Soaring Arrests Clog Court System, Force Releases

Ana Tezhozol, a 16-year-old high school freshman, admits she made a mistake.

Two weeks ago she illegally crossed between two subway cars on a no. 2 train as she headed home from school. A transit police officer caught her, but she wasn't prepared for New York City's criminal justice system, she said.

After she was arrested and handcuffed, she spent the next 30 hours in a Bronx jail cell before a judge sent her home with a slap on the wrist. She missed a full day of school.

"I've never been in a jail," she said through a translator yesterday. "I was scared."

Ms. Tezhozol, who emigrated from Tlaxcala, Mexico, a year ago, said the arrest was her first encounter with a police officer in America.

Encounters with the police have been on the rise since the beginning of the year, according to statistics from the police department and the Office of Court Administration.

On January 1, caps on the amount of overtime a police officer can accrue were removed, leading to a spike of more than 10,000 more arrests than in the same 2 1/2 month period in 2006. Two weeks ago the caps were restored at 60 hours of overtime a month, and the arrest rate has since dropped, sources said.

The police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, said at a budget hearing on Tuesday that many of the new arrests were due to a narcotics initiative at the beginning of the year, but a spokesman could not be reached yesterday to clarify the details of the initiative.

The arrests have clogged the courts so much that at one point last month the Legal Aid Society had to file a habeas corpus writ because about 100 arrestees in the Bronx had been held for more than 24 hours. A New York State Court of Appeals decision in 1991 ruled that 24 hours is the reasonable limit to hold someone without a formal charge.

"It's an important mandate. We do everything we can do arraign someone within 24 hours," the acting administrative judge of the New York City Criminal Court, Judge Juanita Bing Newton, said.

Since the arrests began to pour in — especially for misdemeanors such as trespassing in the Bronx and possession of drugs for personal use in Brooklyn, according to Legal Aid — the Office of Court Administration had to add 35 additional arraignment shifts. Overtime spending in the courts has surged by $1,350,970 more than last year, which the office said was largely a result of the new arrests.

The Bronx has been the borough most affected by the surge in arrests. An attorney in the special litigation unit of the Legal Aid Society, William Gibney, said that on one day in January, every arrestee was held for longer than 24 hours. The society filed a habeas corpus writ in mid-February, when more than 400 prisoners were awaiting arraignment. A judge released 26 arrestees with desk appearance tickets.

The delays in arraignments have led the New York Civil Rights Union and other city officials to revisit a bill before the City Council, Intro 53, which would require the city to pay people held for more than 24 hours. The chairman of the council's public safety committee, Peter Vallone Jr., said he opposes the bill, which he called a "get-out-of-jail-free-and-get-paid card for criminals."