NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton pitches amnesty idea to clear 1.2M warrants

[hrmjustin]

NEW YORK (AP) — Sheila Beasley was struggling to clean up after her beloved Rottweiler, Rocky, on a Bronx sidewalk on a December day in 2008 when she briefly put his leash down — a move spotted by a nearby plainclothes police officer who promptly wrote her a summons for having an unleashed dog.

Beasley, a 50-year-old mother of two, said she forgot about the ticket and missed a court date to resolve it. That decision triggered a warrant for her arrest, and nearly three years later, police showed up at her door and hauled her off to jail, where she stayed for four days.

"I feel like they abducted me from my house," Beasley said this week. "I would never even make up in my wildest dreams and think I would have to go through a system like that for something so insignificant as doggy poop."

New York's court system has about 1.2 million open warrants like Beasley's, affecting people who run the risk of arrest for failing to resolve sometimes decades-old infractions for low-level offenses such as drinking in public or disorderly conduct. And while city officials haven't yet presented a formal proposal on how to resolve the backlog, Police Commissioner William Bratton has floated one approach that advocates and others are already supporting: amnesty.

http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/05/nypd_commissioner_bill_bratton_3.html#incart_river

[rug]

1. Great idea.

When I was submitting my application to the bar I had to go to 120 Broadway to get a Certificate of Disposition on an old arrest. When I got there I gave my name to the clerk who fllpped through an old book like one of Harry Potter's gnomes. He looked up, asked my date of birth and said, "Don't move, there's a warrant out for your arrest." Even after three years of law school, my first instinct was to bolt. It turned out to be an old Vera Summons for theft of service stemming from an allegation I used a slug instead of a token in the subway. I just threw the damned thing away nine years earlier. The judge dismissed the case because it was so old. There are so many crap citations resulting in so many crap warrants. And they are overwhelmingly on the poor and the minorities. This is a good move.

[hrmjustin]

2. Wow that must have been annoying.

I agree this would help out a lot of people.