By Justin A. Davis for Yes! Media.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Yes! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

On Sept. 17, 2024, hundreds of protesters swarmed the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, New York, calling for an end to police violence on public transit and demanding free fares. Some protesters "distributed MetroCards and swiped commuters through the turnstiles," while others hopped turnstiles before filing into subway cars. The New York Police Department arrested at least 18 people.

The impetus for this protest came two days earlier, when NYPD officers confronted 37-year-old Derell Mickles for hopping a turnstile at the Sutter Avenue station. Mickles allegedly "charged" at officers with a knife, which police say led them to fire their guns in self-defense-though body cam footage shows Mickles "standing still, his arms by his side."

Officers shot Mickles, a fellow officer, and two bystanders. Mayor Eric Adams, a former transit officer himself, defended the NYPD's response by citing Mickles' arrest record and the necessity of fare enforcement. "If lawmakers want to make the subways and buses free, then fine," Adams said. "But as long as there are rules, we're going to follow those rules."

Incidents such as these reflect a long history of dangerous, and even fatal, interactions between NYPD and "fare evaders." Authorities have long conflated fare evasion with dangerous criminal behavior-using race- and class-based assumptions that minor infractions create an environment for violent crime (sometimes referred to as "broken windows" policing). Demands to reform fare enforcement have been a frequent part of the discourse around improving New York's transit system. But some abolitionist groups go further in calling for free fares as a step toward removing police from public transit entirely.

Militant protest against fare enforcement is part of an abolitionist struggle that often goes unnoticed and highlights how transit safety has shaped the look of modern policing.

Fare Boxes and Broken Windows

New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is in the midst of two connected crises: long-running fears about crime, and a massive budget deficit. MTA's budget woes have a number of causes, such as declining tax revenue and a controversial pause on congestion pricing, but the agency has long portrayed fare evasion as an "existential challenge." Fare box revenue represents 26 percent of MTA's budget. According to recent MTA data, as much as 48 percent of bus riders and 14 percent of subway riders board without paying, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue each year.

MTA has tried a number of strategies to reduce fare evasion, including redesigned infrastructure and aggressive messaging. But over the past five years, increased policing has become a catchall solution to stop fare evaders-and to make transit feel safer in the process. In 2023, NYPD issued more than 100,000 fare evasion tickets, and arrests have "more than doubled" during Adams' administration. Meanwhile, police raids have become increasingly common. In March 2024, NYPD announced an 800-officer surge at subway stations (dubbed "Operation Fare Play"), while MTA has used multiple surges of its "Eagle Team" (with assistance from NYPD) to check bus fares in the past two years.

In 2019, a group of riders founded Unfare NYC, a community network that uses social media to crowdsource alerts about police presence on public transit. Inspired by grassroots campaigns against fare enforcement in Montreal and Chile, Unfare's work reduces contact between officers and riders to promote a vision of "a ride without fares and a world with no police." Unfare member Daria says transit is an obvious place for abolitionist struggle: "It's a site where the city's working class is forced into contact with a police presence that keeps getting bigger and bigger." (Unfare members are using pseudonyms to protect their identities.)

Another group, Swipe It Forward, has been offering "a grassroots community response to broken windows policing" since 2016. They encourage riders to share fare cards.

For decades, New York's transit police have used turnstile hopping as a marker of dangerous or undesirable populations. Teams of officers began regularly sweeping subway stations in the 1990s, sometimes posing as civilians in "decoy operations." Former transit police chief Bill Bratton who served from 1990 to 1992, outfitted the force with new patrol cars, "commando sweaters," and, controversially, semi-automatic handguns. Bratton later served two non-consecutive terms as commissioner of the NYPD. As though foreshadowing the Sutter Avenue shooting, critics argued in 1990 that rapid-firing guns in crowded subways "would not only increase the risk of bystanders being shot but also of police officers wounding themselves or fellow officers."

