SEPTA, schools urged to drop student passes

To reduce violence in the subway, SEPTA and the Philadelphia School District should eliminate the year-old student TransPass program, and return to subsidized tokens and paper transfers for students, City Controller Alan Butkovitz said yesterday.

Butkovitz, who released a performance audit of subway security, said the passes allow truants "to roam the system from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m." He cited the March 26 death of Sean Patrick Conroy, 36, a Starbucks store manager in Center City, who died after he was attacked by five truant Gratz High School students.

Butkovitz also called for the city to install security cameras and manned security kiosks in the concourses and pedestrian tunnels under City Hall. And he urged SEPTA police to turn over the responsibility for rousting homeless people from the concourses to civilian staffers, to free up more officers to deal with violent crime.

In the first quarter of this year, he said, SEPTA and city police escorted 17,000 homeless people out of the transit system. Most quickly returned. Butkovitz said Philadelphia should follow the example of New York City, where the homeless are taken from subways directly to shelters.

"The failure to manage student violence on the subway is the biggest problem," Butkovitz said at a news conference yesterday. He said half of the serious crime in the transit system was committed by youths.

He said "inadequate planning by the school district has put the riding public at risk." He cited an attack by six students on two classmates in March; the students were assigned to CEP-Allegheny, a charter school for violent and disruptive students, and had been sent on a four-mile crosstown trip to the Kendrick Recreation Center in the middle of the school day because their school didn't have a gym.

"Prudence would seem to dictate that every effort be made to limit travel time on public transit by high-risk students - not extend it," Butkovitz said.

He said the school district and SEPTA "just kind of throw their hands up and say, 'That's a fact of life.' " Butkovitz said he was not optimistic that either agency would do much as a result of the audit.

"We've been dealing with the school district on management of violence issues for 10 years, and nothing seems to change," he said.

He said SEPTA general manager Joseph Casey was "pretty impressive" in many ways but that for SEPTA "to take a 'what can we do?' approach was kind of disappointing."

Casey said the transit agency had "seen no evidence of significant misuse" of student passes "or any correlation of pass misuse with crime on the system." In a written response to Butkovitz, he said crime statistics, which show a spike in crime after school dismissal times, were largely unchanged in recent years.

Casey said SEPTA was cooperating with the city to try to reduce use of the subway concourses by the homeless, but he said using non-police staff to deal with the problem "raises the possibility of more risk than benefit."

A Philadelphia School District spokesman said he had not seen the audit and would have no immediate response.

The city's deputy mayor of public safety, Everett A. Gillison, responded to the audit by agreeing to make emergency phones more visible and to better protect them from vandalism. He said he would create a formal cooperation plan between city and SEPTA police.

But Gillison said many of Butkovitz's recommendations, such as installing cameras and kiosks, were too expensive for the city to tackle in its current financial straits.