The Bay Area Council, a powerful coalition of business groups, has joined with more than 100 AAPI organizations to urge Gov. Newsom to “deploy the CHP across the BART system to address pervasive violence on trains and in stations.” The move follows a recent spate of violent incidents on BART cars and in or near Bart stations. “We need to take strong, decisive and immediate action that violent and other crime will not be tolerated on BART,” the Council’s president said yesterday.
Deploying CHP on BART would be similar to the way Gov. Newsom has deployed CHP officers to Oakland, where they’ve had remarkable success in combatting crime.
I would like to make a suggestion: If CHP does indeed begin to patrol BART, they must—repeat must—be allowed to arrest criminals, including vagrants and fare-hoppers. Most of us who take BART have watched in horror as BART police (a rare presence) move through cars, completely ignoring clearly drug-addled passengers, open consumption of alcohol, unleashed dogs, blaring music, straphanger acrobats, and jerks with their feet sprawled on adjacent seats. All such intruders should be asked for proof of purchase of a BART ticket, and escorted back outside the gates where they can’t harass passengers. But I’ve never seen BART officers interfere with anyone on the train, and so there’s little reason to think that CHP officers would succeed where BART has failed.
This gets to the essence of our society’s problems with crime and anti-social behavior. For some reason we refuse to get tough with the bad guys. We let them perform their annoying stunts on BART and on other public venues, supposedly in the name of “civil liberties,” but the fact is that no one should have the “civil liberty” to fare-hop a BART gate or behave in blatantly inappropriate ways on the cars.
I personally am not concerned about having my throat slashed on BART, as that poor woman was two weeks ago. But I am tired of the morons and idiots who infest BART. Whenever I visit my family in the South Bay via BART, the first thing they ask me is, “So what weirdness happened today on BART?” They’re so used to my tales of zombies, crazies, druggies and other intimidators who seem to enjoy free, uncontrolled access to BART trains, with BART doing absolutely nothing to stop them. As for those new plastic gates that are supposed to prevent fare-hopping, have you seen them? They will stop no one. A child could push one open; two people can easily squeeze through while the flimsy gates are open.
So maybe CHP can do something about all this. But if Gov. Newsom, BART and other authorities aren’t prepared to enable them to do actual law enforcement, then forget about it. We don’t need token cops to provide symbolic presences on BART; we need law enforcement officers ready, willing and able to arrest the people who should not be on BART in the first place.
Steve Heimoff