"Law and Order" at the Turnstiles

In 1982, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson proposed that visible signs of neighborhood disorder (such as graffiti, public intoxication, and vagrancy) could embolden criminals to commit more serious offenses and cause community members to retreat from public spaces. This so-called "broken windows" theory has become one of the most important frameworks of modern policing, especially in New York City. "Fare evasion has been the most common thing that someone gets arrested for in New York, I believe, for [more than] 20 years," says Eric Goldwyn, Ph.D., program director at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management.

Elected officials, police leaders, and pundits-conservative and liberal alike-continue to use "broken windows" rhetoric to justify greater fare enforcement. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas recently wrote in the New York Post that "the only thing that will change people's minds is if they know that a penalty will be swift, certain and actually collected." New York Times columnist Pamela Paul argued that "many progressives are still loath to admit that broken windows policing works," while suggesting that police abolition reflects "an elitist attitude that betrays a lack of experience with crime-ridden environments."

Who does fare enforcement benefit? Studies by the Community Service Society and the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center have found that fare enforcement occurs more frequently in low-income and majority-Black and Latinx neighborhoods. In 2023, nonwhite New Yorkers represented 82 percent of tickets and 92 percent of arrests, and criminal justice reformers have consistently pointed to wider racial disparities in Bratton's legacy.

In response to these critiques, community groups, politicians, and consultants have proposed reforms aimed at reducing race and class disparities in fare enforcement. In 2022, the Riders Alliance, a grassroots organization of MTA users, published "A Riders Plan for Public Safety," which recommends unarmed civilian personnel to check fares and expanded eligibility for fare discounts. A Blue-Ribbon Report commissioned by MTA leadership calls for "precision policing" that uses data to identify fare evasion hotspots and a "warnings-first approach to summonses for first-time evaders."

It's not clear whether punitive enforcement tactics actually reduce fare evasion. In a recent proposal for a behavioral consultant, MTA acknowledged that "these costly and sometimes controversial methods have had limited success in reversing the upward trend in riders who do not pay." What such tactics are effective at is sending large numbers of vulnerable people through the criminal justice system each year. They can trap people in dangerous and dysfunctional jail facilities, even putting them at risk of deportation.

Increases in transit policing have, in turn, energized abolitionist calls to remove police from MTA. When former Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced 500 new transit officers in 2019, groups like Swipe It Forward and Decolonize This Place, an anti-imperialist protest coalition, mobilized protesters to the subways. Anonymous activists called for fare-free, cop-free subways and put up dozens of mock ads that read "Don't snitch. Swipe."

Abolitionists have often grounded their critiques in the history of American policing, which is intertwined with chattel slavery and settler colonialism. A Swipe It Forward organizer recently told the press that "the NYPD ... are fixated on slave patrolling and quotas, and they use the transit system as one of their main iterations to do so." Writers Against the War on Gaza, a Palestinian solidarity coalition, echoed this language in a writeup of the Sept. 17 protest: "The NYPD protects property and capital, it funnels black and immigrant populations into endless cycles of immiseration and poverty and modern enslavement."

From Affordable Transit to Free Transit

There is precedent for free transit. MTA suspended bus fare collection for months in 2020 as a COVID-19 mitigation tactic and recently ended an 11-month pilot program suspending fare on five bus routes. According to MTA, that pilot led to "a 30 percent increase in ridership on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends." But the idea has yet to catch on as a permanent solution.

While transit agencies across the country have experimented with free fares in recent years to reduce congestion, encourage higher ridership, and address economic inequality, MTA increased fares by 15 cents in 2023. "The idea of fare free transit is worth debating, and the more experiments the better," says Kafui Attoh, Ph.D., associate professor of Urban Studies at the City University of New York. "At the same time, we [shouldn't] gloss over the potential drawbacks, in terms of funding and ridership."

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to a fare-free MTA is replacing fare box revenue in its budget and finding political support to do so. Research on fare-free transit tends to focus on smaller cities with lower ridership that don't rely heavily on fare box revenue. "There's something of a paradox here," says Attoh. "Where it is feasible, its impact will be limited, and where its impact would be the greatest, its feasibility is the most questionable." Goldwyn adds that without substantively addressing the budget gap, a move toward free fares could lead to service cuts, creating "even less frequency and worse reliability" for those who rely on transit.

