It's not sure that the money could be better spent. It's the subject of debate. The Guiliani-Bloomberg policing strategy has been to arrest and prosecute minor offenders. The theory is that vigorous enforcement for minor offences keeps order and reduces major crime. We don't know why, of course, but following implementation of strategies consistent with the theory, crime dropped in NYC (Yes, Yes, it was dropping before, under Mayor Dinkins).

I personally disagree with the "broken windows" theory, but the drop in crime rates is hard to argue with.

There are, in addition, a number of institutional pressures which seem to encourage misdemeanor prosecution. For example: Police commanders who districts report felony increases are subject to criticism from NYPD management. This encourages crimes that could be charged as felonies to be downgraded.

In addition, as crime-rates fall, the whole law-enforcement criminal-justice industry needs a steady stream of defendants to justify its continuation. Even though crime conintues to fall in NYC, our courts and jails stay crowded.

Whether you agree with the laws or not, they are still the laws, and they were broken by these people. However, I'll agree that handcuffs and detention are probably unnecessary where an appearance ticket would suffice in most of those cases.

As for the guy selling to the underage girl (probably a plant in a sting), it's all part and parcel to the crackdown on alcohol laws - however, it seems like no matter how much TPTB crack down on the under-21 laws, people under the age of 21 still manage to get their hands on alcohol, and with little effort. OVERLY PUNITIVE POLICIES ARE INEFFECTIVE.

However, that's a discussion for another day. :-)

Thank you for having the stamina to keep up this fight.

This is the other (unseen) side of the "broken windows" policing approach given so much credit for the decline in crime during the Giuliani years and apparently favored by the Bloomberg administration. What is needed is a definitive way to show that locking up the sellers of air fresheners (or "squeegee men") is, in fact, not the reason crime declined. The question is, do arrests like this simply reflect the fact that some people are easier to arrest than real criminals? Is the real fault not only with hardened police officers, or with judges who might let the police know they don't want their time wasted and their dockets packed with minor league cases?

To Jennifer: You write that the laws are the laws, whether I agree with them or not, and they were broken by "these people". True. But would you have the same matter-of-fact response if the police started roaming liberal arts college campuses and universities, from Yale to Smith to NYU, stopping and searching countless students often without justification, and when they find marijuana, or a student selling bootleg movies, or air fresheners, or if at a dorm party alcohol being sold to minors, dragging these students out of their dorm building, or from the front steps of the library, or off the lawn with their friends, and putting them in prison for two days, forcing them to miss class (maybe a final exam), possibly get expelled from school, perform community service, perhaps get a criminal record, etc.? All for, say, possessing a bag of marijuana. Perhaps you would feel the same. But I don't think our society would stand for it, in large part because the arrestees would be predominantly white and wealthy. In fact, that is why it NEVER happens. Yet, it occurs every day in the Bronx, and society just shrugs its shoulders, in large part because "these people" described in my blog were all either African-American or Latino, or Chinese and Mexican immigrants. The double-standards are outrageous. The laws are the laws only for specific people, even though a much larger portion of our society breaks them.

Daniel: I too disagree with the broken windows theory, and as you note, the crime rate had started to fall, and there are other possible explanations for it (for instance, a very good economy for much of the 1990's). Broken windows gives the police unbridled discretion to arrest lots of people for little things (or for no reason at all). As a result, for instance, whereas in 1993 prosecutors dismissed around 9,000 misdemeanor and felony arrests, in 1998 they dismissed 18,000 (of 345,000). More than 140,000 cases completed in 1998 resulted in dismissals, an increase of 60% from 1993. In the Bronx and Manhattan, dismissals rose by 41% and 23% in 1998, respectively, even as crime rates declined. Such increases suggests both that many arrests were either bogus or unsustainable in court and that prosecutors had too many minor cases to prosecute them all. Moreover, in 1997 and 1998, the Street Crimes Unit stopped and frisked 18,023 and 27,061 people, respectively, but arrested only 4,899 and 4,647. Put another way, the police unit detained over 45,000 people in two years but arrested only 9,500, meaning that they detained 35,000 people who had not committed a crime. Something is certainly broken, then, about the broken windows theory.

I agree that the criminal justice system needs to justify its budget, staff, etc., by keeping the jails crowded (the same goes for upstate prisons). Without arresting people for minor offenses, and certainly without arresting people at all for drug-related incidents, it would render unnecessary at least one-third of all prisons, corrections officers, police officers, judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers.

Owen: I think these arrests occur, in part, because they are so easy. A woman walking through a subway with DVDs is easy to spot and has nowhere to go. There will be no uproar when the police approach a 17-year-old Dominican girl on the corner, search her for no reason, and arrest her for a bag of marijuana. It is more difficult, dangerous, and time consuming to find the person who transports weapons from Florida to New York, or the drug kingpin who operates his business indoors, or the Wall Street stockbroker commiting fraud. And as I wrote above, no police unit is carrying out undercover drug operations at Cornell University.

As for the judges, they do often express their dismay or annoyance at many of the low-level cases that clog up the system, but by then, the harm is done. What the judges should do, if they really care, is organize and start pressuring the police department, city council, the mayor, etc., for a change in our policing policies.