SEPTA is treating fare evasion as a criminal offense for the first time in five years

SEPTA is going back in time in the way it punishes riders for jumping turnstiles.

In June, SEPTA quietly stopped issuing tickets to riders who skip the $2 fare and reverted to a bygone practice of issuing summary citations, raising concerns among some civil rights advocates.

Instead of facing a $25 fine for fare evasion, non-paying riders are now being sent to court, where judges can mete out hundreds in fines, community service hours, and potentially stiffer sanctions. SEPTA stopped using summary citations for fare evasion in 2019, arguing that the system was dysfunctional and created “criminal stigma” for thousands of offenders.

Transit police issued more than 700 summary citations since relaunching the system two months ago.

SEPTA Transit Police Inspector James Zuggi said his goal is to stop crime before it happens — and police believe most infractions are committed by riders who skipped their fare.

“Most if not all of the perpetrators are fare evaders to get into the system,” he said. “It may not always be a major crime. Sometimes it’s smoking on a train, or using narcotics. But we want to address that at the gate.”

The policy rollback comes amid SEPTA’s ongoing struggle to address crime and lure ridership back to public transit, where antisocial behavior has fueled a sense of disorder since the pandemic. Transit officials raised ticket fines from $25 to $100 for smoking, public urination, and other misconduct on SEPTA lines in June, but only fare evasion will result in a court date.

Summary citations are a low-level criminal offense, similar to traffic violations. But civil rights advocates argue that reverting to the citation system could exacerbate problems within the criminal justice system that reformers have for years sought to fix.

Mike Lee, executive director of ACLU Pennsylvania, questioned the efficacy of returning to the abandoned system and whether it would disproportionately target low-income people of color.

“SEPTA is assuming everybody who is evading a fare is committing a crime,” Lee said. “Many people can’t pay it. And this still goes on your record.”

SEPTA ramped up enforcement of fare evasion prior to switching over to the summary system in June. In the first six months of this year, the number of tickets issued for fare evasion has topped all of 2023.

Officers are being deployed to hotspots where fare evasion is rampant, such as Frankford Transportation Center and various Market-Frankford Line stops along the Kensington Avenue corridor.

On a recent morning in Kensington, transit police stood at the gates of the Somerset El Stop, turning away hopeful riders who didn’t have the fare. Some walked away, while others argued with officers. One officer told a reluctant fare payer that nothing is free, comparing jumping the turnstile to trying to get “a free bag” of drugs on Kensington Avenue.

Zuggi acknowledged some riders are still adjusting to the increased enforcement.

“There was a culture shift,” Zuggi said.

While SEPTA struggled with staffing levels during the pandemic, offenses such as fare evasion and smoking on SEPTA became normalized, so much so that people who skip fares “think they didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

In 2019, SEPTA developed an in-house ticket system amid concerns that the agency had been criminalizing poverty through the reliance on summary citations to tackle fare evasion. Police issued hundreds of tickets each month, but less than 5% of offenders paid the fines, according to a recent audit.

SEPTA officials said the fare evasion accounts for one in four rides on the city’s two subway lines. Systemwide, it’s the practice for 18% of all rides, with estimates ranging between $30 million and $68 million in lost revenue each year.

The authority in April installed newer, taller gates that deter fare evasion at 69th Street Station. Officials are studying other stations where it can erect the body-length turnstiles.

In the meantime, Zuggi echoed what past transit officials have said in defense of harsher sanctions on fare evaders: They’ve led to a safer transit system. His officers have also seized 26 firearms and arrested people on 324 bench warrants due to their increased enforcement this year across the board.

In the past, SEPTA police used to arrest fare evaders. Now, SEPTA says the riders are temporarily detained while given a summary citation. If those detentions are turning into pat-downs, civil rights lawyers said, the practice raises questions about racial bias and unlawful searches.

Philadelphia attorney David Rudovsky, whose firm filed the lawsuit on behalf of the ACLU over the city’s stop-and-frisk tactics in 2010, said that SEPTA police still need reasonable suspicion to conduct a search. As with a traffic violation, the offense alone is not probable cause for a frisk.

“There’s no automatic right to search,” Rudovsky said. “My team and I think the only thing the police can do is to conduct a frisk if there is reasonable suspicion that the person is armed and dangerous.”

A SEPTA spokesperson said transit police search a person only if there is reasonable suspicion.

The new wave of summary trials has already begun to flood the courts. It is not clear how the authority and the courts plan to fix problems that plagued this system in the past.

In a 2019 memo explaining why it abandoned the summary citation practice, SEPTA acknowledged that fare evaders rarely appeared in court and seldom paid the fines issued by judges — typically about $300. Officers were nonetheless required to take time off to appear in court for each summary trial, resulting in high overtime costs. The whole system, the authority continued, was plagued by the “dysfunction of the prosecutorial process.”

Judges can issue bench warrants for failure to appear at summary trials, leading to more serious criminal charges and raising questions about an influx of inmates amid an understaffing crisis in city jails. SEPTA said that historically has not happened with fare evasion cases.

Zuggi said SEPTA is coordinating with the courts and plans to use video evidence at trial instead of relying on officer testimony, when possible. A court spokesperson said the courts are prepared to handle the increased caseload. A SEPTA spokesperson could not provide the outcomes for the first wave of cases.

Lee of the ACLU said defendants should know what is at stake if they miss court or are unable to pay their fines.

Public defenders are not provided for people facing summary trials. ACLU Pennsylvania in June sued Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro over the lack of funding for public defenders statewide, arguing the state was depriving people of their constitutional rights to “effective, free representation.”

“Let’s say I evade the fare, I forget what day I go to court,” Lee said. “Will that debt follow me if I fail to pay? They should have the ability to talk to somebody about what the consequences could be.”