In other words, if cities such as New York want to invest in making public transit free and accessible-in the same way that libraries and public schools are-they need to make it a priority in their budgets. Abolitionist groups advocate reductions in police funding to do so. MTA's "fiscal cliff" suggests a fundamental imbalance between expanding police and fully funding public services. Indeed, New York's fare crisis reflects a broader debate about the basic function of police in a city where nearly 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

The website 8 to Abolition, a resource of "non-reformist reforms" compiled in 2020, cast free public transit with investments in health care, education, and community-based food providers as two sides of the same coin. It is a way to "invest in care, not cops." No New Jails NYC, a former grassroots campaign to close the Rikers Island jail complex, echoes this, calling for removing all NYPD officers from the MTA and decriminalizing fare evasion to "pay the annual fares of all New Yorkers who cannot afford [it]."

Last year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Adams' "Cops, Cameras, and Care" initiative sent more than 1,000 extra officers to patrol subways, NYPD overtime pay increased by $155 million-and the state reimbursed the city for less than half that amount. Meanwhile, Adams' administration proposed extensive budget cuts to libraries, parks, early childhood education, and more, many of which were reversed after public outcry. Unfare member Lou argues that fare evasion's outsized role in MTA's budget crisis reflects a "long history of stripping funding for these services and shifting the blame to 'crime' and the poor."

In fall 2024, the Sutter Avenue shooting sparked a new wave of spontaneous fare strikes, teach-ins, and "liberated train rides." As abolitionists scrutinize NYPD for student repression, corruption, and plans for a "Cop City" in Queens, they are using transit issues to advocate for a transformative vision of community safety-with a fare-free MTA at the center. A city without fares is "deeply connected to our collective freedom of movement more broadly," says Lou. "Being free to move through our city together means being free from police harassment and violence, from fines and incarceration."

By removing a key incentive to police subways and buses, transit agencies could meet the demand surging through New York's subways and realize the abolitionist call to "Live free, ride free.


Justin A. Davis wrote this article for Yes! Media.


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By Johnny Magdaleno for Mirror Indy.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Mirror Indy-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration.

There’s a simple patch of grass in section 94, lot 276 of the Crown Hill Cemetery that has perplexed Rebecca Robinson and her two sisters for their entire adult lives.

Their grandparents rest there in unmarked graves.

If a grave marker did exist, it might say Dr. Earle Robinson was a top physician at the old Veterans Administration Hospital on Cold Spring Road. Or that Gwendolyn Robinson left behind multiple grandchildren who, now in their 50s and 60s, can still remember how she encouraged them to read.

So why doesn’t the couple have a tombstone honoring their bright spot in the sisters’ family — and in Indianapolis history?

It’s not the only mystery the sisters have been trying to bring to a close. The other one has burdened them for decades and remains unsolved despite multiple attempts by Indianapolis law enforcement to find an answer.

Why would anyone want to murder them?

There have been many theories as to why the elderly Robinsons — Earle was 70, Gwendolyn, 69 — were stabbed to death in their Riley Towers apartment in August 1975.

Many theories, but zero arrests.

One theory, eventually discarded by law enforcement, was that a disgruntled patient targeted Robinson and his wife.

Another was that Robinson was mistaken for his son — an OB-GYN named Earle Robinson Jr., who fathered the sisters and three other children. Family members say Robinson Jr. may have been a target because he was among the first doctors to provide abortions in the Indianapolis area, according to Diane King, one of the sisters.

The simplest theory is that a home robbery ended in the worst possible way. Police said as much when interviewed by The Indianapolis News a month after the murders, according to old newspaper archives. But even that theory isn’t flawless.

