The city’s crackdown on fare evasion turned bloody on Sunday afternoon when four people — including an NYPD officer — were shot by police officers responding to a man who allegedly skipped the turnstile in a neighborhood where many people can’t afford basic needs, much less the cost to ride the train every day.
Police said the mayhem began after 37-year-old Derell Mickles skipped the fare at the Sutter Avenue L train station in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and avoided officers as he walked toward the platform. NYPD officials said he threatened the officers, who responded by firing their Tasers. Officials said the Tasers did not work and Mickles then pulled out a knife, which led to the officers firing their guns.
The surrounding community was shaken by the violence on Monday morning, and dozens of locals turned away from the station after they saw police standing near the turnstiles. Census data suggests that Brownsville residents have a hard time paying for the subway, with the neighborhood’s poverty rate at 39%, the highest in the city, according to NYU’s Furman Center.
“Here, everybody passes through them doors,” Margarita Pino, 65, said of the station’s emergency gates that are a common way for riders to evade the fare. “They’re not doing [it] now because the police is there.”
Brownsville has one of the city’s highest rates of fare evasion tickets. According to NYPD data, riders were 40 times more likely to be arrested in 2023 for fare evasion at the Atlantic Avenue L train station — just a stop away from Sutter Avenue — compared to the citywide average.
MTA officials have for years called for a harsher crackdown on fare evasion, saying the problem costs the transit agency nearly $700 million a year. “We have to change the culture and make sure everybody feels this [paying the fare] is a responsibility,” MTA chair Janno Lieber said in July.
But after Sunday’s shooting, some advocates questioned whether the push to enforce the fare has gone too far.
David Jones, an MTA board member and CEO of the nonprofit Community Service Society of New York, said he has long raised concerns about the agency relying on the NYPD as the main deterrent to fare evasion. To reduce fare evasion, he’s urged transit officials to push for more enrollment in the city’s Fair Fares program, which offers half-priced subway and bus fares to low-income New Yorkers.
“One of the fears I had was exactly this,” said Jones. “It really underlies the problem of having armed police as the front line in trying to stop fare evasion.”
Jones called the NYPD shootout an “overreaction” to Mickles’ alleged fare evasion, which police officials said escalated after he pulled out a knife. He was hospitalized in critical condition on Monday after police shot him multiple times in the chest, according to the NYPD. Police officials said a 49-year-old male bystander was also in critical condition after being shot in the head. A police officer who took a bullet to the left armpit and a 26-year-old female bystander who was grazed by a gunshot were both in stable condition, according to the NYPD.
“The NYPD is responsible for transit fare evasion enforcement, which has frequently resulted in arrests of felons with active warrants and, as recently as earlier today, recovery of weapons that otherwise could have risked riders’ safety,” MTA spokesperson Tim Minton said in a statement.
The tension between the police and riders in Brownsville was visible at the Sutter Avenue station on Monday morning, when a Gothamist reporter witnessed NYPD officers swarming a man who tried to jump the turnstile.
“Don’t touch me, don’t put your hands on me,” the man yelled before being walked out of the station without being arrested.
Eric Clark, who lives near the station, said he got out of jail on Sunday after he was arrested for beating the fare at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station two days earlier. He was taken in by officers after he was flagged by the NYPD for an unrelated assault, according to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.
“That’s the same thing that could have happened to me,” Clark said of Sunday’s shooting. “Instead, they just surrounded me. [An officer] threw the cuffs on me so tight I had to scream. People were stopping and pulling out cameras.”
Clark, who was commuting on Monday to meet with his attorney, said he made sure to bring money to pay for his fare to avoid another incident.
While the police crackdown may have prompted Clark to make sure he pays his fare, Margarita Pino, who has lived in Brownsville for 20 years, said there was no reason for the NYPD’s enforcement against turnstile jumpers to result in gunfire.
“You can’t even sit in the subway car, innocently, and a man gets shot in the head and a girl gets scraped in her leg,” she said. “Come on, that’s ridiculous.”
Stephen Nessen contributed reporting.