This problem warrants action
In a city where 40% of the population was born overseas, it’s not surprising to see progressive politicians make a big show of refusing to use law enforcement resources or share the personal data of New Yorkers with federal authorities who might move to deport the undocumented.
“We are not going to allow our police officers to be used as immigrant enforcement agents,” Mayor de Blasio said in January.
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito made an extended riff on the topic part of her State of the City speech last week.
“We will not waste city resources to help immigration authorities locate otherwise law-abiding New Yorkers who pose no threat to public safety. We will not be a pawn in that game,” she said, and vowed: “We will not allow officers of the Department of Probation, the NYPD and the Department of Correction to act as ICE agents and enforce immigration law. They have better things to do.”
So far, so good. But after the applause from the big speeches and rallies fade, the mayor and the speaker should attend to the politically much less sexy task of making city agencies better — much better — at sharing criminal justice data among themselves.
Right now, according to advocates and agency officials, we waste a vast amount of money and manpower by not taking some simple steps to prevent summonses and arrests from turning thousands of New Yorkers’ lives upside down every year.
Every day of the week, for example, people who have been arrested and detained on Rikers Island are allowed to walk out of jail on whatever matter got them busted, according to an NYPD official — even if they have a string of open arrest warrants for other offenses.
That means cops will someday have to chase down open warrants on a person who was already in the custody of the Department of Correction.
We’re mostly not talking about serious crimes: The vast majority of warrants begin as summonses for low-level misconduct like public urination, riding a bicycle on the sidewalk or drinking liquor from an open container in public. But a person who fails to show up in court to clear up even a minor problem can wind up facing a courtissued arrest warrant.
That starts a grotesque game of jack-inthe-box: If a long-forgotten warrant pops up on a person stopped by the cops for any reason, he can end up in handcuffs and detained for hours — or even days — until the matter gets cleared up.
Right now, cops face a horrendous backlog of 1.5 million outstanding warrants. It’s a nightmare situation in need of a fix — and one easy way to attack it is to make sure every person held on Rikers clears up all open warrants before leaving jail.
The same logic applies to the tens of thousands of people sleeping in city shelters every night. When the sun comes up, an army of compassionate caseworkers at the Department of Homeless Services battles to connect homeless New Yorkers with an apartment, job training, addiction treatment, mental health counseling and other needs.
Here again, a little coordination would go a long way. When individuals and families check into shelters, DHS staff should also flag any outstanding warrants sitting in law enforcement databases — and help clients get them resolved.
Clearing up warrants should be considered an essential part of helping the homeless get back on their feet. The last thing a struggling family needs is to have somebody get arrested for a minor offense that might be years in the past.
Making sense of this madness will take some managerial ingenuity. We’ll need coordination between the NYPD, the Office of Court Administration, the five district attorneys and the Departments of Correction, Probation and Homeless Services.
Equally important is the need to make criminal justice records more transparent, available and easily correctable by the people caught up in the system.
As the Daily News has regularly documented, New Yorkers often get arrested because of mistakes in their official record of arrest and prosecution (RAP sheet, for short). Warrants remain even after they’ve been cleared; arrests of the wrong person follow the innocent for years; and records that were supposed to be sealed by court order sometimes aren’t.
It’s one more example of why de Blasio and Mark-Viverito, so eager to keep the personal data of undocumented people from the feds, ought to make sure city agencies are making use of that information to help all New Yorkers, immigrant or not.