Sign my Avaaz petition if you believe fare evasion should not be a criminal offence

[rliu]

Like I have said on another forum, I don't need to have a personal stake in a topic to have an interest in it. Are all those who have an interest in animal welfare issues currently employed at wildlife sanctuaries?
You chaps mainly choose to engage with the moral issue of whether fare dodgers should be punished. But we don't disagree on that, I have said I support deploying inspectors and ticket gates and the penalty fares system. None of you so far have convinced me to think using the criminal law system is the best method in the majority of cases.

 

[ufkacbln]

Like I have said on another forum, I don't need to have a personal stake in a topic to have an interest in it. Are all those who have an interest in animal welfare issues currently employed at wildlife sanctuaries?
You chaps mainly choose to engage with the moral issue of whether fare dodgers should be punished. But we don't disagree on that, I have said I support deploying inspectors and ticket gates and the penalty fares system. None of you so far have convinced me to think using the criminal law system is the best method in the majority of cases.

Putting up a coherent, sensible and well constructed argument is one thing, convincing someone with inflexible and entrenched views on the matter is another

 

[rliu]

Don't need to have true, but have you?

Yeah I was given a penalty fare 4 years ago for boarding a train at an unmanned station when the ticket machine had a no change given sign on it. I started reading about the issue again because of related coverage in the Guardian in the last few months, and then read the narrow interpretations of this crime on rail forum. Then of course the government raised the issue of decriminalising non payment of TV licenses a few months ago which is why I thought this is also an area worth debating as there are similarities. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26727068

My petition isn't really going to help me for something that happened and is irreversible, so it's not a personal stake in that sense.

 

[rliu]

Thanks

Just to mention I edited my last post with a bit more info

 

[rliu]

Hmmm, that fare-dodger is back in the news today http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...gh-flyer-who-dodged-43000-in-train-fares.html

I know this bloke wasn't able to buy silence in the end, but I'm sure many other middle class fare dodgers got away with it more than a young NEET, as suggested by Daniel Hannan's blog post a few years back on the same paper http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...3/My-wifes-real-crime-Being-middle-class.html
"she was to fight her case as a freeborn Englishwoman – albeit a freeborn Englishwoman with a couple of kind barrister friends who were prepared to act for her. Sure enough, TfL dropped the case."

 

[rliu]

In the case of the bloke just unmasked, do you think there should be no possibility of a criminal sanction?

It's an example the train companies will use for years to come to justify the current system, but in this case the real cost to him was having to resign his job due to a FCA investigation. I think this supports my point that there are other alternative ways of punishment, one that will not treat every person caught without a ticket the same.
Also due to the nature of his prolonged evasion the BTP could have prosecuted him under the Fraud Act. My issue is with the current legal regime of the Regulations of the Railways Act, which as I explained is interpreted by the courts in a very restrictive way.
I will amend my petition to clarify this distinction.

 

[rliu]

And what if it were this level of abuse of the system but by a person who isn't in the same position of loosing quite so much peripherally?

They can still be charged under Fraud Act if they have been fare dodging persistently. The Regulation of Railways Act doesn't seem to distinguish, from the cases I have read, between a one-off and persistent behaviour.

 

[rliu]

How do you see the fraud act being used in this situation?

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/road_traffic_offences_transport_offences/ - in the section of fare evasion the CPS suggests using Fraud Act for serious fare evasion.
If I remember correctly there are 3 types of fraud offences and one is acting dishonestly with intent to secure a financial gain for yourself, that can certainly cover serious fare evasion.

 

[rliu]

That's my understanding too

 

[shouldbeinbed]

It's an example the train companies will use for years to come to justify the current system, but in this case the real cost to him was having to resign his job due to a FCA investigation. I think this supports my point that there are other alternative ways of punishment, one that will not treat every person caught without a ticket the same.
Also due to the nature of his prolonged evasion the BTP could have prosecuted him under the Fraud Act. My issue is with the current legal regime of the Regulations of the Railways Act, which as I explained is interpreted by the courts in a very restrictive way.
I will amend my petition to clarify this distinction.

Does the law treat every person without a ticket the same though? @Archie_tect in this thread has shown that being on a train without a valid ticket is no guarantee of ending up branded a criminal. You're making some rather broad generalisations on your trip through this thread.

It also seems clear that just as peoples arguments aren't convincing you, yours are no closer to convincing to them.

 

[rliu]

Does the law treat every person without a ticket the same though? @Archie_tect in this thread has shown that being on a train without a valid ticket is no guarantee of ending up branded a criminal. You're making some rather broad generalisations on your trip through this thread.

