1. Eyewitness – the fare jumper
Had to go to San Leandro yesterday, and when I returned, I saw a very tall young woman leap over the fare gate. This sort of thing really pisses me off. Almost without knowing it, I turned to the woman and said, in a loud voice, “Hey! You didn’t pay!”
She gave me a dirty look and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me but she didn’t. When I got up to the platform, there was a new message on the digital displays overhead.
2. The New Digital Message
The new message—at least, I hadn’t seen it before, and I take BART frequently—said something like “CONCERNED ABOUT POLICE MISCONDUCT? CONTACT US.” That was pretty stunning. I thought, “I bet if BART got a call about so-called police misconduct they’d have an squad on the premises within minutes. But let people jump the fare gate, or use drugs in the stations, or approach passengers in a threatening way, or throw food wrappers and containers all over the car, and you can complain all the want: nothing will get done, nobody comes.”
To me, it’s more evidence that wokeness has taken control of BART’s management. Everybody is worried about “police misconduct,” which is virtually non-existent as a real problem, but when it comes to the everyday woes that plague BART and bother the rest of us, they’re not so worried. Riding the train, I thought of all the times when I wished BART cops would come. But even on those rare occasions when they do, I’ve never seen them take action to enforce the rules or the law. Indeed, they do just the opposite: nothing. I’ve seen BART cops walk through a car, right past passengers with open bottles of booze, or with unleashed pit bulls, or passed out in the seats with the pants sagging to their knees—and barely even glance at the perps. No wonder the public is skeptical about BART’s claims that public safety is their #1 priority.
And then we pulled into Fruitvale Station.
3. Fruitvale Station and Oscar Grant
Fruitvale is famous, of course, as the place where BART policeman Johannes Mehserle accidentally shot Oscar Grant to death in 2009. Oakland, in reaction, erupted into a fury of cop-hating; downtown experienced some of its worst violence ever. A jury properly found Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter; he had not intended to shoot Grant, but in the confusion of the moment, he had grabbed his gun instead of his Taser. Mehserle was sentenced to two years in jail but released after 11 months.
That didn’t sit well with the cop haters. The main police hater in Oakland is Cat Brooks. She repeatedly called Mehserle a murderer. “On January 1, 2009, Oscar Grant was murdered by then-BART police officer Johannes Mehserle,” Brooks wrote.
Of course, it was just another lie from an extremist who lies all the time. Mehserle murdered no one, and besides, Oscar Grant would be alive today if he hadn’t resisted arrest. But to this day, you’ll hear people refer to the “murdering BART police” and this ties into the (Brooks- and Pamela Price-generated) meme of “killer cops.” Isn’t it amazing how many people, who otherwise are normal and intelligent, have bought into this fiction? But that’s the wokes for you: in true Trumpian fashion, they have adopted Joseph Goebbels’ truism, “The bigger the lie, and the more you repeat it, the more people will believe it.”
Well, I hope when BART installs their new fare gates, it will prevent fare-evading. But I’m sure the hostile sociopaths who feel entitled to use BART for free will figure out a way to continue their cheating. (And you know that anyone who jumps a fare gate is probably doing other illegal things as well.) Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had citizen-enforced justice, in which whenever a crowd of law-abiding BART passengers witnessed fare evasion or any other illegal behavior, they surrounded and overpowered the perp and waited for police to make a proper arrest? That’s the kind of country I want to live in. We’re not there, yet, but I predict this: as crime mounts, and city governments prove themselves unable or unwilling to combat it, we’re going to see a rise in vigilantism.
Steve Heimoff