NYPD Practice of Arresting People Over Minor Offenses Draws Criticism

Even as violent crime has receded across New York City, arrests are near historic highs, driven by an increasingly controversial imperative that no offense is too minor for police officers to pursue. Now, the death of a Staten Island man after officers tried to arrest him for peddling cigarettes is intensifying scrutiny of the Police Department’s unflagging push to arrest people over the most minor offenses.

The Police Department reported making 394,539 arrests last year. That is tens of thousands more arrests than in 1995, when there were three times as many murders in the city and the department was in its early embrace of the “broken windows” strategy, which sees enforcement of low-level offenses as effective at preventing more serious crime.

William J. Bratton, the man who brought “broken windows” policing to New York in the 1990s, is once again the city’s police commissioner, appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, and is carrying on the department’s focus on so-called quality of life crimes that he considers the seeds of more serious disorder.

Eric Garner, 43, was a target of those efforts.