UrbaNerd: Big Drop in Misdemeanor Busts in NYC

One of the signal features of New York City’s approach to law enforcement during the Bloomberg era was the rise in arrests for misdemeanors, which climbed every year from 2003 to 2010 despite continued decreases in felony crime. Busts for these lower-level offenses, which can involve alleged crimes as varied as selling illegal cigarettes or hawking counterfeit goods or hitting someone, decreased slightly toward the end of the former mayor’s time in offense. But that did not satisfy advocates concerned about over-policing: Misdemeanor arrests are closely linked to quality-of-life enforcement and the controversial broken windows strategy, both of which disproportionately affect communities of color.

So when Bill de Blasio came to office promising policing reforms yet misdemeanor collars in 2014 largely kept pace (see chart 1 below), it fueled concerns that the mayor was shying away from meaningful change.

New data obtained by City Limits suggests that de Blasio’s second year in City Hall looks very different from his first. A breakdown of top charges in cases involving misdemeanors provided by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services indicates that from January through September of 2015, there were just under 148,000 misdemeanor busts in the city, down 15.6 percent from the same period in 2014 and 15.1 percent from the first nine months of 2013.

The city is on pace to record the lowest number of misdemeanor arrests since 2004 by year’s end.

Fewer drug arrests explain a huge share of the 26,000-arrest drop from 2014. In the first three quarters of 2015, there were 9,600 fewer busts for fifth-degree criminal possession of marijuana or criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, the lowest-level charges associated with pot or other drugs, respectively. Big drops were also seen in busts for third-degree assault, theft of services (penal-code jargon for turnstile jumping), criminal trespass, driving while intoxicated, resisting arrest and petit larceny.

A few crimes did see modest increases in arrest numbers in the first part of 2015 (see chart 2, below). There were 358 additional arrests, for example, for low-level gambling offenses. Tiny increases were also recorded in arrests involving patronizing or promoting prostitution or torturing animals.

Since Commissioner Bratton introduced broken-windows policing under Mayor Giuliani, people have debated whether there is a connection between enforcing low-level laws and preventing more serious crime. Through October 25, New York City’s crime rate was down 3.1 percent, though rates for murder, robbery and rape were up.