New York, NY – Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg heralding a record-low number of inmates in city jails, the amount of people arrested during his administration is the highest in city history, DNAinfo.com New York has found.
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In fact, the number of NYPD arrests in the Big Apple has jumped nearly 23 percent since Bloomberg took office — there were 338,788 collars in 2002 compared to 413,573 last year, police statistics show.
And the number of people caught in the criminal justice system started to climb virtually from the day he took office and appointed Raymond Kelly as his police commissioner.
There were 334,163 collars in 2003 — which was a scant decline from the previous year — but after that the number of arrests jumped to 351,435 in 2004 and continued to climb until it reached a peak of 422,982 arrests in 2010.
Stop-and-frisks, meanwhile, rocketed in New York from 98,000 during Bloomberg’s first year to nearly 700,000 last year — a staggering 600 percent rise that prompted widespread concern of racial profiling by the NYPD because they occurred primarily in minority communities.
Only 39,758 arrests out of 413,573 made by the NYPD in 2011 were for the seven major crimes — murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft.
Court insiders complain that the NYPD has been jamming the system with petty crime collars — and statistics show that nearly 10 percent are dumped at or prior to arraignment, and another 30 percent are closed with suspects given ACDs, or Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissals, which means if they stay out of trouble for six months the case is purged from their records.
“Day after day, people are stuffed into our holding cells for days at a time and then go to court and the prosecutors or judges look at the case and say it is not worth pursuing,” one top court official told “On The Inside.”
They blame the NYPD’s zero tolerance policy that forces cops to arrest everyone without exercising any discretion.
“There are thousands of cases that would not be here if the cops could use their own judgment like they used to in the past,” the insider said.
However, mayoral spokesman John McCarthy insisted that the NYPD arrest numbers show that the city is committed to tackling “lower level crime.”
Punishments that do not end with jail terms involve alternatives that have positive impacts on suspects and on the quality of life in New York, he said.
Content is provided courtesy of DNAinfo.com
How many innocent people are arrested? How much of the Court’s time is wasted?
Many of these so called “arrests” are ludicrous, and should never have been made. For example, there was the case of a Chassidic arrested just prior to Rosh Hashanah in 2010 (he was forced to spend Rosh Hashanah in jail), because he verbally told some cops, not to ticket another Chassidic, who was speeding to get home prior to Rosh Hashanah, in Crown Heights. The cops charged the opinionated person with “assault on a police officer” and “resisting arrest”. The charges were ridiculous, and should never have been pursued. Also, there was the bogus jaywalking ticket given to another frum individual, at Kings Highway and E. 15th St. The public doesn’t understand that when these bogus arrests or stops are made, it takes cops away from their primary duties. They have to go to the station house and fill out tons of paperwork. The NYCPD has never provided an iota of statistical evidence, which shows that these questionable “arrests”, have contributed to a lower crime rate, overall.
With more arrests but less convictions – seems like the justice system is not working (or corrupt).
To #4 Then why don’t we see the police getting into trouble for bogus arrests?
When do you hear about it?