Police reform advocates have been working at federal, state and local levels to increase police accountability and transparency. There have been a series of wins at all levels over the last few years—though with Jeff Sessions as the head of the Justice Department progress on federal oversight of policing is likely to be rolled back decades. Still, with pressure, New York City has been steadily making its policing policies fairer and still has a way to go. This week, it continued to move forward by dismissing old warrants in an effort to reduce the number of people in the courts.
On Wednesday came another major step in the evolving effort to move the city’s police practices from an abusive past into a more enlightened future: The district attorneys from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens moved to dismiss 644,000 outstanding arrest warrants stemming from minor offenses at least 10 years old, more than a third of the city’s 1.6 million outstanding summons warrants.
This backlog stems from the now-discredited belief that petty offenses, like riding a bike on the sidewalk or drinking in public, could lead to more serious crimes. The result was the blanketing of minority neighborhoods with criminal summonses that forced hundreds of thousands of people to live with a constant threat of jail time for minor infractions.
It is an important thing for the city to eliminate these warrants. It makes little sense to clog up the criminal justice system with minor offenses such as these—especially with the idea that they could lead to more crimes, which has no basis in fact. There is no evidence that riding a bike on a sidewalk leads to robbery, assault or murder. To suggest so is completely ridiculous and not based in anything other than racism, particularly because these punitive policies overwhelmingly target people of color. In fact, the city was sued in a class-action suit and had to pay $75 million when it was found to single out minority citizens in issuing summons illegitimately. Jail time for these kinds of infractions is disproportionately harsh because they do not pose a threat to anyone and it ruins lives.
In 2009, at the height of zero-tolerance policing, the city handed out more than 500,000 summonses, compared with about 268,000 last year. Few summonses result in a guilty finding. But people who forget court dates for offenses like littering are subject to arrest warrants that can land them in jail — sometimes for days — the next time they encounter a police officer in, say, a routine traffic stop. Warrants can also make it difficult to find jobs or get apartments. Immigrants can be denied citizenship applications or be deported.
The good news is that the summons were expunged based on the belief that people who have not incurred additional infractions over a decade are not likely to commit additional crimes. Better still, it would be better to eliminate these kinds of police practices in the first place. There is no need to put people in jail for petty crimes when they could be given community service. And it’s just another way to criminalize black and brown people who are already marginalized enough. New York may have moved a few first steps to increased justice and equality in policing, but it still has a long way to go.