At Home and Accused of Trespassing

At Home and Accused of Trespassing

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 27, 2012

Few things can be more galling than the takeover of public housing projects by hoodlums who use law-abiding people as camouflage for criminal activity.

Not too far behind would be the scoffing dismissal by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Thursday of the reality that legitimate people in projects are, at times, wrongly charged with trespassing.

Time and again, people accused of trespassing in the projects have provided pretty good evidence that they were there as guests or even residents, and many of them maintain that the authorities didn’t bother to check out their stories.

Such mistaken charges were being brought so often in the Bronx that prosecutors said that they wouldn’t pursue trespassing cases unless they interviewed the arresting officers.

On Thursday, the mayor said that the Bronx district attorney, Robert Johnson, was wasting officers’ time by asking them about the trespassing arrests. “If you want to bring crime back to New York, this is probably as good a way to start doing it,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

In that sense, the whole court system could be seen as a waste of police resources. As it happens, Manhattan prosecutors usually require interviews of police officers before proceeding in trespassing cases, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney said.

Mr. Johnson, an independently elected official who does not require Mr. Bloomberg’s permission to make decisions on enforcing the law, ignored the mayor’s gibe about bringing crime back. “The officers are answering our questions,” Mr. Johnson said, “and we’re making the judgments that we were hired to make.”

Steven Banks, the chief lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, which represents people accused of crimes, said: “We have cases in all five boroughs of New Yorkers who are either tenants or guests of tenants in the New York City Housing Authority who are arrested for allegedly trespassing when they weren’t. These cases divert attention of the courts, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers and the police from more serious matters.”

The mayor also said there really was no proof that mistaken trespassing arrests were a problem, an assertion that would not survive an avalanche of evidence to the contrary.

One authority on the subject is Aaron Brown, 24, arrested for trespassing last year at the Clinton Houses in Harlem.

Mr. Brown, an information technology manager for a federal agency, grew up in the Clinton project, and when he moved out after college, his mother and a brother remained behind. On a Friday evening last year, he called on them.

In the lobby of the building, he said Thursday, he was surrounded by police officers who asked what he was doing.

“They wanted to know, ‘Do you live here,’ and I said, ‘No, but I lived here for 10 years and my mother is on her way back from the store,’ ” Mr. Brown said. He gave them her apartment number.

“One of them asked, ‘Do you have any drugs on you or concealed weapons?’ ” Mr. Brown said. “I said: ‘No, why would you ask that? I just told you what I am doing here.’ ”

He was then cuffed and frisked, and the arrival of his mother in the lobby, home from the store and vouching for his status, did not change the course of events. Four hours later, he was released from custody with a summons to return to court, which he did three times before the charges were dropped. “I had to take personal leave to go to court, which I don’t have a lot of,” he said.

MR. BROWN is among many plaintiffs suing the city over trespassing arrests in a raft of cases. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which has brought one of the suits, says a study found that more than 60 percent of the charges are brought against African-Americans.

On Thursday, seven members of a PCP gang who had set up noxious shop in the Milbank-Frawley Houses in East Harlem pleaded guilty to a long list of charges. They were hunted down by the police after people in the projects, and a community center, complained of their operation.

Policing the projects is hard, essential, dangerous work. One could argue that arresting law-abiding people for trespassing there is necessary, if regrettable collateral damage. One might speculate that it is a byproduct of requirements that police officers show certain levels of activity every month, the toxic quantification of everything. But it would be purely delusional to argue that those arrests don’t happen and don’t hurt.

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