City Council in talks to Decriminalize Minor offenses like Open container and Public Urination

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.

 

                                  

Drinking on the street and Public Urination  

( Minor offenses )

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.”

 

Opening of Container the street and Bicycling on the Sidewalk 

( Minor offenses )

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.

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.