Puerto Rican Day Parade Arrests Down
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Police arrested between 22 and 40 people at the Puerto Rican Day Parade this year, a fraction of the number arrested in years past.
The more than 200 arrests last year, many of suspected gang members, caused an uproar among civil liberties advocates, who said some innocent bystanders had been swept up in the arrests.
This year, police said they arrested 40 people, while the Manhattan district attorney’s office said it had counted 22 arrests related to the parade.
The charges ranged from marijuana possession to vending without a license. Police said there were also sexual abuse arrests. None of the arrests were for unlawful assembly, the common charge lodged against the suspected gang members last year.
A police spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said gangs hadn’t been present at this year’s parade.
“We didn’t experience groups uninvited to the parade trying to crash,” he said.
The associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Dunn, said the low number of arrests was “good news.”
“This reflects well on the parade and on the police department,” he said.
