Not having a car, I take BART a lot. I have used the system since I moved to California in 1978. In the intervening 45 years, I’ve witnessed BART’s steady downward slide, from a safe, clean (if crowded) system to today’s chaos, grime and danger. I still take BART these days by force majeure, but every time I do, I wish there were some other way of transporting my body around.
Apparently I’m not the only one who feels this way. We’ve all seen the news that BART is on a fiscal cliff headed toward financial disaster. Now, there’s a new poll out, from the Bay Area Council, showing just how fed up passengers are with the transit system. They’re pissed off by the filth, the homeless people in the cars, the insane zombies, the farejumpers who get away with lawbreaking with such impunity, the rude, annoying behavior of too many passengers (who themselves appear to be farejumpers), and the overall lack of order and civility. By wide majorities, BART passengers want more police in stations and on cars—and they want those cops to intervene more often in bad behavior.
How many times have I seen BART officers walking through cars doing nothing, while people smoke, have their dogs off leash, play loud music, toss fast food containers on the floor, and pose a threat to passengers? I’ve asked myself, many times, what’s the use of BART police if they’re not allowed to do anything to stop illicit behavior? I’ve seen BART cops watch as people fare jump. I see BART is on a hiring spree now to hire more cops, and I wonder why they would bother if the current cops aren’t doing their job now?
For me, the key finding in the Bay Area Council poll is, “65% say BART should focus on core operations and leave social service issues to other public agencies.” Amen to that. This compulsion for every public or semi-public agency to get involved in social services is like a contagious disease, spreading from City Councils to Boards of Education to—now—transit agencies. Well, BART has one mission, and one mission only: to keep the trains running, in a safe, orderly manner. And a rock-bottom necessity for that is policing: the system not only needs more cops, it needs to allow them to actively intervene in unruly, inappropriate behavior. Is a group of young people parading through the cars blasting music on their boom boxes? Throw them out. Is some half-stoned, disheveled tramp passed out on the seats, his asscrack staring everyone in the face? Wake him up and throw him out. Is some wiseacre jumping the toll gate? Throw him out or, better, arrest him. People will not return to BART until they see that the system is serious about protecting them—and so far, BART has not shown any inclination to get tough on crime. If anything, quite the opposite: BART has fully embraced the Cat Brooks-Carroll Fife woke myth of “police reform.” They brag about their partnership with the Center for Policing Equity, which is just another leftwing, anti-cop organization, whose “goal is to make policing less racist, less deadly, and less omnipresent.” How stupid. We need BART police to be more omnipresent. It’s not “racist” to detain people who behave criminally. If too many of them happen to be Black, that’s not the fault of the BART police. Let’s stop pretending that “disparities” in stopping and arresting people are due to “racism.” They’re due to disparities in the race of the criminals being stopped.
If BART enters their death spiral and goes under, as some are predicting, I’ll feel bad. My main mode of transit will have gone away, leaving me with a real predicament. At the same time, I can’t help but feel that, if BART dies, it will have brought this upon itself. BART, like every other civic agency in the Bay Area, has become the victim of woke politics. Its governing board is dominated by “progressives” who dislike uniformed police and have bought into the delusion that “transit ambassadors” can fix the system’s problems. They cannot. In all my time on BART, I’ve never seen a so-called “transit ambassador.” Not once. Believe me, I wish I had. The night I took BART from San Jose to 19th Street, I was practically praying for an “ambassador” or a cop to show up during that long ride. Other than me, the car was filled with menacing maniacs; it was like the bar in Star Wars. In fact, almost every trip I take on BART is like a descent into some inner circle of hell. If BART can’t get a grip on its problems, then maybe it deserves to die.
We need to collectively declare war on aberrant behavior, which is killing our cities and all its institutions. We need to do what civil societies have always done when confronted by crime and disorder: arrest the bad guys. I’m tired of circle-jerking conversations about “root causes” and I’m tired of criminal apologists like Fife, Bas, Thao, Kalb and Kaplan whining about how we have to embrace these poor, misunderstood criminals and help them through their tormented lives. No! We have to stop criminals. BART can do it, but first, they’re going to have to purge their management of the woke bleeding hearts and replace them with people who understand that public safety and restoring trust is their job, not running a social service agency.
Steve Heimoff