After learning more about the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in class, I was curious to see if BART's policing was connected with the number of riders at stations. Though the system has many merits and provides crucial access throughout the Bay, the system is also infamous for Oscar Grant's shooting at BART Fruitvale Station and other very recent instances of violence. In thinking about BART's place in the national conversation around policing, this raised several questions for me: What are riders' concerns and perceptions regarding safety and policing on BART? Are certain stations over-policed, based on how many riders use the zone's stations? Are policing methods connected with ridership in any way?
I found the BART Police Department's statement and map online (shown below) and split up entry/exit data from BART according to the police zones. I'm not able to answer all of the many very, very important questions around policing and BART in this infographic, but I hope that this contributes to a discussion of who is being policed on BART and how BART Police Department's resources are distributed throughout the system.
I found that police zones do not appear to correspond with the zones' station ridership. I calculated ridership based on average weekday entry/exit data from BART, and I made the assumption that each data point represented half of one trip per day. Rather, I assumed that BART travelers were making daily round trips, though I know this is not always the case.
It is critical to note that I only know that BART police zones are overseen by a lieutenant who has a team of "patrol Sergeants, Police Officers and Community Service Officers" (BART Police, 2012). Some zones, like Zone 4 with over 150,000 daily riders, may have more officers assigned to it than less dense zones, like Zone 5 with less than 35,000 daily riders.
Thus, a link between ridership and policing may exist on BART, but the link is not between average weekday ridership and BART police zones.