New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has proposed granting amnesty to 1.2 million low-level offenders with open warrants for minor offenses such as drinking in public and disorderly conduct, according to CBS New York.
Some of the summonses stem from unresolved tickets that are more than a decade old, the station reported. Although hundreds of thousands of tickets for minor offenses were given out last year, 40 percent of offenders failed to show up in court, according to The Associated Press.
“Warrants never go away. There’s no expiration date,” Bratton said in an interview with the AP. “It would be great to get rid of a lot of that backlog. It’s not to our benefit from a policing standpoint to have all those warrants floating around out there.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office said officials are already investigating how pardoning minor offenses would work. A spokesman for the mayor told WCBS that drug crimes shouldn’t be forgiven.
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