On one hand, it makes sense that Riley Towers would be targeted by burglars. Just over a decade in age, the high-rise apartment buildings were pitched to potential residents as the embodiment of modern, luxurious living. Only “reputable and responsible citizens” would reside there, reads an 11-page advertisement in The Indianapolis Star from May 1963.

Yet strangely, nothing of value had been taken from the Robinsons’ apartment when the couple’s bodies were found. Mattresses were ripped open. Beds were flipped over. Drawers were pulled out and emptied on the floor. And money, jewelry, radio sets and televisions were all still there when police went inside to inspect the crime scene.

Police discarded narcotics as a motive for the break-in. They said Robinson didn’t keep large quantities of drugs in his apartment. They also said whoever did it likely didn’t know he was a doctor, according to newspaper archives.

Rebecca Robinson, 51, is a visual artist who has dedicated much of her creative output to elevating themes of social justice and Black dignity. She wonders if her grandparents’ murders should be thought of not as a one-off, random attack, but as a manifestation of a larger social issue.

“Two affluent Black people living in Riley Towers,” she told Mirror Indy. “Was it just hate?”

New DNA test deflates hopes

City authorities at the time wanted this case solved, Indianapolis police recently told her. Earle Robinson Sr. mattered to the medical community.

As director of admissions at the VA hospital, he oversaw the patient intake process under “rigid standards” imposed by Congress, wrote retired Col. H. W. Buchanan in a September 1975 letter to the editor in The Indianapolis Star.

“He was impeccable in appearance, generous of heart, and totally dedicated to the welfare of his associates and patients,” Buchanan continued. “In visiting the hospital, many veterans and their families would stop by his office to say ‘hello,’ and as busy as he was, he always took time to extend a warm welcome and a concern for their welfare.”

Investigators searched and searched. They interviewed “hundreds” of people, the Star reported. They collected biological evidence from the crime scene that is still preserved in Indianapolis police cold case archives to this day.

Yet after 50 years of painful uncertainty, the Robinson family still hasn’t caught a break. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers invited the family in for an interview in 2023 and committed to testing old evidence samples, possibly tied to the killer, for DNA.

The result: no new information, no new hope.

“The case remains open and Unsolved Homicide Unit detectives continue to follow up on any leads that arise,” IMPD spokesperson Amanda Hibschman told Mirror Indy.

At this point, the family isn’t expecting criminal charges. They’re not waiting for news of an arrest.

They’re looking for a reason to stop wondering — for the relief of knowing more than nothing about who did it, or why.

“Whoever did it is probably dead right now,” acknowledged King, Rebecca’s stepsister and one of the surviving granddaughters. “There’s no recourse or any kind of penalty or charges they can be charged with now.”

“All we want is some kind of closure.”

A gruesome discovery

Don’t turn on the TV.

Michelle Robinson Smith’s mom gave that command to her older brother all those years ago. She was 10.

She was the youngest daughter of five children from Earle Robinson Jr. and his first wife. Rebecca Robinson, the only child Robinson Jr. had with his second wife, Rena, was just 9 months old at the time.

Despite a bitter divorce, the five older siblings still maintained loving relationships with their paternal grandparents.

It’s why Robinson Smith’s mom tried to protect them from news broadcasts that day in August 1975, when she called the older Robinson siblings on her way home from work.

Don’t turn on the TV.

“It was all over the news and the paper,” remembers Robinson Smith.

People close to the family started showing up at their house. One of her mom’s best friends was in tears, Robinson Smith said.

Then their mom arrived. She asked King, Robinson Smith and the other siblings to come upstairs with her. As they gathered together in their brother’s room, she told them the unfathomable news.

Understandably, she did not tell her children just how depraved the killings were.

Earle was stabbed 11 times in the chest. Gwendolyn, 17 times in the chest. Both had slashes on their arms. They were found on the ground, laying next to each other in their nightclothes. Autopsy results suggest they fought with whoever did it.

A Riley Towers building superintendent named Jerry L. Smith discovered their bodies. “I just want to get away from here,” Smith told a newspaper reporter at the scene.

