Pushback on fare-beat nab data Councilman lashes department

The law is the law, police will tell you, and we’re the law enforcers not the lawmakers. You don’t like it, change it. That tune changes when the law does, and the police don’t like that change. Then, they start sounding like lawyers.

Take Local Law 47 of 2018, which took effect on Jan. 11 and requires the NYPD to produce public reports on fare-beating arrests and summonses broken down by station and race, age and sex four times a year, starting Jan. 30.

Seventy-nine days and no such report later, the bill’s author, City Councilman Rory Lancman, has come out blazing with a letter to Police Commissioner James O’Neill accusing the NYPD of, well, breaking the law.

Lancman (D-Queens), who now is chairman of the Council’s Justice System Committee, wrote Wednesday morning that, “The first report was due in January, and good-faith efforts to obtain this data, as required by law, are at a dead end.”

He says the data have to include a breakdown of arrests and summonses at each station by race, age and gender. The NYPD, though, interprets the letter of his law as requiring only a citywide demographic breakdown, according to one police official involved in the now-brokendown negotiations.

And while everyone agrees that the law requires arrest and summons numbers for each of the system’s 476 stations, the department wants to limit the public list to the 100 stations with the most arrests and summons.

A police official says that the department realized only after the law had passed and it began collecting the data that a full list might somehow help bad actors