Edit: This plays into something I observe in most "data-driven" organizations. Having a statistic available about recovery costs makes it easy to shift the conversation toward that statistic, when you actually ought to be asking questions about (in this case) the causal impact of that intervention on the subway's overall profitability, the need for easily available public transit and whether there ought to be a fare in the first place, the public good (or maybe harm -- the point is that we ought to be discussing it one way or the other) done by using fare-jumping collections as a mechanism for training people to be less antisocial in other aspects of their lives, or whether that obscene cost of fare collection is actually a reasonable baseline and should be improved. Your statistic, while interesting, is almost useless when trying to figure out what we should do next, at least by itself, and when paired with human psychology it can be actively harmful.
It does shovel a lot of dollars at law enforcement and let the Adams administration pretend to be tough on crime despite engaging in a lot of it, which was the actual intent.
This is the same reason that getting rid of fare-checking is bad - the sorts of people who are kept off the transit system by enforcing a fare, are not people you want to be in an enclosed space with.
Similarly stores with loss prevention guards are probably losing money, but I'd much rather that than having to click a button to unlock items, etc.
Nevermind that the economics of your argument are completely blind to the fact that the funding sources of the MTA and the NYPD are completely different.
More crazy is the downstream effects of putting up your hands and letting crimes go.
All this for what ? Social justice? Here's my counter to that - the subway is a public good, For the People a socialist would say.
So you encourage stealing from The People.