‘Public safety surge’ on Metro trains brings more crime reports
(Image generated with MidJourney)
A routine trip home from work turned tragic for Juan Luis Gomez Ramirez, who was shot from behind on a Metro bus in the City of Commerce last May.
Just hours before the incident, Mayor Karen Bass announced sweeping new public safety measures that would bring more law enforcement officers to Metro rail cars, buses and stations. The measures sought to address a series of violent crimes against riders and operators throughout Los Angeles’ Metro system.
Law enforcement nearly doubled the hours its officers spent patrolling trains last year. In January, officers clocked 19,000 hours patrolling trains. By December, the hours had increased to nearly 37,000.
Increased officer presence is being used as more than a visual crime deterrent. Newly deployed officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Long Beach Police Department who patrol Metro’s public areas have filed significantly more reports for crimes against society — a category that includes weapons offenses, narcotics use and trespassing.
Publicly available data shows Metro’s self-described “public safety surge” has coincided with a jump in reports of trespassing crimes in the rail system as well. Last year, 4,532 instances of trespassing were logged systemwide, a 177% increase from 2023. The long-term trend is even more stark: Police reported 35 times more trespassing crimes last year compared to 2022, and 53 times more than in 2020.
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The behavior officers classify as trespassing on Metro property remains somewhat unclear. A Metro spokesperson said trespassing often constitutes accessing non-public areas of the transit system, like tunnels and control rooms.
“Our law enforcement partners focus their efforts on disrupting criminal activity before it spills into the system and enforcing penal code within Metro stations and buses, including removing trespassers from railway tunnels and ancillary areas,” Metro wrote in a statement to Crosstown.
The surge has not led to a significant increase in overall arrests made on the system, however. Last December, Metro reported that law enforcement had made a total of 670 arrests on the system. That compares with 642 arrests in December of 2023.
Do more arrests mean less crime?
The beefed up policing was spurred by a widespread perception that riding on the Metro rails is dangerous. Just over 80% of L.A. residents think riding Metro trains is unsafe, according to a June 2024 LABarometer survey by USC researchers — up from 76% in December 2019.
Fears for personal safety are one factor that has kept riders from returning to the rail system after the pandemic. Average weekday ridership on Metro trains has fallen to 31,483 this March from 39,645 during the same month in 2019.
Metro insists that public perception of the rail experience has improved as a result of the increased police presence, measured by a Metro-led rider survey the transit system did not provide Crosstown.
Metro rail lines saw a 15.5% drop in violent crimes per transit rider from 2023 to 2024, a figure the Metro Operations, Safety, and Customer Experience Committee pointed to as evidence of the “surge”’s success in deterring crime at its Feb. 20 meeting.
Cracking down on fare evasion
The rate of crimes against society per transit rider peaked in August 2024, when there were roughly 36 crimes for every one million boardings — up more than 800% from August 2023. Trespassing arrests fell toward the end of last year, when law enforcement shifted focus to narcotics and weapons offenses.
Another issue the committee was trying to address in 2024 was fare evasion, which rose following the coronavirus pandemic. Metro didn’t collect fares beginning in March 2020, a social-distancing move that lasted until January 2022.
The transit system has fought against floundering fare compliance in the years following. Between April 2023 and March 2024, 96% of the violent offenders arrested throughout the Metro system didn’t pay to ride, ABC7 reported.
Last year, Metro introduced its Tap-To-Exit initiative on some lines, which requires riders to tap their fare card to leave an end-of-line station. Metro says the program has led to reduced fare evasion and fewer people at stations without a TAP card or intent to board a train or bus, which might correlate with the drop in trespassing arrests the system saw in late 2024.
Other crime reduction measures Metro is implementing include weapons detection pilots, first launched at Union Station and the APU/Citrus College station, and recently expanded to additional high-traffic stations. The pilots test “pillar-style” detection technology that scans incoming riders for concealed weapons.
How we did it: Crosstown analyzed reports from Metro board meetings, ridership data and Metro’s own reports on crime, arrests and deterrence in its February public safety report.
Have questions about our data? Write to us at askus@xtown.la
