The Legacy of Zero Tolerance Policing

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/opinion/the-legacy-of-zero-tolerance-policing.html

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New York City is wisely backing away from an abusive “zero tolerance” policing strategy that led officers to blanket minority communities with criminal summonses for minor infractions — like drinking beer in public or sitting in a park after dark — and was based on the discredited premise that petty misconduct leads to serious crime.

As part of its unfolding reform effort, the city has significantly cut the number of summonses issued by the police and encouraged police officers to shift the most common minor violations into civil court, which spares people from getting a permanent criminal record and lets them atone for some violations with community service. But that has done nothing for the hundreds of thousands of people who have arrest warrants for failing to appear in summons court.

That changed last week, when the City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, announced that four of the city’s five district attorneys — all but Staten Island’s — have agreed to seek dismissal of arrest warrants that are at least 10 years old. The move could vacate as much as a third of the 1.5 million arrest warrants pending, but more needs to be done.

The City Council and the district attorneys argue that people who have stayed out of trouble for a decade after committing minor violations deserve to have their warrants expunged — particularly since many of the summonses were issued unjustly or unnecessarily.

At the height of zero tolerance policing in 2009, the city issued 520,000 summonses — compared with about 294,000 in 2015, the latest available figure. Only about one in five summonses results in a finding of guilt — a clear indication that many summonses are being issued without legitimate cause. Nevertheless, people who forget their court dates — even for a minor offense like littering — are hit with arrest warrants that turn a nuisance offense that might have been dismissed into a serious problem. (To its credit, the de Blasio administration rolled out a new form that clearly states the appearance date and sends reminders by phone or text.)

Once the warrant is recorded in a database, the defendant runs the risk of being arrested during a routine traffic stop and jailed, sometimes for days before seeing a judge. An open warrant can lead to deportation, denial of a citizenship application and a number of other problems.

These hardships have hit minorities hardest. Just last month, the city agreed to pay up to $75 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming that hundreds of thousands of summonses were issued by the police without legal justification and disproportionately singled out minority citizens.

The problem with the 10-year argument is that it does not include the tail end of the “zero tolerance” period, from 2008 to 2013, when the Police Department issued 426,000 to 520,000 summonses a year. The city and the district attorneys will need to conduct a review of this period as well.