A potential showdown is looming over a pair of City Council proposals that would decriminalize a host of offenses — including fare-beating, drinking on the street and public urination — in an overhaul that could dramatically impact the NYPD’s “broken windows” approach to policing.
The measures, still the focus of ongoing negotiations, could pit some Council members against Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who raised questions about the potential changes just last month.
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s office is working on a proposal that would make some of the most common criminal court summonses civil charges instead. Violators would get a ticket to one of the city’s administrative courts, such as the Environmental Control Board, instead of criminal court. Cops could no longer make arrests for those offenses, and missed court dates would turn into default monetary judgments instead of warrants.
Bratton appears cool to the idea, saying people wouldn’t take a civil ticket seriously.
“I’m not supportive of the idea of civil summonses for these offenses because I think that they’d be basically totally ignored, that they don’t have any bite to them, if you will,” the city’s top cop said at a Council hearing in March.
Asked Friday if the NYPD had warmed up to the civil court route, Deputy Commissioner for Collaborative Policing Susan Herman responded, “We’re in ongoing conversations with the City Council about the speaker’s proposal.”
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Mayoral spokeswoman Monica Klein said Mayor de Blasio supports summons reform, but declined to comment on whether he supports the specific proposal.
“The mayor has made a clear commitment to reforming the summons process, and the speaker’s proposal is under review in consultation with NYPD,” Klein said.
A Daily News analysis shows the seven offenses that would be sent to one of the city’s administrative civil courts under the Mark-Viverito plan account for roughly 2.7 million, or 42%, of the summonses issued by the NYPD between 2001 and June 2014. They also account for more than 510,000 open arrest warrants, according to the analysis of data provided by the state Office of Court Administration.
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The seven offenses under consideration are public consumption of alcohol, public urination, bicycling on the sidewalk, being in a park after dark, failure to obey a park sign, littering and unreasonable noise. The offenses under consideration for decriminalization are under the city’s administrative code — not the state penal code — making it possible to amend them without state approval, officials said.
“All the consequences of the criminal justice system would be removed and people would just be civilly responsible for their conduct,” said City Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Queens), chairman of the Courts and Legal Services Committee, who is working on the proposal with Mark-Viverito. “And it would be akin to a parking ticket, which I think would be more than enough to deter people from committing that kind of conduct without bringing the heavy hammer of the criminal justice system down on their head.”
It’s not clear what impact the decriminalization plan would have on the city coffers.
Public urination and open container are the only two minor offenses for which fines can be paid by mail. But Lancman said many people have reservations about allowing people to simply pay online for criminal court summonses because they’d essentially be pleading guilty to a violation or, in some cases, a misdemeanor without having an attorney present.
“When it’s a civil offense we don’t have any problem letting people pay online or by mail without having to show up at all … that would almost certainly mean you’d have a higher percentage of people paying a fine,” Lancman said.
He said that in criminal summons court, roughly half the people don’t show up, and of the people who do show up and are assessed a fine, a quarter of them don’t pay.
Another plan sure to get under Bratton’s skin would seek nonlegislative changes to police policy that would give fare-beaters tickets to the MTA’s Transit Adjudication Bureau, also a civil court. No handcuffs, no criminal court summonses.
The News reported last year that fare evasion has become one of the top charges leading to jail time in the city, with 25,867 arrests.
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Bratton has long argued that focusing on “quality of life” offenses contributes to a safer city and helps reduce more serious crime — the crux of broken-windows policing.
Accused turnstile jumper Damien Brunson, 32, became a poster boy for broken-windows policing this month after he was caught with a gun in his backpack at the High St. station in Brooklyn. It turned out he was an ex-con and, therefore, couldn’t legally have a gun. He was then charged federally and faces up to 10 years in prison.
Critics say the policing model unfairly targets blacks and Latinos, who were the recipients of roughly 81% of the summonses issued since 2001. They also say issuing criminal summonses for low-level offenses often stamps young people’s records with minor violations that could affect their ability to get jobs, housing or student loans.
Assistant Police Commissioner Ronald Wilhelmy told The News the NYPD has done its own analysis of summons activity, which it expects to release within the next six weeks. He said it will show that the locations with the highest density of summonses last year more closely correlate with quality-of-life calls and violent crime than with the density of black and Hispanic residents.
Rafael Guzman, 67, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was one of dozens of people who appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court last week to answer a summons for a minor offense. He was accused of urinating on a trash bin in Washington Heights.
“To be honest, it’s inappropriate for them to make him come here,” said his daughter Maireni Guzman, 44, who accompanied him to court.
“Yes, he did something he wasn’t supposed to, but it was because of his health; it’s not like he wanted to do this.
“He’s almost 70 years old and he’s on dialysis. He was actually peeing on himself, so he stopped to finish near some trash and a Dumpster and the cops saw him and waited for him to come out and they gave him the ticket.”
Rafael Guzman’s summons — like nearly half of all summonses cops have issued since 2001 — was dismissed.
During the 10-year period ended in June 2014, about 76% of all marijuana summonses were dismissed — the highest of any of the top 20 most frequently issued charges — followed by loitering (69%), operating a motor vehicle in violation of the safety rules (67%), disorderly conduct (61%) and bicycling on the sidewalk (59%).
Bratton has said as a result of the continued decline in crime — down 9.6% compared with the same time last year through April 12 — police would enter into a “peace dividend” with the city.
He predicted cops will have 1 million fewer enforcement interactions with the public this year, in part through a dramatic reduction in the number of stop-and-frisk encounters and summonses.
The number of summonses handed out by cops through April 12 dropped to 67,144 — a 29% decrease from the same time last year, according to the NYPD’s most recent report.
That’s 41% fewer than two years ago, and half of the number of summonses issued during the same time period five years ago.
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With Erik Badia, Joseph Stepanksy
