One of the things that the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority, referred to by most people around here as “Metro”, likes to emphasize is how safe the subway and bus system that runs through Washington, D.C. and the Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland suburbs is compared to other major city transportation systems. One reason that this might be true, of course, is that, unlike the New York subways, Metro does not operate on a 24 hour schedule. Since crime is most likely to occur late at night when there are few riders, comparing Washington’s subway system to New York’s is, for more reasons than one, a phony comparison. As this story in today’s Washington Post reveals, though, there may be another reason that Metro is able to make this claim — it appears that they’re fudging the numbers.
Metro transit officials undercount serious crime at the region’s 86 rail stations, leaving dozens of assaults, robberies and other major incidents off the official tally they report to the system’s board of directors and the public.
That practice stems from a long-standing policy not to count crimes handled by law enforcement officers other than Metro’s Transit Police, even if the crimes occur in a station or on a subway platform.
For the 18 months ending in June, for example, Transit Police recorded 73 aggravated assaults at rail stations, but they did not include the 21 aggravated assaults reported by other police departments, which brings the total up by nearly 30 percent, according to a review of records by The Washington Post.
Nearly 60 percent of the serious crimes at Montgomery County stations did not show up in Metro figures because they were investigated by local police. Montgomery reported 36 incidents, and Transit Police reported 27.
In other words, a crime that occurs near a Metro station, but not specifically on Metro property isn’t counted. The effect of this policy is quite dramatic:
In a July news release, Hanson boasted of a 24 percent reduction in aggravated assaults and a 19 percent drop in larcenies between June 2004 and June 2005. According to the department’s 2004 annual report, a larger category of crime on the rail and bus system dropped by 2 percent compared with the previous year — 1,234 crimes compared with 1,259.
During the 18-month period reviewed by The Post, Metro counted 463 serious crimes at its rail stations, but 98 other, similar incidents remained off its books, according to local police department records. That raises by more than 20 percent the total number of serious crimes — rapes, aggravated assaults, armed holdups, pickpockets and purse snatches.
Thousands of lesser crimes, including vandalism and urinating in public, also occurred on the rail system during that period.
Many of the most serious incidents, however, were not counted in Metro statistics.
Adding those other incidents paints a far less rosy picture of how safe the Metro system actually is and allows the government-run transportation system to make the claim that riding public transportation is a safe alternative to using your own car. Since Metro has no outside entity to answer to, and since there is no competition in the “public transportation” arena, they are able to get away with making these obviously false claims and convincing people that it they are safer than they actually are.
This is another example of the perverse incentives created when government gets involved in enterprises where it doesn’t belong. In a free market, an entity that lies about its safety record would get caught and exposed by its competitors and the members of the public would have the information they need to determine what the best transportation choice for them might be. In an environment where the government is the sole actor and jobs are awarded by political patronage, the incentive is to hide information and convince the world that the emperor does indeed have clothes.
