How I Almost Got Arrested
By: Corinne Ulmer
Tags: New York, Subway, Police, Arrest

I just heard about medium from TikTok and I am very intrigued. I’m mostly here to see if I like it and if it is something I can keep up with because I do really enjoy writing. For my first story, I thought that I could tell how I almost got arrested in New York City.

I moved to NYC in late August of this year for college and my life feels like a movie. It felt like a movie when I moved in and that feeling has not subsided. As a teen in NYC, you learn many things very quickly, the dos and don’ts of the city if you will. You learn to walk quickly, you learn to always wear comfortable shoes, you learn to pay attention to your surroundings. You also learn how to successfully ride the subway. I caught on to this fairly quickly…after I got over my fear of using it. What they don’t tell you about the subway though, is that it adds up quickly. At $2.75 a ride, it can appear like nothing, but after I show you some quick math, you’ll understand how expensive this can truly be.

As I stated before, the subway is $2.75 a ride (swipe), unless you own a monthly card, which is about $130 a month. So let's just say you ride the subway five days a week for work, which is $5.44 a day. You then multiply this by five which is $27.20 a week. Then multiply that by four because there are four weeks in a month, that’s $108.80 per month. That is a LOT of money straight out of pocket for a broke college student.

Because of how expensive this is, many people learn how to avoid paying the fare. You look to see if there is an MTA worker in the booth then you hop the turnstile (some even go under it), or you go through the emergency exit and pray the alarm doesn’t go off. Moral of the story, there are MANY ways to avoid paying and this is not an unusual thing to witness. I myself caught onto these tricks rather quickly after realizing how expensive the subway truly is and that I simply do not have the money to pay for it every time. This never caught up to me until recently.

I go to voice lessons every other week and they are a haul to get to. It takes three train transfers to get there! But that is beside the point, the point is, I stopped paying for the subway. I got into a routine of going to certain stations because I knew no one would be working there and this worked out for me for a while. Until recently when I jumped over the turnstile on my way back, only to be greeted by three cops.

Three cops! I, of course, looked at them and said “I can go back and pay” with my hands up and they did not take this plea saying “we have you on video doing this”. At that moment I knew I was done for, so I walked over to them. They explained that they had me doing this on video often and that I could be arrested for this. Of course, they asked for my ID, which I do not have, 18 without a license type beat you feel? Then the male police officer who was speaking to me the most reached into his back pocket. I immediately thought, this is it, I’m getting arrested, then he just took out a little touch pad to look me up. He noticed my non-existent record and gave me a ticket. A ticket for $100. Doesn’t that seem a little steep for skipping a couple payments of $2.75?

I am happy that I was not arrested, but now every time I go on the subway I have to pay the fare because I really cannot deal with the police again. I guess this was just karma though at the end of the day. Don’t be a square, pay the fare.