It also seems clear that just as peoples arguments aren't convincing you, yours are no closer to convincing to them.

If it gets to court the law does treat all offenders the same, without much discretion. As I said earlier in the thread, 99% end up in a conviction. In fact the link I posted earlier in the thread showed that responding to a freedom of information request, there were only 25 unsuccessful prosecutions out of over 20,000 for London bus fare evasion in 2008, so the percentage is 99.99%

The discretion comes at the stage before court, where public transport operating companies may settle things with the passenger.

 

[shouldbeinbed]

thanks for the clarification that you only meant those that get to court.

I don't suppose you know what proportion of all captured fare offences get to court?

Did yours? & is so was that the only option offered to you or did you dispute/refuse a lower level out of court option? Also what criminal record do you receive for paying a penalty fare? - genuine question in the context of the discussion, I have no experience of having had to do it. I take it the sanction and likelihood of a criminal record is greater if you do take it all the way to court.

Another question there may not be the nuanced data for: what proportion of the 99+% convictions you quote when at court were utterly innocent mistakes anyone could make or significant technical failures on the part of the operator meaning that a ticket could not possibly be obtained and what proportion were either cynically deliberate non payments or were a choice made in the face of an unexpected circumstance - but where there was an opportunity/possibility not to try to ride for free**

Could it be that 25 non convictions is an accurate representation of the 'but for the grace of god' or catastrophic operator failure situations? (edit: 6 year old data - is that as recent as it gets?)

** e,g your situation : a machine not offering change is unfortunate but isn't the same as the machine having a out of order sign on it and not issuing tickets at all.

A great many pre-pay machines on car parks run the same (in my opinion) scam by very deliberately not offering the opportunity of receiving change when buying a ticket - there are several times I've had to overpay for a ticket (invariably in places I'm not familiar with) to avoid the potential worse consequences for not bothering to purchase a ticket at all because I was caught with the wrong combination of money in my pocket.
It may sound a harsh assessment but you made a choice & got caught out, same as RLJs on here before have & then complained about it.

also to be very pedantic, even one unsucessful prosecution shows the law doesn't just blindly follow the same pattern every time at court.

 

[rliu]

I don't think I have any new expansions and clarifications beyond my other posts already. The only final point I'd make is that fare dodging is not a criminal offence in most other European countries, and their public transport systems have not been collapsed by fare dodging, so it's debatable whether criminalising people is effective at preventing undesirable behaviour. This is the same principle in play as the fact that higher incarceration rates and a harsher penal system in the USA hasn't led to a lower rate of serious crime than European countries. It's the underlying social attitudes and conditions that lead to crime, more than how harsh the penalties may be.

http://www.france24.com/en/20130917-fare-dodging-frances-national-sport/
As a result, some 20 French cities have simply opted to make transport free... thus eradicating the cost of ticket checkers.

Since the large southern city of Aubagne did so four years ago, ridership on public transport has grown by 170 percent while car traffic has dropped 10 percent.

Would have thought as long suffering cycle commuters we should all support a solution that leads to greater use of public transport and reduced private motor traffic.

 

[rliu]

That may be off topic to what we discussed before Adrian but it's certainly food for thought to compare different societies and criminal law codes.

If you read the article you will see the reason Aubergne made public transport free was partly due to the cost of administrating fare evasion issues, so I wasn't bringing in a completely different debate about whether public transport should be entirely taxpayer funded or passenger funded.

In Britain we are becoming more and more ideologically devoted to making individual service users pay but as recent news stories illustrate, the trebling of tuition fees has only served to double the estimated rate of debt default by students and in fact is deemed unlikely to boost income to the treasury or HE instutions. The American system of privatised healthcare costs the taxpayer more per head than the UK or other European countries, due to the cost of administering programmes to reimburse private insurers to offer basic health services to those on the lowest incomes.

As I said, off topic but things which may be interesting to consider for some.

 

[rliu]

Yeah I know, I'm not really trying to win the argument any more, just enjoying the debate for the sake of it.
In terms of that speeding example, I do believe it is probably better to get more people cycling, so they can experience how stressful it can be when someone is coming up your rear at 40mph, and to also make cycling experience a part of driving tests.
If you read the average Mail comments thread or speak to the average Top Gear type you will see they do see speeding as just some other scheme for the government to fleece people, and this perception can only be changed by first hand involvement in some accident (tragic) or by increasing cycling (beneficial to all)