Gabriele Stabile / Gabriele Stabile /The New York Times

At halftime of the Jets home games, men, sometimes lined up three-deep, often participate in an obscenity-laced chant, demanding that the few women in the gathering expose their breasts.

It’s rude and it’s crude and it reflects poorly on the Jets, the NFL and the states of New Jersey, which hosts the games, and New York, which claims the team.

What’s most surprising about this is that the New York Rangers and the Mets used to welcome crowds that reveled in their vulgarity and lack of manners. The management of both teams made a concerted effort to stop the miscreants, going as far as to revoke season tickets. It worked in Madison Square Garden. Shea Stadium got a lot better, too — not perfect, but better.

The stadium management says there are too many people engaging in behavior that it concedes is against facility rules to do anything. Management is wrong. But it’s not a job for the security guards, who are part-time folks who lack the training and the liability insurance to be sorting out this sort of mess. It’s a job for the N.J. State Police who swarm about the stadium on game days.

All that needs to be done is to put up some signs and make a few announcements to the effect that behavior more appropriate to the Bada Bing club up the road from the stadium will not be tolerated. Violators will have their season tickets revoked. Call in the state police, put a few people undercover in the crowd, identify a couple of classless jerks, and have the state troopers remove them from the premises — permanently, if necessary.

Throw a couple of people out and the rest will stop immediately if not sooner. I’m no sociologist, but you don’t need to be one to figure this out. The folks who run the stadium have allowed football fans to behave as if they were at a European soccer match or in a NASCAR infield. The behavior won’t stop by itself because they people engaging in it find it amusing and have no reason to stop. Keep letting it go and the behavior will spread. Impose some simple sanctions and it stops. No matter how much fun it may seem to be, it’s not worth losing your tickets over.

So stop asking why people do these things and start making it unprofitable for them to continue. And please do it quickly. I’d like to go back to being proud of New York sports fans instead of embarrassed by them.

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