Police Commissioner Bill Bratton remains opposed to getting rid of criminal penalties for quality of life crimes like turnstile jumping—but in a letter to Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said he is open to proposals that could “divert more quality-of-life offenders from the criminal process.”
In her State of the City address, Ms. Mark-Viverito called on the city to adopt civil penalties, rather than criminal ones, for certain quality-of-life crimes like turnstile jumping—an idea that was later fleshed out to include crimes like biking on the sidewalk or public urination.
In his letter, Mr. Bratton notes he is still opposed to eliminating criminal penalties, in large part because those penalties allow an officer to compel an offender to hand over identification, and because for some people, civil penalties are not a strong enough deterrent.
But Mr. Bratton said he was open to using tools other than arrest.
“To further our discussion, we are in the process of developing a set of proposals that could serve to divert more quality-of-life offenders from the criminal process, while preserving the ability to impose meaningful sanctions if needed,” Mr. Bratton wrote. “Our underlying premise is simple: we seek to expand the officer’s toolbox rather than to contract it, so that Department policy can provide guidance to officers based on a wider range of enforcement options, as circumstances warrant.”
The police commissioner has long been a champion of the “broken windows” theory of policing, which calls for officers to enforce quality-of-life crimes in an effort to forestall more serious offenses. He has credited the approach for the dramatic drop in crime that began when he was first police commissioner in New York, under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Ms. Mark-Viverito laid out her proposal to decriminalize some offenses as part of a larger criminal justice reform vision, aimed at reducing the amount of people who are arrested for relatively minor crimes and then languish in city jails. She cited one crime for which the city had already stopped making arrests—possession of smaller amounts of marijuana. But the department has not technically decriminalized that offense and has simply changed its enforcement policy; in some cases, people can still be arrested for the crime. (Mr. Bratton, in his letter, notes the arrests have dropped by 56 percent in 2015 compared to the same time in 2014.) Many of the crimes that have been floated by the Council for decriminalizing are ones advocates note black and Hispanic New Yorkers are more often charged with, an argument also made during the push to change marijuana enforcement.
Mr. Bratton addressed a few of those specific offenses in his letter. The department has already determined that, “in the main,” biking on the sidewalk can “be handled in the civil sphere,” he wrote. Officers are handing out moving violations due back to traffic court in “a majority of these situations,” he wrote, rather than issuing criminal charges.
When it comes to public urination, Mr. Bratton said two laws on the books allow the NYPD to conduct enforcement—and the department is considering directing officers to use an administrative code, which is a violation, rather than a health code that results in a misdemeanor. He said other offenses may be best dealt with using violations returnable to the Environmental Control Board instead of to criminal courts, but that the board would need to be able to cooperate with the NYPD in tracking offenders, so repeat offenders could eventually be hit with criminal penalties.
The commissioner said he would also “welcome a discussion” of using documented warnings instead of summonses, but added that they would need to be tracked so an officer could determine whether someone had been previously warned for the same offense.
In a statement, Ms. Mark-Viverito—who has been siding with Mr. Bratton on a push to hire 1,000 more cops in the city budget—praised the commissioner in a statement.
“Commissioner Bratton’s recognition that we need to explore lowering the impact of low-level offenses is significant and the City Council looks forward to a deliberative and thoughtful dialogue as we work to keep our city safe while also striving to create a more equitable criminal justice system,” she said. “I welcome Commissioner Bratton’s openness and look forward to our continued conversations.”
Mr. Bratton also suggested a task force, comprised of NYPD executive staff, representatives from Ms. Mark-Viverito’s office, and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to further discuss the issue, working with the five district attorneys and Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who has also proposed using civil penalties in some cases to help clear court backlogs.
