Have to give credit to Patterico for this one as I saw it yesterday on his Twitter thread, but before we get into the Twitter part of this story, a little background. It is now widely acknowledged that the DC Metro system is in serious trouble. The Washington Post ran a story about the system’s cultural problems in May.

Metro was struggling alongside other transit agencies last fall, each subsisting on federal dollars during a pandemic that siphoned off passengers and fare revenue. As others rebound, Metro finds itself in a hole that has only deepened.

Troubles intensified for the nation’s third-largest transit agency in October, when a derailment triggered a federal safety probe and 60 percent of Metro’s fleet was yanked from service. The probe continued into a week ago, when officials discovered nearly half of train operators lacked required recertification testing and training. Metro’s top two executives departed the next day — hours before new leadership faced a scathing safety order that cited “Metrorail’s culture of noncompliance.”…

Joe McAndrew, vice president for government affairs and infrastructure at the Greater Washington Partnership, a founding partner of the MetroNow coalition that seeks to help put Metro on a stable path forward, said it’s difficult to find what would fix the system.

“All along, we were told things were getting better — the safety culture was getting better, the workforce was attuned to running a safe and reliable systems — and, unfortunately, that has not happened,” he said. “Patience is wearing thin in the business community, the advocacy community, the ridership and residents of this region to continue to try to defend this institution.”

But Metro’s culture of noncompliance isn’t limited to the people who work there. The system also has a major problem with fare evasion. WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) published an estimate in February which concluded that the system had lost $10 million in just the first half of 2022. However, the older gates on the DC subway system weren’t equipped to actually measure the level of fare evasion so those figures were really just estimates. Newly installed gates were designed to actually detect fare evasion and the data from those must not have been good because almost as soon as they were installed, WMATA began talking about changing them out for entry gates that people wouldn’t be able to step over. This report is from September 1:

As that story points out, fare evasion was decriminalized in Washington DC back in 2018 because of equity concerns:

The D.C. Council gave final approval this week to a measure decriminalizing Metro fare evasion, paving the way for fare-jumping to become a civil offense punishable by a $50 fine in the District.

The measure passed amid staunch opposition from Metro and its board, which argued the transit agency loses more than $25 million a year to fare evasion and that lessening the penalties would only exacerbate the problem and lead to more crime. Council members and activists rejected that argument, saying decriminalization was an important step toward addressing disproportionate policing of African Americans who use the transit system…

“We are extremely disappointed with the Council’s vote to decriminalize fare evasion, which we believe will have significant safety and financial consequences for the region,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said in a statement. “We hope the Council will revisit this issue once these impacts are understood.”…

Proponents of the bill, the Metro Fare Evasion Decriminalization Amendment Act of 2018, pointed to a recent report from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs that found between January 2016 and February 2018, 91 percent of Metro Transit Police citations and summons for fare evasion were issued to African Americans.

So, just to be clear, fare evasion is still a criminal offense in Virginia and Maryland but not in Washington, DC. In DC it’s still a civil offense, meaning you can still be given a ticket and a small fine for it but in practice the law isn’t being enforced and as a result there are a lot of people evading the fare. And that brings us to this story published Tuesday by ABC 7 about a decision to crack down on fare evasion:

“Metro has a message for fare evaders: operating buses and trains isn’t free,” the transit agency said in a press release announcing stepped-up fare evasion efforts…

Metro said decriminalization of fare evasion in D.C., which was passed nearly four years ago, left Metro Transit Police Department (MTPD) without a method of even giving tickets to fare evaders in the city, and as a result, the number of tickets given dropped drastically…

Numbers reported by MTPD show through August 2022 they dealt with 298 cases of fare evasion. Metro tells 7News that those cases involve criminal charges in Maryland and Virginia, and in almost every case fare evasion was a secondary charge to a more serious crime.

By comparison, in 2017, MTPD numbers show that 15,409 people were charged for either criminal or civil fare evasion violations the entire year.

So in 2017 they were charging nearly 1,300 cases of fare evasion per month and now it’s 37 cases per month. No wonder that so many people don’t take the need to pay very seriously when there’s almost no chance of getting caught unless you commit some additional crime. The plan now is to give warnings for a few weeks and then starting in November to give out tickets until fare evasion drops.

Finally we come back to Twitter. An ABC 7 reporter went to a station and filmed fare jumpers in connection with the story above. She was shocked by what she saw. Even when people could see they were being filmed, they didn’t care.

We’ve been watching @wmata fare evaders ALL MORNING. Our camera isn’t hidden and people are blatantly hopping turnstiles live on air. Metro estimates $40 million in lost revenue. @7NewsDC pic.twitter.com/WCnKZGaeo9

— Victoria Sanchez (@VictoriaSanchez) October 5, 2022

But there was immediately a lot of blowback. Not at the people jumping the gates but at the reporter who filmed them. Here’s NBC’s “dystopia beat” reporter Ben Collins explaining why no journalist should film this.

Dictionary definition of afflicting the afflicted.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) October 5, 2022

The senior editor for HuffPost also had thoughts.

You expect people to be distrusting of your camera, and that’s a debt *all* journalists will have to pay

— Andy Campbell (@AndyBCampbell) October 5, 2022

As did lots of other folks:

when you were in journalism school did you envision a life of holding power to account by filming poor people going about their day? are you living your dream? is this what you thought your journalism would be?

— p.e. moskowitz (@_pem_pem) October 5, 2022

why would you devote so much time to shaming poor folks just trying to get to work

— Scott Heins (@scottheins) October 5, 2022

Wow, $40m? That’s almost as much as one settlement for a cop beating the shit out of someone.

— man it’s a hot zone, (@Mobute) October 5, 2022

Just dropping by to say this is pathetic. If you want to do a WMATA story, start with how it’s unaffordable and unaccountable to the public despite sucking up more & more taxpayer $$ each year.

— Nandini Jammi (@nandoodles) October 5, 2022

Embarrassing and shameful that @wmata isn’t free and that they’re wasting time and resources on this.

— Scott #AbolishThePolice #ACAB Menor (@smenor) October 5, 2022

I could go on and on but you get the idea. Seemingly every leftist on Twitter had thoughts about that brief clip illustrating an actual news story about a problem WMATA says they are working to stop. The journalist tried to explain to people why it was a story but of course the Twitter scolds don’t care. (Note this clip includes more fare evasion.)

Metro says it lost $40M due to fare evasion, launches campaign to bring it to an end @7NewsDC https://t.co/goVIuK2NKQ

— Victoria Sanchez (@VictoriaSanchez) October 5, 2022

I’ll give Patterico the last word.

Journalist tweets video of scofflaws evading fares, which is theft. Virtually every reply expresses anger . . . at the journalist. Society is broken when people don't follow basic rules — and those who notice the rulebreaking, instead of the rule breakers, are the ones shamed. https://t.co/XjLfeaU9fD

— Patterico (@Patterico) October 6, 2022