In the wake of a class-action suit challenging the way police patrol housing projects, trespassing charges dropped nearly 10 percent last year. "The pressure from the lawsuit seems to have helped," said William Gibney, a director at the Legal Aid Society, one of the groups that filed the suit in Jan. 2010, which alleges that false summonses have been issued across the city. But even so, trespassing charges have risen 44 percent since 2002.
Trespassing arrests went down to 18,290 in 2010, from 20,031 in 2009. Police say that vertical patrols of housing projects, which includes questioning people who are loitering and demanding to see ID, curtails drug dealing and other crimes. Critics say that it is just another means for cops to meet illegal quotas. One such example happened last summer, when a Brooklyn man was given a ticket by police for trespassing outside of his own apartment.
And last December, a Judge criticized the NYPD for unfairly manipulating Housing Authority rules in order to perform hundreds of thousands of unnecessary stop and frisks not in the spirit of the laws. The Times noted last winter that officers cited a suspicion of trespassing in only twelve percent of all street stops from 2003 to 2010. And even among those, the trespassing stops were "far more likely than most stops to result in nothing more than an inconvenient delay. Few moved beyond the questioning stage."
