In September, Derrell Mickles bypassed the turnstile at the Sutter Avenue L train station in Brooklyn, New York, evading a $2.90 subway fare. Police chased Mickles through the station, shooting him and three others, including two innocent bystanders.
Cops claimed that Mickles charged at them with a knife, but video of the attack showed him standing still when police opened fire. He had a pocket knife, but never brandished it at the police or anyone else.
NYPD militarizing subway stations
This appalling act of racist police violence comes as the NYPD increasingly militarizes subway stations to combat fare evasion. Yet, even after a dramatic increase in enforcement, fare jumpers still cost the city a whopping $690 million a year. Clearly, more aggressive policing doesn’t stop fare evasion.
Following the attack on Mickles, the capitalist media focused all their attention on whether or not the officer’s actions were justified—never addressing the underlying social and economic roots of fare evasion. It doesn’t take a genius to see that poverty is the real issue when people avoid a $2.90 fare.
New York is one of the world’s most expensive cities. The cost of living is already unbearable for many. The city’s median household income is $75,910 a year, while the average cost of living for a family of four is $64,284—not including rent.
One in five New Yorkers lives below the poverty line, and the figure is one in four people in Brooklyn. Credit card debt shot up 11% in NYC in the first half of 2023, nearly triple the estimated wage and salary growth over the same period, and 12.2% of New Yorkers were more than 90 days delinquent on that debt.
The city is also suffering its worst homelessness crisis since the Great Depression. Over 130,000 people in NYC sleep in homeless shelters each night, while an estimated 200,000 sleep doubled up in someone else’s home, and thousands sleep on the streets.
New York is one of the world’s most expensive cities. The city is also suffering its worst homelessness crisis since the Great Depression. / Image: Adjoajo, Wikimedia Commons
Skyrocketing police budget
Thanks to Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, the police budget nearly doubled from $5.8 billion in 2023 to $11 billion in 2024. The additional $5.2 billion is equal to 75% of total annual revenue from all subway fares and tolls, which is about $6.9 billion. The increase in the NYPD budget alone could have covered most of the cost of making all subways, buses, bridges, and tunnels free.
But that is not in the interest of the capitalist class. They need armed-to-the-teeth police to instill fear and defend their social order. The ruling class understands that the waves of social unrest unleashed over racist police violence and the American-backed slaughter in Palestine are only the beginning. They are strengthening police departments for the far bigger social explosions yet to come.
Class war
The capitalists have no interest in improving the lives of workers. When their political representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties try to redress social grievances, they do so “in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society,” as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto. It is more profitable to fund violent repression with our tax dollars than it is to provide everyone with decent, quality healthcare, housing, and transportation—which, under capitalism, are all very lucrative, private industries.
There is no social force more potentially powerful than the organized and mobilized working class. Our collective liberation can only be achieved when we are united for a common purpose—the complete overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ government. For decades, the class war has been one-sided, with the wealthy and powerful making gains at our expense. But consciousness is changing, confidence in the traditional institutions of the ruling class has plummeted, and the communist generation must prepare itself for the next explosion of class struggle.