(Continued from Part 1)
I waited a good 10 minutes for Deputy
Hernandez to come back so I could tell her what happened. I was eager to
get home, so I was tempted just to leave and forget it. But I also felt
that I owed it to my fellow Metro passengers to have this sort of
incident documented, and to do what I could to hold this man responsible
for his actions.
I'm
glad the deputies were there and able to arrest this man, but in other ways they seemed to take only a lukewarm interest
in the assault. They made no attempt to find witnesses and get their
statements (even though two witnesses had already found me). When I
told Deputy Hernandez that, yes, I would like to press charges, she
implied it would be a big hassle and perhaps not worth the bother.
She
said that in this situation, since police hadn't witnessed the punch,
it would be classified as a misdemeanor and I would essentially be making a
citizen's arrest, then going to court to testify against my attacker. There was also a fair chance that this man would never show up in court (why would he?).
I
went up to street level with the deputy, where her car was parked, and
she spent a good five minutes looking in the trunk of the car trying
find the right form to fill out. I continued to stand and wait as she
wrote information on the incident down. I'd been standing with her for
20 minutes before she gave me a form to write down my description of events. Even when all the paperwork was done, I still had to wait five
more minutes for a "report number." Clearly, not the most efficient process. All in all, I spend about 40
minutes, mostly standing around doing nothing, waiting for the police to
do their work.
Initially, Deputy Hernandez told me
that since this guy was clearly mentally unstable that they would try
and find some reason to keep him in custody longer, perhaps by
requesting a mental evaluation But just a few hours later when she
called me – she had forgotten to put my birthdate on the report – she said they were about to release him.
She
suggested that he might "plea out" and there won't be a trial. About
the best result I think I can expect out of the situation is putting the
incident on his record, so perhaps someday it and other crimes will add up to some real jail time.
There are some bigger
issues in this whole incident, one of which is the question of why there
are so many mentally ill people wandering Los Angeles' streets. That's a
topic that's too big for me to tackle here.
This
episode also raises anew questions about Metro's peculiar "honor system." On Metro trains, you're supposed buy a ticket, but
there's nothing to force you to do so. Anyone can walk into a station
and onto a train without a ticket.
The catch is that if fare
inspectors find you without a ticket you can be cited and fined as much
as $180. That's a pretty substantial penalty, but there are some big
problems with this system. First, they rarely check for tickets. I've
gone for months of daily commuting without any ticket inspection.
Second,
there's little penalty if you ignore your ticket. The Los Angeles Times
said in 2007 that "most of the 60,000 passengers cited each year never
pay up or go to court to fight their citations, resulting in the low
collection rate, according to court statistics." True, the court may
issue an arrest warrant for those who don't pay, but that's hardly a
deterrent for transients.
In the end, Metro train lines end up as the transportation of choice for the kind of people who don't care if they're wanted by the law. And that makes Metro dangerous for all of us.
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