For Second Week, Arrests Plunge in New York City
By J. DAVID GOODMAN and AL BAKER

For two straight weeks, New York City police officers have sharply cut back on making arrests and issuing summonses throughout the five boroughs, magnifying the growing divide between the city’s police force and its mayor, Bill de Blasio.

Officers made half as many arrests in the seven days through Sunday as in the same week a year ago. In the entire city, 347 criminal summonses were written, down from 4,077 a year ago, according to police statistics. Parking and traffic tickets also dropped by more than 90 percent.

Most precincts’ weekly tallies for criminal infractions were close to zero: In Coney Island, the precinct covering that neighborhood did not record a single parking ticket, traffic summons or ticket for a low-level crime like public urination or drinking, the statistics showed.

The drop may present a new challenge for the mayor and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton. With officers in the country’s largest police department apparently using their own discretion to largely ignore low-level offenses, Mr. Bratton finds himself, for a brief moment, confronted with the kind of reactive force that he worked to shed two decades ago in New York City.

Standing with the mayor at a news conference on Monday, Mr. Bratton offered various theories to explain the decline: the large-scale protests over police practices last month; the mourning period for two Brooklyn officers killed on Dec. 20; the holiday season; a dip in 911 calls. He said the department’s leadership was actively studying what took place.

“I will look very specifically — precinct by precinct, tour of duty by tour of duty, sector car by sector car, officer by officer — and we will deal with it very appropriately, if we have to,” he said.

“We may see,” he added, “that things begin to return to normal on their own volition.

At the same time, he acknowledged the sagging morale of officers, which union leaders have sought to attach to the policies of the mayor.

Hundreds of officers — out of tens of thousands — have twice turned their backs when the mayor eulogized the two officers shot in their patrol car by a man who targeted them for their uniforms. In his first comments on the police protests, Mr. de Blasio said on Monday that such displays were “disrespectful” to the families of the men killed, Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

“I also think they were disrespectful to the people in this city, who, in fact, honor the work of the N.Y.P.D.,” Mr. de Blasio said.

Mr. Bratton, who before the second funeral, on Sunday, asked officers to put aside their grievances, went further, lamenting the “selfishness” of their actions.

“Come demonstrate outside City Hall, come demonstrate outside Police Headquarters,” he said. “But don’t put on your uniform and go to a funeral and engage in a political action.”

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton held the news conference to draw attention to the city’s success in driving down crime, even as stop-and-frisk encounters plummeted. Robberies and murders, they said, dropped to their lowest levels since 1963, when the department began collecting reliable statistics.

The downturn in enforcement activity, though, threatened to reopen a question that Mr. de Blasio had seemingly put to rest in his first year in office: Would crime rise under a liberal mayor promising policing reforms?

During the first week of the enforcement declines, in fact, crime went down. But in the second week, the statistics showed an uptick: Robberies rose 13.5 percent over the week, to 361 from 318 a year ago. Murders increased to 11 for the week that ended Sunday, from seven in the same week a year earlier.

The numbers, disclosed on Monday, reveal a downturn in nearly every category of arrest — including gun possession and drunken driving — and all three categories of summons activity, parking violations, (down 93 percent to 1,191 from 16,008); traffic infractions (down 92 percent, to 749 from 9,349); and low-level crimes (down 91 percent).

Richard Aborn, the leader of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, said he expected the drop to correct itself. “The only thing more critical to the cops right now than their outrage is their sense of duty,” he said, “and they’re not going to abandon that for a long period.”

How much revenue the city might lose was not immediately clear. The city took in $546 million in parking fine revenue during the 2014 fiscal year, according to Doug Turetsky of the city’s Independent Budget Office, an average of about $10.5 million a week.

Robert Cassar, the head of the union for police traffic agents, said his uniformed personnel — who are now doubled up on their rounds — were at even greater risk to attacks than patrol officers. “Our guys, we don’t have guns,” he said.

“We’re being very cautious,” he added. “We don’t want to enrage the public.”

Across the city, officers made a total of 2,401 arrests, compared with 5,448 for the same week the year before, a 56 percent decline. That included 17 percent fewer arrests for major felonies, which declined to 472 from 568.

The declines came after a drastic drop in activity that began shortly after the murder of Officers Ramos and Liu in Brooklyn, and continued across all 77 precincts in the city.

Police union leaders have denied the declines represent any organized work action, though they have urged their members to put their own safety first, which could curb enforcement in all but the clearest situations that called for an arrest.

The sustained declines, however, suggest something of a coordinated effort, even if it was not sanctioned by union leaders.

“People are talking to each other,” Edward D. Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said on Sunday. “It became contagious.”

He added that there had been no decrease in police service. “All of the 911 calls are being responded to,” Mr. Mullins said.

Mr. Bratton said he had no intention of departing from the proactive approach to policing, addressing minor offenses to head off major crimes following a strategy often known as “broken windows,” which he helped pioneer during his first stint as New York City police commissioner in the 1990s. “We’re not going back to that period of time; never again,” he said.

He called attention to the roughly 17,000 police officers who live in the city, a majority of the force. “I think officers are very mindful that if this city were allowed to be de-policed, some of the first who would be affected would be their families,” he said.

不爽市長…紐約警半罷工 開單量剩1成

不滿紐約市長白思豪的紐約警察不僅在殉職警察的兩場葬禮上背對著他，還出現怠工狀況。紐約時報報導，過去兩周紐約市五個區的警察逮捕案件和發出的傳票都大幅減少，紐約警察和白思豪之間裂痕擴大，是他擔任市長一年來最大危機。

紐時報導，過去兩周紐約警察逮捕的人數是前一年同期的一半。全紐約市共發出347張刑事傳票，而一年前的同期共發出4077張。警察開出的停車和交通罰單也減少逾九成。

大部分管區的一周違規罰單總數接近零：康尼島管區沒有開出任何一張停車罰單、交通違規通知或行為不檢的罰單，例如當街小便和酒醉。

警察處理案件銳減，可能是白思豪和紐約市警局局長布拉頓的新挑戰。

紐約市警局是全美第一大警局，局內警察顯然自己決定不理會較輕的犯罪，廿年前曾任紐約市警局局長的布拉頓面對與當年相同的反動力量。

布拉頓五日在與白思豪的聯合記者會上，解釋警察處理案件銳減的各種可能原因：上月針對警察執法過當的大規模抗議活動、兩名布魯克林區警察去年十二月廿日遭殺害後的哀悼期、新年假期、911報案電話減少。

他說，警局高層正在研究原因。「我會仔細查看每個管區、每個勤務、每輛巡邏車和每名警察。」不過他也說：「情況可能自動恢復正常。」

布拉頓承認警察士氣低落，警察工會認為與白思豪的政策有關。工會領袖表示，在紐約市和密蘇里州佛格森市發生警察執勤時殺害手無寸鐵的民眾後，市長卻支持抗議的民眾，造就了警察遇害的環境。

白思豪在記者會上首度對警察在葬禮上背對他的行為發表評論，他說，這是對兩位殉職員警的家屬「不敬」，「也是對以紐約市警局為榮的全體市民不敬」。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/nyregion/decrease-in-new-york-police-arrests-continues-for-a-second-week.html

2015-01-07．聯合報．A15．國際．編譯田思怡