In January, BART, the subway and rail system serving San Francisco and its suburbs, reported that crime on its trains fell 41 percent in 2025. The agency installed 715 new fare gates across all 50 stations. Fare gates are the waist-high turnstiles riders must pass through to enter the system. Fare evasion dropped 55 to 60 percent. Maintenance hours inside stations fell by 961 in the first six months after the rollout. The system generated roughly $10 million in new revenue from fares that would have walked through the old gates.

This April, The Atlantic covered it. Liberal outlets that spent years arguing against enforcement-first policing are now being forced to acknowledge what BART's numbers show. BART was not a Republican project. It was a progressive transit agency admitting that enforcing the rules made the system safer.

Seven hundred fifty miles away, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a different set of facts was playing out. In March 2019, a man named Shamar Elkins fired five rounds at a car near a public high school. Children were playing outside. Prosecutors charged him with illegal use of a firearm and carrying a gun near a school.

In October 2019, the local district attorney accepted a plea. The school-zone firearm charge was dismissed. Elkins pled to the lesser charge. He paid a $50 fine. He served no time. He kept his gun rights. That choice, to dismiss the school-zone charge, was what kept him off the federal ban on gun ownership when he walked into those two houses seven years later.

On Sunday, April 19, 2026, he shot his wife, then drove to a nearby house and killed eight children. Seven of them were his own.

The BART concession

For fifteen years, progressive outlets argued that fare-evasion enforcement was the criminalization of poverty in transit form. Common Dreams ran "Decriminalize Fare Evasion" in 2020. TransitCenter argued the enforcement costs outweighed the benefits. California legislators introduced bills to end criminal penalties entirely. BART's own board voted against it.

The board was right. The data is in. Enforcing a rule about a fare gate, the smallest rule a transit agency has, cut the overall crime rate by 41 percent. That is what broken-windows theory predicted forty years ago. The test ran for six months and the result held.

The mayor, the board, and the advocacy press are now quietly revising their position. The Atlantic's April piece is a tell. The magazine that ran years of coverage skeptical of stop-and-frisk and broken-windows enforcement now reports the BART numbers straight. That is what retreat looks like from the inside.

The theory the data killed

Alec Karakatsanis, founder of Civil Rights Corps and author of Copaganda, has argued for years that fare-evasion enforcement is "moral panic" engineered to justify government repression of poor and minority riders. His signature statistic, cited throughout the book and on his Substack, is that officers spend only 4 percent of their time on violent crime. The implication: what police do the rest of the time is theater.

BART's own numbers falsified the theory. The agency spent six months enforcing one rule. Violent crime on the system dropped. Maintenance hours freed up. Revenue returned. None of that is manufactured. BART posted the numbers on its own press page.

San Franciscans reached the same conclusion through the ballot box. In June 2022, they recalled their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, by a 55-to-45 margin in a city that votes 55 to 30 Democrat. The voters who fired him were not right-wing operatives. They were the neighbors of the people Boudin's philosophy was supposed to protect.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia tells the same story through the other end of the telescope. In 2021, the city had 562 homicides. By 2024, the number was 268. That was the biggest one-year drop since 1961.

The district attorney did not change. Larry Krasner presided over both numbers. What changed was the mayor and the police commissioner.

Mayor Cherelle Parker, sworn in January 2024, told her city during the campaign that stop-and-frisk is "a tool that law enforcement needs." That is broken-windows policing named and claimed by a Democratic mayor in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. Her police commissioner then concentrated enforcement in the ten patrol districts that drive most of the shootings and ran a targeted-presence strategy across the city's worst neighborhoods. Homicide clearance climbed toward 73 percent. The result was the largest single-year homicide decline Philadelphia has seen since the Kennedy administration.

Same DA. Different policing. Different numbers. The philosophy that produced 562 bodies did not produce the drop. Reversing it did.

The Shreveport body count

Shreveport happened because the philosophy that Philadelphia reversed is still the working policy of the local district attorney's office.

The DA in 2015, 2019, and today is James Stewart. His 2015 campaign was underwritten almost entirely by the Louisiana Safety and Justice PAC. That PAC received $930,600 from George Soros in 2015, effectively all of its funding. The Louisiana group was a state-level arm of Soros's national network funding progressive prosecutor candidates in more than a dozen American cities. Stewart's opponent ran tough-on-crime. Stewart won.

Four years later, Stewart's office handled the Elkins plea. The dismissed charge, carrying a firearm near a school, carried a fixed five-year sentence and would have made Elkins a felon for life, barred from owning a gun under federal law. The charge his office accepted carried a maximum of two years, a sentence light enough to duck the federal ban. The prosecutors chose the charge that left his gun rights intact. They dismissed the one that did not.

The left's own criminal-justice outlet saw the pattern early. In October 2019, The Appeal argued Stewart was not progressive enough. Inside that philosophy, dismissing a schoolyard firearm charge counted as moderate reform.

That is the point. The plea was not a mistake. It was the philosophy applied to a specific case.

The law already on the books

The Democratic response to mass-casualty events is now familiar. New firearm statutes. Universal background checks. Assault-weapons bans. Red-flag laws. Each of those bills disarms the person who files the paperwork. None of them reaches the man whose prosecutor dismissed the charge that would have made him a felon.

A 1968 federal law bars firearm possession by anyone "convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year." The state charge that would have triggered it, carrying a gun near a school, was in Elkins's 2019 indictment. The prosecutors dropped it.

Two months ago in this space, I wrote about a study from Vanderbilt and Wellesley measuring what cities lost when they stopped prosecuting. Among young Black men, violent deaths fell 18 percent in counties where a tough prosecutor narrowly beat a reform candidate. The mechanism the economists identified: felony convictions, and some violent misdemeanor convictions, bar a person from owning a gun. One gun death is prevented for every 90 convictions that trigger the federal ban.

The local DA's office, in October 2019, took one of those bans off the table. Seven years later, a wife was shot, eight children were killed, and the predictable policy argument began again.

Enforce the law

You can harden a fare gate. You can refuse to drop a school-zone firearm charge. You can let the 1968 federal gun law do the work Congress built it to do. Each of those is a small bet on consistency — a refusal to treat a threshold as optional.

BART made the bet one way. Shreveport's prosecutors made it the other. San Francisco's voters recalled their DA. Philadelphia's voters elected a mayor who said stop-and-frisk is a tool her police need. The Atlantic conceded the BART numbers this month. The progressive-prosecutor movement is retreating from its own strongholds because the evidence has caught up with it.

The Democratic coalition now demanding new gun laws over the bodies of Shamar Elkins's children cannot explain 2019. The gun law they want was already on the books in October 2019. Their prosecutor chose not to use it. You can have the philosophy or you can have the children — you cannot have both.