Philly cops hand out thousands more citations every year following a rule change

For years, getting caught cracking open a beer on the streets of Philadelphia was an arrestable offense. In fact, it was the only place in Pennsylvania where police officers were required by law to detain those who had committed very low-level crimes — sometimes for hours — just to issue a citation and a small fine. 

However, a recent court order changed how the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) handles citations for similar “quality of life” crimes (known as “summary offenses”), like public urination, open-container violations and public nudity. What once involved a trip to a local district station is now handled on the street in a matter of minutes, like a parking ticket. But new police data provides evidence that these well-intentioned reforms might be working a little too well.

The changes came in 2009, after the state Supreme Court reviewed Philadelphia’s “non-traffic summary citation procedures,” at the urging of Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. After the court’s Criminal Procedural Rules Committee concurred that the city’s rules were largely a waste of time, an order was issued that brought Philadelphia’s police codes in line with the rest of the state.

“These are the crimes we’re looking to address immediately out on the street,” said police Lt. Kevin Long. “We’re allowing the officer to deal with the problem and then be back in service within 15 minutes, as opposed to taking the individual into headquarters and then taking the officer out of service for two hours.”

Indeed, the number of citations has skyrocketed since the rule change. In 2009, the last year before the new rules took effect, patrolmen issued just 13,300 citations, according to police data. But by 2013, that number had jumped to 23,400 citations — an extraordinary 75-percent increase.

Long attributed the jump to police clamping down on crimes that previously may not have been worth the hassle of an arrest.  

“If you have an open container, an officer may not have addressed that because of the time it takes you out of service,” said Long, referring to the old codes. “Now an officer is more compelled to write a citation on the street and continue on their patrol duties.”

However, if that were the case, one might expect to see an increase in citations across all police districts, but that’s not what’s happening. In fact, most districts saw their citation stats decline or stay the same over the last three years. 

Prior to the rules change, the districts with the most quality-of-life crimes were those in and around Center City — an area with lots of people and bars. But since the change, there has been a surge in the number of citations issued by just four outlying police districts, in Overbrook, Kensington, Mantua and Lawndale in the Northeast. Together, those four districts accounted for nearly half of all citations issued across all 21 police districts last year. 

Additionally, the SEPTA police, who patrol the public transit system and flagged just a single summary offense in 2011, issued over 8,700 citations last year alone.

The increase among transit cops was deliberate, said SEPTA Police Chief Thomas Nestel, describing his vision of clamping down on fare jumpers as part of a “broken-windows” approach to increasing the perception of safety on mass transit lines.

“We’re very focused right now on fare evasion. We’ve actually deputized our cashiers, and as soon as they see a fare evasion they notify us,” said Nestel, who said most summary citations last year were issued aboard SEPTA trains. “It’s our opinion that people who are not paying to get on the system are getting on the system to do other things that are not positive.”

Conversely, Commissioner Ramsey said his office had not directed commanders in the four “high-performing” districts to step up citations, and suggested that district commanders may have taken it upon themselves to react to “community concerns.”

“If you receive complaints, you have to deal with them,” said Ramsey. “If it’s something of a minor nature that can be handled with a summary citation, then obviously that’s what we would opt to do.”

However, some PPD officers, who asked to remain anonymous, disputed this notion, saying district captains sometimes lean on street cops to “juice” enforcement stats by handing out more of the easily issued citations. By pumping up numbers with the low-hanging fruit, captains attempt to create the illusion of activity and progress in tough neighborhoods.

In general, the pattern of citations did not seem to parallel high-crime areas, population density or even neighborhoods with lots of alcohol permits. The busy 15th District (which has the highest number of calls for police service) and the booze-filled 5th District (which covers Manayunk) ranked in the middle and bottom of the list, respectively, in terms of summary citations. Even the notoriously violent 22nd District did not rank among the top five for these kinds of crimes.

Legal advocates were also skeptical about the efficacy of an increasing number of summary citations, as such charges often disproportionately affect the poor.

“We definitely do see a big impact on our clients from these summary convictions,” said Jamie Gullen, a staff attorney at Community Legal Services, an agency that provides counseling and representation for indigent Philadelphians. “A lot of the time we hear from people that didn’t even realize it was a criminal charge because they were just given a citation on the street. Some people think it’s a traffic ticket.”

But Gullen added that because the citations show up on background checks and criminal records, some people are denied job opportunities because of these minor and sometimes debatable “offenses.”

“We see a lot of clients with disorderly conduct citations, which is one of these super-vague offenses,” she said. “Under the criminal code, there’s a provision for disorderly conduct for making a loud noise in a public place. You could probably walk around Philadelphia giving out thousands of [those] citations every day.”

Gullen said that average person charged with a summary offense can opt to pay $200 up front and attend a special “summary-diversion program” — basically paying their way out of trouble and expunging their criminal record in the process. She recommended creating a payment-plan system to give low-income residents the same opportunity.

“For people of resources, it’s really easy to get out of these cases and not have it impact your record. But for our clients who don’t have $200 to front for these cases, they end up pleading guilty,” said Gullen. “It really is an income issue.”