hand, must engage in great degree of interpretive labour with their passengers. Translink police very rarely make their way onto the buses, preferring to focus on the train system. Bus drivers use their discretion when enforcing fares. Based on my observations, my guess is that they refuse entry to about half the passengers who don't pay fare. With the other half, drivers make a judgement call and choose to allow the fare evader to board. Translink allows drivers to use such judgement, and they consider the loss to be a cost of doing business. Why then cannot Translink deal with a few more lost dollars on the SkyTrain? The budget for the transit police force is about $32 million annually. Eliminate fare checks and cut police by a third (it should be cut more, but let's start there) and we have $11 million right there that could go toward civilian enforcement and perhaps leave a million or so extra to make up for lost fares (which aren't really lost fares anyway – most fare evaders would simply stop using the system if they were prevented from entering without payment).
Weaponized fare-checks makes life easier for a great number of people at Translink, but at a great social cost. This heavy-handed approach ensures that innocent and non-violent passengers will be on the receiving end of violent take-downs. Take a recent example: 29-year-old Jordan Dyck was beaten and pepper-sprayed by two Translink police officers. His offense? Sitting on the steps of the station entrance while playing a game on his smartphone. The cops asked him for ID, he asked why, and the situation ended with Dyck in a hospital bed. If the officers had simply told Dyck he couldn’t sit on the steps and he should move along, he might have been more responsive. In fact, a civilian employee would have done that job with just the right amount of authority. Instead, the police went “full cop” on him for the simple act of being idle.
Dyck’s version of events was considered accurate after it was discovered the officers fabricated evidence to support their case. They were convicted of assault, but no penalty was issued for the fake evidence. The fact that the police were convicted and taken off duty may seem to negate my argument – justice prevails – but my point is that the assaults are made possible in the first place, and for every conviction there must be several other victims who choose not to press charges, or don't have the resources to do so.
Stories of police misusing their power are endless, and Translink is no exception. All police forces have growing files of encounters with officers that started over trivial matters and ended in violence; Translink's own records contain notes such as: “Subject became uncooperative and would not identify himself while being checked for fare on SkyTrain. During arrest subject became uncooperative and grabbed onto the platform railing and refused to let go. Taser was deployed after several warnings."
Knowing this, we are creating criminals and injuring innocent civilians to facilitate Translink’s indolence. This is the trade-off we have made: occasionally brutalize non-violent passengers in order to help a bureaucracy take the lazy way out of difficult decisions.
A point that should be covered in this discussion is a defense often used by the police when using heavy-handed tactics to deal with petty offences – that their sweeps often catch those who have outstanding warrants for arrest. I don’t doubt this is true, and it’s a positive aspect of the police fare-checks. But just because a certain practice might have some benefit doesn’t mean the practice is ethical overall. We could also use the police to check tickets at sporting events, concerts, and movie theatres to shake down any patron that looks suspicious. We'd certainly find criminals to legitimately arrest, but we’d also find such practices offensive, menacing, and perhaps unconstitutional. Are weaponized fare checks on transit any different, and why are we so tolerant of it?
This leads back to my point about a society reaching a “fucked-up” threshold when the threat of violence is used to enforce public behaviour or administrative matters. Let me turn to another quote from Graeber's book:
“Most human relations – particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies – are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view... Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (cross this line and I will shoot you, one more word out of any of you and you’re going to jail). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid.”The preferred weapon of the stupid. Does that apply to Translink? They had and still have the choice between providing a Passenger Service desk at each station entrance, and fare-checks at all the station gates, but they opt to spend that money on police – the choice between "complicated" human relations and the "threat of physical harm" type.
And we can see where that stupidity manifests in other aspects of the organization. The fiasco over the newly installed fare gates in our SkyTrain stations comes to mind. The gates were installed in late 2012 with implementation planned for spring of 2013. It’s now two years later. After an overrun of $23 million and ongoing problems reported by beta-testers, the gates are still not in operation, and no date for a full roll-out is planned. The fare-card technology Translink is using is a tried and tested one, having been used successfully in most major cities across North America, Asia, and Europe for at least 15 years. No one can say that this is new, untested gear – it’s a system perfected by others after long-term use. A few bugs and minor delays should be anticipated when adapting the system to another location’s needs, but the problems Translink has been having are the kind of errors one would expect from an untried innovation – mostly regarding overcharging and card readers unable to detect the debit cards.
