“According to both state law and BART policy, passengers can drink and eat all they want in the ‘Free Area,’ which we define as the portion of the station that’s outside the fare gates where you don’t need a ticket,” BART Police Chief Gary Gee said. “But BART Police Officers will ticket riders who eat or drink in the ‘Paid Area,’ which we define as the places where you need a ticket such as inside the fare gates of a station, on platforms or on any train. State law sets the fine as high as $250 and up to 48 hours of community service for this infraction.”
This has been the policy since BART started running. Eating/drinking in “paid areas” is nonetheless common among people of all ethnic backgrounds, and if a BART officer says anything at all, it’s usually nothing more than a passing “don’t eat here”. During the 30 years I’ve lived in this area, actual arrests for eating (and they happen every few months) seem to be mostly confined to blacks. Funny, that…
It’s almost as though enforcement of the rule/underlying state laws are so subject to unconscious (or conscious!) bias on the part of transit police that they should be struck down. Almost as though they’re evidently in conflict with the equal-protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.
Where do you start on this? The lack of signage? The no eating rule? The overreaction of cops? The actual arrest? The race of Mr. Sandwich? The fact that the officer was “insulted”? The fact that Mr. Sandwich used a “homophobic slur”?
Fuck everything about this. I am voting Gamma Ray Burst in 2020.
Deputy Dog was trying to get the guy riled up enough to try and punch him out and therefore be arrested on a serious charge. It was only because everything was on camera and there were witnesses that DD didn’t just arrest him outright and claim he was attacked.
That’s a ridiculous false equivalence if you’re comparing sandwich guy using a slur to a police officer abusing his power and having an excessive response to a black man doing a day-to-day activity that most people get in no trouble for. Yes, both things are bad, but one of the two things is a component of endemic police violence that has been going on for years, yet refuses to change. Throwing your hands up in the air and saying, “Wow, everything about this is fucked” removes all of the nuance in this situation.
Ah! this is the “Pleasant Hill” Bart station. Confusingly, this station is located in Walnut Creek, CA (Pleasant Hill sold the land to the neighboring city some years back). Also, fuck these cops.
Basically if cops ask you to do anything, including something stupid or wrong, they can arrest you for disobeying them.
And so you get arrested, and maybe go to court and the officer is maybe even found to be in the wrong. . . resulting in him/her getting a paid leave of absence or desk duty for a while. Problem solved.
(Legitimately I do struggle with the question of, “well, what about issue of driving-while-black? That is, racist differences [in gross outcomes, and lived experience] in traffic enforcement?” In that case I’d say the threats to life and health of doing no traffic enforcement are great enough that we can’t simply say “well, no traffic enforcement at all, then,” and so we have to do what we can to remediate the system without canning it entirely.
But for cases like “no food on transit”, where there is no substantial threat to public safety, throwing away the rules is clearly quite realistic.)
You see, this is one of the other things that breaks my brain. The idea that a transport company can have its own police force. Here in Munich, there are two security companies that work for their companies (Deutsche Bahn and the MVG), but they don’t carry weapons or handcuffs, and if an arrest is necessary they have to call the real cops. All they can really do is issue fines.
It’s not actually that uncommon. Most colleges have their own police forces a well. Several of the larger malls also have their own police force.
The idea is that at a certain point, you don’t just want security guards, but actual police who can do actual arrests. This is a good thing for the patrons as well, as it comes with actual police officer training, plus specialized training for the environment they’ll be working in.
As official police, they’re still responsible to the city’s chain of command as much as any other police department in the city is, as well as being responsible to whoever is running the institution they’re representing. In this case for example, if either the Mayor or the head of BART is pissed off enough, they can get these guys fired.
Oh, they’re public employees. It’s… not entirely uncommon in the US for there to be entirely separate police agencies for a specific transit infrastructure. I don’t think the reasoning is especially motivating; maybe it has something to do with not having to worry about jurisdictional issues as a train or bus or whatever moves about.
(note that the NYC Transit Police have been a division of NYPD generally since 1995.)
It does seem to lead to greater corruption in some cases. There’s one department near me that’s particularly infamous for this, their jurisdiction is largely a single interstate parkway, and some other park roads within that park.
