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by M. Chris Fabricant
On a hot August night last summer in the South Bronx, David M. was walking toward the front door of his friend Dee's high-rise public-housing building. As he approached the door, he saw an NYPD paddy wagon stationed on the corner and a police officer starting to climb out. So David thought better of it and decided not to visit Dee, to just keep walking.
Then he heard footsteps behind him. Soon his face was pressed against the wall of Dee's building, with his jeans pulled down to his ankles and his T-shirt pushed into his armpits as gloved hands ran over his body. The police officer kept shouting at him to give up the stash, and David kept insisting he didn't have anything.
Twenty minutes later, David was shirtless, chained to a few other people in the back of the paddy wagon, and charged with trespassing. He spent the next four hours in the back of the sweltering NYPD meat wagon as police rounded up other young men for trespassing.
David eventually became my client, but there is nothing unusual about his story. Every attorney in my office has had dozens of similar cases. David's story is unique in one way: He is fighting it. Unlike virtually all of my clients, he wasn't worn down by the methodical torture of Bronx Criminal Justice and taking a guilty plea.
Before coming to the Bronx Defenders (where I am a staff attorney), I had never had a misdemeanor case, and rare was the client I was certain was innocent. In the Bronx, well over half of my cases are misdemeanors, and I have had a disgraceful number of innocent clients, many of whom plead guilty to a trespassing charge, either in a "Clean Halls" building or a New York City Public Housing building. "Operation Clean Halls" allows the NYPD to stop, search, question, and arrest anyone in or even near the building in an action called a "vertical." Clean Halls has been touted as a tool for keeping drugs and drug dealing out of low-income housing, but once a landlord signs a Clean Halls affidavit, no one can leave their home without their papers.
Trespassing arrests are up a staggering 25 percent since 2002—and this is no crime wave, no trespassing epidemic. The Clean Halls program is a major component of "Operation Impact," which was launched by the NYPD in 2003 and targets neighborhoods like the one David grew up in by flooding them with rookie police officers trying to make as many arrests as possible. In the 28-month period following the launch of the operation, 72,000 arrests were made in the targeted areas. More HERE
