The Washington Post and D.C. City Council have finally figured out why 91 percent of Metro fares evaders are black: Racist transit police are targeting black people and ignoring white people who do the same thing.

That is why the city council this week voted to decriminalize citations for the free riders.  And why the Metro says it will continue to lose $25 million a year on the turnstile jumpers -- a small price to pay to correct 40, 4,000, 4 million (take your pick) years of racial injustice directed at black people, say members of the city council.

Writing tickets to black people is “endemic of a systemic issue” of white racism, said city councilman Charles Allen.  And that is why the City Council voted to change their citation scheme to a system where police can still write tickets, but the Metro will not be able to do anything to collect the fines if the perps refuse to pay.

Under the old system, people were not allowed to register their cars, for example, if an unpaid ticket was on their record. The Washington Post explains it all to us:

Allen and his ilk on the council “pointed to a disparity in fare evasion arrests that shows police disproportionately target African Americans.” 

The City Council relied on a report from the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, which said the Metro had increased enforcement on the trains over the last two years.

“This is a hyper-policed environment where mainly poor Black and brown residents are targeted and overwhelmingly saddled with citations,” said Nassim Moshiree, policy director for the ACLU, told the streetscene.com. “This increased enforcement is a distraction from the reason that Metro is losing money. There have been years of mismanagement, including service cuts and interruptions. “

“Moshiree said the Metro has no evidence to support that fare evasion is causing their $20 million loss. She suggested that long-term mismanagement, service cuts and disruptions have driven higher-income riders to alternative transportation and left lower-income riders to experience Metro new enforcement strategies.”

And of course, no story of black victimization and white racism is complete without Black Lives Matter chiming in: “People have been detained and beaten because they didn’t have ten cents or a dollar,” said Dornethia Taylor, an activist with Black Lives Matter D.C. “They still have to choose between food, rent and metro, but at least with a civil offense and a ticket, that person doesn’t have to worry about being locked up.” 

That’s not even close to be true, but that does not really matter, does it?

Some squares on the city council questioned the new scheme, saying that not enforcing the law is the same as sanctioning theft. Not to mention $25 million in annual losses from fare evaders.

They were on the losing end of a 11-2 vote in favor of the 91 percent.

The moves at the Washington, D.C. City Council echo similar stories from around the country: If black crime is out of proportion, it cannot mean black people commit more crime. Rather, racist cops are picking on black people.

In San Francisco, where 6 percent of the population is black, black people make up 50 percent of those who fail to appear for traffic tickets which require presence in front of a judge. Black people represent 45 percent of those cited for driving with a suspended license.

In Oakland, officials at the Bay Area Rapid Transit system refused to release videos of large and small scale black mob violence on their system because they said it would be unfair to the black people who appear in the videos.

In Washington, D.C., crime and violence on its Metro system is also a black thing, but Metro officials occasionally release videos of crimes against its passengers. 

All this adds up to a toxic stew of white racism that just won’t go away, Bay Area public officials told reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle: “After protests in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the police killing of an unarmed black teenager, the U.S. Justice Department criticized that city’s police department for suspending driver’s licenses and arresting people for failing to pay traffic tickets.”

“We’ve got to do better,” said one member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in talking about the traffic tickets. Public officials and reporters agree that racism among (other) white people in the San Francisco area is responsible for any racial disparity between black and non-black people in traffic tickets, felonies, schooling, health, housing, income, jobs, public transportation, recreation, drug abuse, entertainment, sports, commuting, and other areas.

Ditto for DC. And tons of other places in America. And they are all pretty sure Trump did it.

Colin Flaherty is the author of that scintillating #1 Best Seller, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, where there is lots and lots of documentation and links about black violence on buses and subways around the country.