Earle Robinson Jr. was called into the apartment by police to identify his parents, according to a blog he maintained toward the end of his life.

The first thing he saw as he ascended the stairs was a hand sticking through the bannister. He steadied himself.

Then he saw the carpet soaked deep red. Then, the blood on the walls. Once they came fully into view, he could tell his mother and father had been stabbed over and over again.

In the decades that followed, Robinson Jr. rarely said a word about that day. The senseless attack on his family plunged him into grief. His ex-wife was also reticent about what happened.

The three sisters were kept in the dark about the murders. But as they got older, they resolved to fill the gaps left by their parents’ silence.

Family silence leads sisters to investigate

Each became an informal detective.

As teenagers, Robinson Smith and King scoured newspaper archives at the Indianapolis Public Library downtown. As an adult, Rebecca Robinson visited Riley Towers to see if she could get a glimpse of their grandparents’ apartment layout.

But it was King, the oldest of the three sisters, who brought them close to their biggest break.

In 2023, King was talking with a friend who works at a sheriff’s department near her home in Georgia. She started asking about how to get information from law enforcement on a cold case, and shared some details about her grandparents. That friend asked King to send her an email containing specific details.

Within the next few days, King got a call from an IMPD officer. “I was surprised how quickly it happened,” she said.

In the summer, she met with Sgt. David Ellison, an Indianapolis police detective who helped close multiple years-long cold cases before retiring in 2023. Rebecca Robinson was at that meeting. So was their 91-year-old father, Earle Robinson Jr.

Without knowing it was the last interview he’d ever give police, Robinson Jr. spoke about that day in 1975 “like it was yesterday,” said Rebecca Robinson.

In his frail voice, he told detectives about arriving at the apartment and being questioned by police. He talked about how his mom wasn’t wearing her hairpiece — a possible sign that whoever killed them took them by surprise.

King said it was the first time she’d heard him speak in detail about what happened. But a look back at all that transpired for him and his family around the time of the murders helps explain why it took him nearly 50 years to open up.

‘Much of me died along with them’

The murder of Earle Robinson Jr.’s parents marked a clear before-and-after in his life.

Like his father, he had established a career as a physician in Indianapolis. He was one of the many Black doctors and nurses who in the mid-20th century mastered their skills at the Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis — also like his father.

But after his parents were killed, he seemed to be “always looking over his shoulder,” King said.

He organized a security detail to follow his family around. He started sleeping with a gun under his mattress.

He became distant, said Robinson Smith. “Not because we had done anything … it was just a lot,” she said.

Robinson Jr. talked about the turning point in his blog. “Whatever happens to me I look at as being on borrowed time from that day in August 1975,” he wrote in 2009. “Much of me died along with them.”

He missed his parents’ funeral because he had a severe cardiac arrhythmia on the day they were buried, landing him in the hospital. In other words, his heart was beating too quickly.

The murders were sufficient on their own to alter the course of his life and his family.

But then came a series of threats that made them wonder if the violence wouldn’t stop at Earle and Gwendolyn Robinson.

A threatening letter

You and your baby are next, read the letter sent to Rebecca Robinson’s mom.

I hate you, wrote its author in purple, cursive letters on the heels of the murders. My friends are watching you.

Then came the threatening phone calls targeting Robinson Smith and King’s mom. King later learned that police set up a phone tap on her family’s line to gather info about who was dialing in the threats.

Nothing ever materialized from those threats. Nor did they ever learn if police found out who the caller was.

For the letter, Rebecca Robinson says they knew who wrote it. It was a disgruntled and distant family member who may have held a grudge against Earle Robinson Jr.

Rebecca Robinson’s mom had said she thought the woman was struggling with mental health issues.

But Rebecca Robinson hasn’t completely ruled out that family member, or whoever the caller was, as possible suspects — either directly responsible for her grandparents’ killings or involved in some tangential way.

She was a baby when the murders happened. The added stress of those warnings marked the rest of her young life.

