After two police officers were gunned down in New York last month, police appeared to cut way back on arrests and summonses, a fact NYPD chief William Bratton confirmed last week. Now those numbers are finally beginning to climb again, though they remain well below last year's levels, the New York Times reports. Last week, officers made 4,690 arrests, compared to 2,401 the week before—though a year before, the number was 7,508. Parking summonses showed a similar shift. The apparent change comes after Bratton called on officers to halt the slowdown. "There are no quotas, if you will," he said. "But based on past experience, we would expect more activity than we [have] been experiencing over these last several weeks."
"We are pleased with the fact that the officers are beginning to re-engage again," Bratton says. "With each passing day, each passing week, those numbers are going back to what we would describe as normal levels." Meanwhile, officers have continued to suggest they haven't been holding back intentionally, and a New York Daily News analysis suggests that "low-level policing" began to drop even before the officers were killed. Between Dec. 1 and 7, arrests and summonses were already down 55% compared with a year before. "[Mayor Bill] de Blasio doesn't want us to write tickets," says an officer. "Public housing, they don't want us to make trespass collars. Marijuana's almost legal now at this point. A lot of your numbers are from that." (More police stories.)
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