It might be harsh to call this debacle the product of stupidity, but it’s obvious this is an abnormal screw-up, the result of poor research and botched execution. This might have been predicted by the very fact that Translink currently relies on the threat of violence and arrest to collect fares, given that “violence is the preferred weapon of the stupid.” Any bureaucracy that needs guns to deal with $3 transactions probably doesn’t have the institutional smarts to implement a constructive, multifaceted alternative – the same way that the neighbour who needs the gun to get you to turn down your stereo doesn’t have the intelligence to negotiate a simple solution via diplomacy and human courtesy.
(I will qualify the above by recognizing that Translink has demonstrated intelligence and competence in most other areas of their operation, such as planning routes and delivering service. Their efforts on fare collection and enforcement, though, have always been riddled with huge lapses in judgement. Fares that sometimes cost more for shorter distances than longer ones, or cost more for crossing a non-tolled bridge, are part of a structure I have long considered unprincipled for penalizing passengers who live too close to arbitrary zone boundaries. Equitable distance pricing is another feature of the fare-gate technology that Translink won't be utilizing; willful negligence at the public's expense.)
Looking at this more broadly, consider the social class of those who get caught in Translink’s net. Let’s say someone steals a towel from a hotel room. The hotel notices. Do they send the police? No, they either forget about it or bill the guest’s credit card. Similar story when it comes to dodging $100 of freelance income on your taxes, or failing to put a dollar in the parking meter, or not tipping your waiter. If you’re caught evading the people who enforce these payments, you don’t find your face planted on the sidewalk while getting handcuffed. Nor do innocent parties get mistakenly brutalized in, say, a parking-enforcement crackdown.
The possibility of being fined by an unarmed civilian officer would be enough of a deterrent for anyone with a livable income, in the same way patrons reliably pay for restaurant service (via tips) when they have no legal obligation to do so. Those who have some social standing know that it’s not worth the risk, the hassle, or the shame just to save a few coins, whether the penalty is a fine or a scowl from wait staff.
The reason we use the threat of violence against the lower classes over a $2 or $3 fraud and not against the middle class for a $20 fraud is because enforcement without violence requires interpretive labour – communication, empathy, and knowledge of the community. A parking enforcement officer doesn’t need a gun to write a ticket to a car owner who didn’t drop a dollar in the meter. If the owner confronts the officer, both of them can argue it out because they are likely of similar social classes. They understand each other’s motives and needs before any words are exchanged.
Under no circumstance would that civilian officer be allowed to inflict violence on the offender for challenging his authority.
But a bureaucrat making between $50,000 and $150,000 a year (whether a Translink board member, a civilian staffer, or a transit cop) can’t identify with, and doesn’t want to identify with, the motives and needs of those who cannot afford cars, restaurant meals, or hotels, or those who don't have enough income to have taxes to cheat on. The larger the gap between social classes, the more interpretive labour it takes the higher class to understand the lower one. If you’ve ever changed the channel when one of those World Vision commercials confronts us with the faces of poverty, you can understand why the police don't negotiate with fare evaders. Brandishing a weapon is the easiest way for authority to "change the channel" on a class of people they have no empathy for.
If it ever became routine practice to taser those who ran away from a parks board officer or who argued with a "meter maid," there would be massive protests in various forms, threatening the rule of any government that allowed the practice. That's because the middle and upper classes can relate to those who own a car or who might open a bottle of wine on the beach. But we view public transport as the environment of a lower social class that we don't understand, even though the vast majority of those on the system are actually middle class. I once worked in an office of liberal elites who often referred to the bus as the "peasant wagon" and SkyTrain as "CrimeTrain", even though these were the methods about half of us used to get to work, without ever experiencing any crime or peasantry along the way.
Allowing armed personnel to do Translink’s administrative work should make us all question if this is appropriate for the kind of community we want to live in, and if their use is a sign of a cancerous stupidity at the highest levels of the Translink organization. Police checks of bus and train fare would have been unimaginable ten years before the practice existed. It would have been seen as an element of some kind of dystopian fiction. If we're so willing now to take the lazy and violent approach to disputes over a few coins in a fare box, what will we be willing to use the police for when tackling small social problems of the future? We should consider where to draw the line in utlizing police enforcement, and whether or not Translink has crossed it.
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