BART tightened fare enforcement and saw crime and fare evasion drop sharply, while a 2019 plea decision in Shreveport illustrates how prosecutorial choices can leave dangerous people armed; the contrast between these outcomes and policy debates about prosecution and policing is stark.
In January, BART reported that crime on its trains fell 41 percent in 2025 after the agency installed 715 new fare gates across all 50 stations. Fare evasion dropped 55 to 60 percent, maintenance hours inside stations fell by 961 in the first six months after the rollout, and the system generated roughly $10 million in new revenue from fares that would have walked through the old gates. Those are plain, measurable results from enforcing a simple rule.
The Atlantic covered these numbers in April, and the reaction from outlets that long criticized enforcement-first approaches has shifted. BART was not a Republican project; it was a progressive transit agency admitting that enforcing the rules made the system safer. When facts change, arguments should too, but that rarely happens without pressure from voters and results on the ground.
Seven hundred fifty miles away, a different story played out in Shreveport. In March 2019, Shamar Elkins fired five rounds at a car near a public high school while children were playing outside, and prosecutors charged him with illegal use of a firearm and carrying a gun near a school. Those charges carried serious consequences on paper.
In October 2019, the local district attorney accepted a plea that dismissed the school-zone firearm charge; Elkins pled to a lesser charge, paid a $50 fine, served no time, and kept his gun rights. That decision is what kept him off the federal ban on gun ownership when he later walked into two houses seven years on. On Sunday, April 19, 2026, he shot his wife, then drove to a nearby house and killed eight children; seven of them were his own.
For years, progressive outlets argued fare-evasion enforcement was the criminalization of poverty. Pieces with titles like “Decriminalize Fare Evasion” and groups such as TransitCenter argued enforcement costs outweighed benefits, and California legislators introduced bills to end criminal penalties. BART’s own board voted against decriminalization, and the board’s caution looks prescient now that the data are public.
A prominent critic, Alec Karakatsanis, founder of Civil Rights Corps and author of Copaganda, called fare-evasion enforcement a “moral panic” engineered to justify government repression of poor and minority riders. His signature statistic is that officers spend only 4 percent of their time on violent crime, implying the rest is theater. BART’s results undercut that narrative: enforcing one rule reduced violent incidents and freed up resources.
San Franciscans expressed their views at the ballot box in June 2022, recalling District Attorney Chesa Boudin by a 55-to-45 margin in a city that votes roughly 55 to 30 Democrat. That vote was from neighbors who lived with the real effects of prosecutorial philosophy. Electoral accountability matters when theory meets lived experience.
Philadelphia tells a similar story from another angle. The city recorded 562 homicides in 2021 and 268 in 2024, the biggest one-year drop since 1961. The district attorney did not change, but Mayor Cherelle Parker, sworn in January 2024, said during the campaign that “stop-and-frisk” is “a tool that law enforcement needs,” and the police focused enforcement in the districts that drive most shootings. Homicide clearance climbed toward 73 percent and the numbers moved the right way.
The Shreveport case traces back to local prosecutorial choices. James Stewart, the DA in 2015, 2019, and today, benefited from support from the Louisiana Safety and Justice PAC, which received $930,600 from George Soros in 2015. That funding helped elect prosecutors who favor lighter charging decisions, and the Elkins plea illustrates how those choices play out in single cases with fatal results.
The law that could have prevented this outcome already existed. A 1968 federal law bars firearm possession by anyone “convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.” The state charge dismissed in 2019 would have been the trigger for that federal ban, but prosecutors chose a different, lesser path that left gun rights intact.
Academic work supports the practical effect of prosecutions on gun availability. A study from Vanderbilt and Wellesley measured that violent deaths fell 18 percent among young Black men in counties where a tough prosecutor narrowly beat a reform candidate, and the economists found one gun death prevented for every 90 convictions that trigger the federal ban. Those are concrete trade-offs voters and officials should weigh.
The difference here is consistency. You can harden a fare gate or you can refuse to drop a school-zone firearm charge; both are small bets on enforcing clear thresholds. BART made one choice and saw measurable safety and revenue gains; a different prosecutorial choice in Shreveport removed a legal barrier that might have prevented future killings.
