It’s become common to board a BART train at rush hour and see several riders pecking at their laptops.
Such behavior would have seemed high-risk or naive before the pandemic, when the rail system saw up to 140 robberies and thefts of electronic devices a month. But now data provided by BART shows people could have a reason to feel more secure. This past March, police counted six electronic gadgets stolen from passengers, down from 117 in March 2019.
The decline is so stark, BART Police Chief Kevin Franklin said in an interview, that “we had to change the Y axis on the graph.” Now it only goes up to 45 crimes as opposed to 150…