Clevelanders for Public Transit will host a rally Tuesday morning calling on the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) to cut funding to its police force. Echoing local and nationwide calls to defund and restructure police departments, CPT will ask RTA to reduce its transit police funding by half and redirect those dollars to fare reduction and the restoration of routes that have been cut in recent years.
The rally will meet at 8:15 a.m. outside RTA’s W. 6th headquarters before the agency’s regularly scheduled 9 a.m. board meeting.
In Cleveland, the city’s division of police is by far the largest law enforcement agency, but several others operate with more limited jurisdictions. These include RTA’s transit police, the CMHA police, the Metroparks rangers and the Cleveland Clinic police, not to mention the cornucopia of cops out in University Circle, which include squadrons from University Circle itself (the “UCPD”), Case Western Reserve University, and University Hospitals.
RTA’s Transit Police was created in 1977, shortly after the agency’s founding in 1974, and its mission is all about providing “a safe and orderly transit environment.” But transit police officers spend most of their time writing fare evasion tickets. Or at least they did in 2017, when officers told Scene that they believed law enforcement at RTA had been reduced to a crude form of revenue generation. (RTA was making $25 a pop for first-time fare evaders, and officers were required to write 10 citations per shift.) Later that year, local judge Emanuella Groves ruled that having armed RTA police enforcing fares was unconstitutional.
In 2010, the ACLU found that RTA’s fare enforcement mechanism (armed officers on the Red Line and HealthLine) disproportionately affected Black riders. The $25 fee was in fact implemented to prevent needless interactions with the criminal justice system, though fare evasion remains a fourth-degree misdemeanor.
Late last year, Cleveland Councilman Kerry McCormack said he had drafted a bill to decriminalize fare evasion. Council lawyers were reportedly checking on a few details, but McCormack’s stated goal was to make penalties for fare evasion effectively the same as penalties for parking violations.
Though ridership has steadily declined in recent years, RTA’s police presence has increased. The agency now has 128 full-time officers on its payroll, plus at least 20 part-time officers and additional staff, making it the fourth-largest law enforcement agency in Cuyahoga County. RTA spends upwards of $14 million each year on the transit police.
CPT believes that these “limited resources would be better used to fund service and reduce the cost of fares.”
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This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2020.
This is not a long established group with vast membership – go to the Secretary of State website.
This group was only established a few months ago – and if, as their articles state, they actually do want safety, then defunding the transit police is the opposite of that.
More unpopular liberal garbage trying to pretend it is legitimate majority concerns. Sorry – I’m not buying it, keep your ill-conceived activist crap to yourself.
Defund the RTA and then call the cops on people walking through neighborhoods.
Now they are using this site as an organization tool for defunding the police protests. How about we just defund the police for the leftists?
Have fun riding on the crime bus from hell.
RTA doesn’t really need its own police department, but it does need local police to deal with riders, who refuse to pay their fares along with criminals, who commit crimes, on RTA buses, rapids, and stations.
The problem I see with RTA isn’t with its police department, but instead that it can’t even break even on its own without being subsidized by government.
People of all colors should be paying for the cost of their own transportation.
The government shouldn’t be paying it for them or helping to obtain it at a fraction of its true costs– especially, since there are criminals using the RTA to go from the East Side of Cleveland to the West Side of Cleveland to carjack cars or to commit other crimes.
Just defund RTA, period. Shift the 200 million plus yearly to subsidize Uber.
Not to worry, all that Taxin Jackson and thief Budish need to do is put another hefty tax on us residents to pay for all this!!!
Don’t worry, after Covid bankrupts the City the only ones left Downtown will be the Gentrifiers trying to figure out how they got duped into spending $500K on a condo in a soon to be 3rd World Shithole.
Lol