BART says crime across its system has plunged 41% and is giving a big share of the credit to its new “Next Generation” fare gates and a beefed‑up police presence. In yesterday's update, the agency also said train delays tied to police incidents are on the downswing. Riders, advocates and researchers are glad to see the numbers moving in the right direction, but many are not ready to declare victory without more transparency.
BART’s claim and the data behind it
In a March 16 press release, BART said that as of August 2025 it had finished installing 715 new fare gates systemwide. Those gates, paired with what BART calls BART Police Department’s increased visible presence, are described as core pieces of a safety strategy that lines up with the reported 41% drop in overall crime.
In the same release, BART also pointed to fewer maintenance hours linked to vandalism after the gates went in and offered an early estimate of roughly $10 million a year in recovered revenue tied to the changes.
Researchers and riders push back
Critics are not convinced that more cops and tougher fare gates are the whole story. In a May 2025 report, the Yale‑based Center for Policing Equity argued that “the current approach to fare enforcement within BART not only overstates the financial impacts of fare evasion but also lacks a cohesive strategy to address its underlying issues,” urging the system to expand non‑police responses. The full report is available from the Center for Policing Equity.
As reported by SFGATE, BART has told reporters that rider satisfaction has improved alongside the changes and that delays tied to police activity have fallen since service tweaks such as running shorter trains were rolled out.
Delays, reliability and the policing question
Delays triggered by police holds have been a sore spot for riders and operations staff for years. Earlier coverage showed that policing incidents once made up a hefty share of lost train minutes, although those numbers have been easing off.
Streetsblog documented a drop in train minutes lost to police incidents from 9,878 in May to 6,380 in October in a 2023 breakdown, a trend BART officials have cited as evidence that cutting down on on‑platform incidents helps trains stay on time. In its March update, BART also noted that stations recorded 961 fewer corrective‑maintenance hours in the first six months after the new fare gates were installed.
What to watch next
Policy watchers say the real test is what happens now: whether BART regularly publishes clear, detailed crime and delay data that show whether the trends hold, and whether the agency pilots the non‑police responses that researchers have been pushing.
Hoodline has previously tracked earlier dips in BART crime and the early stages of the fare‑gate rollout; see earlier BART crime drops for prior coverage.
For now, BART’s headline numbers and the ongoing skepticism from outside observers will both shape how riders decide whether the system actually feels safer and more reliable, day in and day out.
