So far this year, public housing has accounted for nearly 20 percent of all shootings in the city, 10 percent of felony assaults and 11 percent of rapes — though less than 5 percent of city residents live in the projects. NYPD “vertical patrolling” of public housing for trespassers, who are often there for the worst of reasons, is a key aspect of bringing safety to their law-abiding residents.
Yet Bronx DA Robert Johnson in July adopted a policy of not prosecuting trespass arrests in the projects unless the arresting officer personally confirms the validity of the charge. Worse, his office can’t actually produce the evidence of false arrests that it cited to justify the new policy.
New York Times readers learned of the new policy in a Page One story last Wednesday — but reporter Joseph Goldstein misleadingly wrote that Johnson had enacted it after “discovering that many people arrested on charges of criminal trespass at housing projects were innocent, even though police officers had provided written statements to the contrary.”
Goldstein was plainly relying on a July 18 letter from Jeanette Rucker, an arraignments chief in Johnson’s office, to the head of the NYPD’s legal bureau — but her letter had already been seriously undercut.
Rucker wrote that Legal Aid defense attorneys had complained to her that their clients were arrested for trespassing in public housing, though they were legally on the premises. Rucker’s assistants investigated the claims and “in many (but not all) of the cases the defendants arrested were either legitimate tenants or invited guests,” she wrote.
But Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has credibly debunked Rucker’s allegations. In a Sept. 6 letter to Johnson, Kelly reported that a commanding officer in the Internal Affairs Bureau (which investigates police misconduct) asked Rucker for the specifics of the cases she referred to in her letter. She replied that “she could not provide specifics and that she knew of only one case which was dismissed due to an error on the part of the involved police officers,” Kelly wrote.
And, Kelly noted, the assistant DA who handled that one case says even that arrest was valid. It was dismissed at Rucker’s request, because the defendant was of limited mental capacity and had recently lived in the building.
The department has analyzed numerous criminal-trespass cases and interviewed the defendants, Kelly added, without finding any officer misconduct. He’d continue to review Bronx trespass cases and get extra training for officers in The Bronx, but Rucker’s “estimation of the issue,” he said, looks to be badly off-base.
Asked if the claims in Kelly’s letter were correct, a Johnson spokesman responded: “That matter is in litigation so we’re not commenting.” Was only one trespass case dismissed? “We’re not confirming or denying that there was only one case.” Are the Times’ claims about “many” false trespass arrests correct? “We have no comment on whether the Times is correct.”
The Times’ Goldstein barely mentioned the Kelly letter, and even then misrepresented Kelly’s damning refutation of Rucker’s claims as mere “suggestions.”
The Times’ motive for its spin was made plain by the headline: “Prosecutor Deals Blow to Stop-and-Frisk Tactic.” Goldstein’s story (plus “Losing Faith in Stop-and-Frisk,” a Times editorial the next day) treats the alleged illegality of trespass arrests as a function of the NYPD anti-crime tactic that has become a liberal bête noire.
Yet the legal claim behind the Bronx DA’s new policy is unrelated to the stop-and-frisk issue. Rucker alleges that officers are making false arrests; the charge against stop-and-frisks is that officers stop individuals because of their race, not their behavior. Rucker’s letter doesn’t mention stop-and-frisks or assert that the officers made trespass arrests on the basis of race.
The real agenda here has nothing to do with the outrageous charge that the NYPD is systematically making illegal arrests; rather, it is to return policing to its passive, wait-till-a-crime-happens stance of the 1970s and 1980s. Which brings us to the litigation cited by Johnson’s spokesman — which does directly echo the larger campaign against stop-and-frisk.
A lawsuit against NYPD actions in city housing projects from the elite law firm of Paul, Weiss, along with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Legal Aid Society, charges (preposterously) that vertical police patrols in the city’s housing projects are “intentionally discriminatory” because the residents of those projects are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.
This is bizarre, of course: The patrols are done to protect those residents from crime. It’s a safe bet that most Paul, Weiss partners live in doorman buildings — because they understand that trespassers are usually criminals.
Patrolling a housing project’s dark stairwells, roofs and elevators is a thousand times more dangerous than sitting in a lobby screening entrants, but the city’s anti-NYPD brigades only see racism in these officer efforts.
If Bronx officers now have to take the time to justify every trespass arrest they make, they may well decide that the arrest isn’t worth it. In fact, as the Times reports, Bronx trespass arrests dropped by nearly 25 percent in August, compared to August 2011; in Brooklyn and Manhattan, they dropped by less than 5 percent over that same period.
It’s not racism that brings a high level of police patrols to New York’s public housing, but the victimization of its residents. The Times’ refusal to recognize that fact puts not just the law-abiding poor, but the entire city, at risk.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Manhattan Institute’s John M. Olin fellow. Adapted from www.cityjournal.org.