Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is hinting he wants to pull funding from transit networks across the nation after a brutal killing on a North Carolina train — and spreading disturbing misinformation about the root causes of, and solutions for, violence on mass modes.
The reality-TV-star-turned-Trump-cabinet-member appeared on Fox News on Monday to decry the “epidemic of violence and homelessness” on public transportation across the country, days after officials from the Charlotte Area Transit System released surveillance video of the Aug. 22 murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska aboard a train.
Zarutska was fatally stabbed by a fellow passenger who sat behind her in what appeared to be an unprovoked attack. Police have since arrested DeCarlos Brown Jr., who reportedly had a history of violent crime and whose mother said he had began acting “aggressive at home” following a recent schizophrenia diagnosis. (Experts emphasize that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia never commit violence, and are in fact 14 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than its perpetrators.)
The case sparked a firestorm of outrage on the right, especially after the White House decried the murder as “the culmination of North Carolina’s Democrat politicians, prosecutors, and judges prioritizing woke agendas that fail to protect their citizens when they need them the most,” including the Charlotte City Council’s 2020 initiative to “reimagine“ policing.
Duffy, meanwhile, implied to Fox viewers that transit networks across the country were hotbeds of violence — and perhaps that transit is inherently dangerous. (He did not comment on the dangers of automobile travel in America, which claims the lives of roughly 40,000 people per year.)
“Your federal tax dollars go to fund a lot of these transit systems across the country,” Duffy told host Sean Hannity. “And we have to look at them and say, ‘Well, maybe it’s appropriate that we start pulling some of that money back — because I don’t think the American taxpayer wants to pay for the homelessness and criminal element that harm little 23-year-old girls [sic] like this who are going home from work, from ordering a pizza, that they’re going to get stabbed in the neck.”
Setting aside the baffling leap between funding transit and “pay[ing for] the homelessness and the criminal element,” Duffy did not explain how, exactly, pulling money from transportation agencies across the country would make them safer.
Even if putting more cops on transit does make it safer — and that’s a subject of hot debate, especially considering statistics on racial bias and violence in transit policing itself — a federal funding freeze might make it hard for Charlotte to pay for the 186 armed and unarmed security officers that have patrolled its system since December.
Some experts, meanwhile, argue that robust transit funding can itself have safety benefits. Studies show that increased ridership is associated with fewer aggravated assaults, likely because of the simple presence of witnesses who can deter crimes of opportunity — and more funding typically means more ridership, specifically when it flows towards better operations that make transit frequent, reliable, and attractive.
Another analysis found that assaults on transit workers are directly correlated with increases in the “Gini Coefficient,” a common measure of income inequality which is itself a product of historic and current policies that are often far outside of a transit agency’s control.
Duffy, by contrast, claimed that his political opponents were deliberately making transit unsafe by stripping it of all law enforcement presence, while simultaneously forcing Americans out of their cars and onto buses and trains — a line he has used previously in relation to New York City’s congestion pricing toll. (Needless to say: that conspiracy doesn’t exist, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be going particularly well.)
“What frustrates me is liberals want you to ride public transportation,” Duffy said. “They hate cars. They hate airplanes. They want us all to ride public transportation. Wouldn’t it make sense that they’d want to make it beautiful, clean and really safe? But they do the exact opposite. They say, ‘We’re going to disregard the voting public, the hard-working men and women who put their boots on every day and go to work, and we’re instead going to stand up and fight for the homelessness and the criminal element that reside on these trains.”
Perhaps Duffy’s most disturbing comment came as he recounted his theory on why liberals were waging a national conspiracy to get Americans murdered on trains.
“They want to foment chaos,” he continued. “Right? When they have chaos, they can disassemble society, which is what I think they’re actually trying to do.”
Duffy conceded that the federal Department of Transportation can’t just pull cash out of transit agencies’ pockets overnight without an investigation that finds that they violated federal rules. But he hinted that he’s going to try.
“We start that investigation tomorrow,” Duffy said. “And I guarantee all your viewers that if I find what I think I’m going to find, they are not going to have your federal tax dollars going to their public transportation system. Zero, none, nada.” (The federal government does not provide operating funds for transit systems; it does provide capital funds.)
Advocates, meanwhile, emphasize that millions of Americans rely on transit to get to work every day. And experts like Transit Center have long pointed out that Duffy’s rhetoric is the one that is divisive:
“Public transit, like trains and buses, and accessible walking and bike routes, give us a healthy, clean, and affordable way for everyone to get around,” the group states on its website. “But for too long, politicians and wealthy corporations have sold us the idea we can’t have the transit we need — all while they profit off of gouging us at the pump and fueling divisions between us. We know what makes communities thrive.”
