LA Metro’s crime started with decision not to enforce fares — for the sake of ‘equity’
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Every day, thousands of Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their homes and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of “Mad Max.”
The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces. Its trains are rolling platforms of murder and mayhem.
The transformation has been swift and stark. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled.
What drove the change was LA Metro’s dedication to creating an “equitable” transit system, where all Angelenos — drug-addicted, homicidal maniacs included — could effectively ride free, without consequences.
Activists and their allies in city government have spent years laser-focused on driving cops from the Metro’s buses and trains. Their argument: making people pay to use the trains is racist.
In November 2016, the Labor Community Strategy Center filed a civil rights complaint claiming that LA Metro was “systematically targeting Black riders.” Black riders, they alleged, made up less than 20% of riders, but received at least half of all citations. As a remedy, the center proposed (emphasis removed) that Metro remove all police and fare-collection staff, institute “[p]olicies of reparation” for black riders and put an “immediate end to all fare collection.”
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EXCLUSIVE: In the past decade, the Los Angeles Metro has reduced fare enforcement by more than 99 percent—and crime has doubled.
We rode the trains for 24 hours to see the nightmare up close. Vagrants, drugs, shootings, robberies, rape. And political leaders who do nothing. pic.twitter.com/M8I8hA7zxM
Less than a month later, Metro’s board of advisors unanimously demanded that Metro create a plan that would “completely decriminalize fare evasion amongst youth transit users” and ensure that youth fare evaders not be “required to interact with law enforcement.”
Then, the dam broke. Metro took over fare enforcement duties in 2017, formally removed those duties from law enforcement agencies’ contracts in 2022, and, at some point, apparently told the police to focus on “hard crime” instead.
Almost immediately, Metro slashed fare enforcement. In 2016, when the sheriff’s office enforced the fares, officers typically performed between 500,000 and 1 million fare checks per month.
Today, Metro hardly enforces fares. Agents conducted only about 5,000 fare checks per month in 2025. In 2020, Metro instated a “Fareless System Initiative Task Force” to examine how a fare-free system could advance equity. “Equity is very, very important to us,” former Metro CEO Phil Washington said.
Free fares inevitably mean one thing: crime.
In 2020, Metro’s board moved to “re-envision transit safety” with a reactionary post-George Floyd peace guard known as the Metro Ambassadors. Clad in neon-green Metro shirts, the ambassadors are meant to be a “visible, uniformed presence” to “deter” crime and administer NARCAN. According to a December 2025 report by UCLA researchers, the unarmed ambassadors have been threatened at gunpoint, sexually assaulted, punched and kicked in the ribs.
Metro is also in the process of establishing an in-house public safety team, which will hire and deploy its own law-enforcement officers alongside ambassadors and crisis-intervention teams by 2029.
When we rode the trains, the police officers we saw didn’t even appear to have digital scanners to check if riders pay at the fare gates.
The lawlessness starts at the entrance: About half of Metro riders don’t pay, according to data analyzed by Davis.
While Metro’s board constructs its progressive dream world, the system’s ridership, the majority of whom are low-income people who rely on public transit to live and commute, are getting shot, stabbed and assaulted.
What would it take to bring back fare enforcement? According to local pro-safety activists, not much.
As of 2023, Metro employs an existing force of over 200 Transit Security Officers, who could easily fare-check 20,000 passengers per day.
But Metro’s ideological commitment to transit equity appears to stand in the way between a safer Metro and more dead Angelenos.
Americans were horrified when Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska was brutally murdered on a Charlotte, North Carolina light-rail train. It was a wake-up call to the country that something has gone terribly wrong if random bystanders are being slain on public transportation systems.
In Metro’s case, that “something” is an easily identifiable variable: the complete absence of fare enforcement and crime deterrence.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Haley Strack is an investigative reporter at City Journal.