MA: Berated, spat on, and even stabbed: Can a new bill stop assaults on bus and train drivers?

MBTA bus driver Patty Hardy wasn’t sure why the passenger was threatening to kill her.

Sitting in the driver’s seat as she steered a bus up the 22 route, through Boston’s Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods, Hardy was doing her job. Yet here was an unruly passenger who told her she was in the wrong area and pledged to shoot her.

It wasn’t the first time.

Increasingly, bus and train operators, customer service agents and other transit staff are being verbally abused, doused with coffee or other fluids, and threatened with more serious violence, most often because passengers are frustrated over fare collection, said Bill Berardino, vice president of the Boston Carmen’s Union, a labor group representing MBTA workers.

Hardy said she has seen the full range, from a passenger who spat in her face to another who pulled a knife and threatened to stab her.

That day, she asked herself, “‘Is this how I’m going to die?’” the widowed mother of two testified to a state Legislature committee last week. “What’s going to happen to my children?”

The Legislature is weighing a proposed bill to crack down on verbal and physical assaults of public transportation workers and expand the definition of assault to include the discharge of fluids or bodily substances, covering saliva, urine and more. It would also extend protections to employees of private transit companies such as Peter Pan and Keolis, which operates MBTA Commuter Rail services.

A similar bill failed last year, passing the state House of Representatives before running out of steam and time in the Senate, Berardino said. He hopes it will have a better shot in this legislative session.

Assaults and batteries on MBTA staff numbered more than 600 last year. Roughly three-quarters were verbal assaults. Another 72 were physical attacks, 33 were assaults with weapons and 38 were assaults with bodily fluid or beverage, Berardino said.

“These incidents happen every single day,” Hardy told legislators. “That’s not a way to live.”

The figures are likely a severe undercount, Berardino said, since more minor incidents of verbal abuse or spitting often go unreported.

He was driven to pass the bill after the stabbing of another union member, York Makonnen, while she drove an MBTA bus in Lynn.

Testifying alongside Hardy on May 6, Makonnen described to state lawmakers how she heard a commotion from the back of her bus late one night.

As Makonnen pulled the bus to the side of the road and opened the doors, fearing for her passengers’ safety, a man rushed to the front and thrust his knife into Makonnen’s neck and back. A fellow passenger stepped between them, threw the assailant to the floor and wrestled the knife away before other passengers subdued the man.

The bill has the backing of the MBTA and Keolis.

Abdellah Chajai, Keolis’s CEO and general manager, told state lawmakers that his employees should enjoy the same protections as standard public transit workers, since the private company is operating a public service.

The T has responded to the rise in assaults by instituting de-escalation training, forming an employee assault task force and making it easier for drivers to log every assault with dispatchers to generate a prompt response from Transit Police, Berardino said.

His union also wants lawmakers to make it easier for police who don’t witness an assault to arrest suspected assailants on the word of transit workers, rather than taking the suspects’ names and issuing a summons to appear in court. They see current practice as ineffective, relying on suspects to show up in court.

“We want an automatic arrest,” Berardino said. “You throw something or verbally or physically assault someone, you’re getting arrested.”

Rep. Joseph W. McGonagle Jr., D-28th Middlesex, who filed the bill, said nearly half of all injuries to transit employees occur because of assaults.

For many public transit staff, “this is a reality,” he said in 2023, when the legislation was last raised, according to the Boston Herald. “Riders who are agitated, under the influence or unwell can become physically aggressive with the operator, which not only leaves the operator at risk of being injured, but everyone else who is riding as well.”

Hardy and Makonnen’s testimony echoed the horror stories their colleagues told lawmakers two years ago, according to the Herald.

Cheryle Bradley, an MBTA bus driver, recalled one episode that began with an innocuous request that a boy stop vaping on the bus.

He complied. But when he later exited the bus, the boy blew a cloud of smoke in Bradley’s face and called her an obscenity. His companion punched the window of the bus as she closed the door.

“And then he brandished a gun,” Bradley said. “Looked right at my face, smiled and he pulled the gun out of his jacket.”

She said she had never been so terrified.

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