“Certain parents, I remember they wouldn’t allow me to play with their kids,” Rebecca Robinson said. “Like the public knew something, and I was always shunned.”

Earle and Gwendolyn’s family legacy honored

This year marks the beginning of the sixth decade without an arrest in the cold case of Earle and Gwendolyn Robinson.

With the family uncertain if police will ever find who did it, the only option they have now is to honor the life they all lived together before the summer of 1975.

Earle Robinson Jr. died in March 2024. Throughout his life, he’d made it clear to his daughters that he didn’t want a marker or headstone for his parents. Nor did he want to visit where they are buried.

He said it was because he could visit them in his heart. King suspects the real reason is the same one that kept him from ever mentioning the brutal nature in which their grandparents were killed.

“It was just too painful for him,” she said.

In 2023, with the help of King, Rebecca Robinson located her grandparents’ unmarked graves at the Crown Hill Cemetery for the very first time. She stuck two small stakes with hummingbird figures in the dirt as markings.

They respected Earle Robinson Jr.’s wishes while he was here. But now that he’s gone, they’ve made a decision.

It’s a decision to honor memory over trauma, and family legacy over an Indianapolis mystery that may never get solved.

They’re getting a headstone later this year.

Anyone with information about the murders of Earle and Gwendolyn Robinson should call the IMPD Unsolved Homicide Unit at 317-327-3475 or call Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana at 317-262-TIPS.


Johnny Magdaleno wrote this article for Mirror Indy.


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In Indiana, the transition from prison back to society can be anything but smooth.

Many people released don't have a place to live and have difficulty with finding steady employment.

Indianapolis-based Give M3 Life began operating two male-only transitional housing facilities in 2022 to help keep people out of prison.

Executive Director Unique Webster explained that the facilities are calm and safe spaces that help people who are dealing with costly and stressful post-release mandates.

"All of these fees that you put on me - I have to pay for this GPS monitoring on a monthly basis. I have to go to these classes that I have to pay for. I have to come to court. I have to take these drug tests," said Webster. "I have to pay for those fees. And then I got legal fees, and I got child support fees. I have no job, so I can't pay these fees, and I'm stressed again."

Businesses are often reluctant to hire someone with a criminal record.

However, Webster said the majority of the men they work with have college degrees, marketable skills, and vocational training from before or during their incarceration.

She added that when they get out, they want to use those skills, but they're often not given the opportunity.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, only 26% of people currently in prison have sought professional help to address mental health issues.

Webster said her organization's holistic approach to therapy helps people avoid distractions and find ways to decompress.

She said the stigma surrounding those who have been in prison can prevent them from getting the care and support they need.

"Many leaving the prison often have untreated or under treated physical and mental health issues," said Webster, "but face barriers assessing consistent care upon release."

The nature of someone's criminal offense can be a factor in substance abuse disorders and mental illness.

The Prison Policy Initiative identifies post-traumatic stress, manic depression, and bipolar disorder as the most common mental health diagnoses among the incarcerated.




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There are more than a dozen state and federal prisons in Central Appalachia, with some located in remote areas of West Virginia.

Connie Banta, board member of the Appalachian Prison Book Project, said the rural facilities face challenges in providing educational opportunities to incarcerated people. Her organization has donated more than 75,000 books to prison libraries in the region over the past two decades.

"Reading is one of the ways that people keep themselves healthy, both physically and mentally," Banta explained. "We feel like it's a basic human right that people have access to information and literature."

According to a report from the group PEN America, prison libraries are less funded than public school and community libraries and lack the resources needed to purchase books. Those available tend to be mostly westerns and romance novels.

The number of people held behind bars in West Virginia has jumped by more than 400% since 1970, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

Banta emphasized reading can help people move forward in their own personal journey as they reenter society.

"We get many letters from people talking about how much it means to them that people who could be doing all kinds of other things take the time to mail them books," Banta reported.

"This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project" was recently selected by the Appalachian Studies Association for the 2024 Weatherford Award in Nonfiction.


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