The Charter-mandated Mayor’s Management Report published Friday shows that the NYPD doubled the number of quality-of-life summonses during the last fiscal year, the vast majority of them civil tickets.
But in the past few years, the NYPD has also surged criminal summonses for offenses that the City Council explicitly made eligible for civil penalties in 2016, more than doubling them from 2019 to 2022.
The NYPD claims this is in response to calls from concerned New Yorkers, and that this approach disrupts future violent crime. To that end, the department points to a decline in violent crimes during 2022 and 2023, at the same time as criminal summonses skyrocketed. Case closed, right? Well, no; this argument only really works if you completely ignore the years prior to that.
Between 2017 and the start of 2019, as the number of criminal summonses was nosediving following the 2016 law, violent crime was also hitting historic lows. Murders and assaults were lower at a time when criminal summonses for quality-of-life offenses were at a sixth of what they are now. The NYPD’s attempt to draw a correlation from such oppositely conclusive data would get you tossed out of an undergraduate math class, but the department seems content to lean on it as a way to avoid answering questions.
Those questions include the very basics, like what exactly constitutes a “law enforcement reason” to issue a criminal summons when the law makes a civil ticket explicitly available. The phrase appears exactly three times in the 1,500-plus page NYPD Patrol Guide, all three in the summons section, procedure codes 209-03 and 209-09, and is never otherwise defined except as one of four codes by which an officer can explain the use of a criminal summons.
The other three reasons are very specific: the violator is a recidivist (which is defined, as someone on parole, probation, with two or more felony arrests over the previous two years, or three or more unanswered civil summonses in eight years); has an active warrant or is being sought in an investigation; or has committed a violation that is not covered by the civil citations law.
Yet the vague “law enforcement reason,” which according to data compiled by the news outlet The City, was used in 2023’s second quarter more than 10,000 times, almost four times as much as other reasons combined, seems more like a get-out-of-providing-a-reason card.
The difference between a civil citation and a criminal summons isn’t just semantics; people have to show up in person, losing entire days of work, in what is often a harrowing first contact with the criminal justice system, instead of just paying a fine. It’s also clear which people this is, with The City’s analysis establishing that more than 90% of those issued summonses were Black or Hispanic. We note it’s pretty rare to see cops issuing criminal citations to white buddies drinking White Claws in Washington Square Park.
So the ramp-up pretty clearly does not have a direct correlation with violent crime reduction, flies in the face of the intent of a city law, overwhelmingly impacts people of color, and has no clear justification or even an attempt at an explanation by the NYPD. It’s another mark of a department grown too used to not having to explain itself, and it’s unacceptable.
New York Daily News Editorial Board
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