Let that be a (stupid) lesson for you

Joseph Goldstein and Christine Haughney have an article in The New York Times about getting busted on the subway:

William D. Peppers recalled how empty the subway car was. It was not yet 4 a.m. on a Friday, so most of New York was still asleep, but he was already late for his job at a Bronx bakery. As his train passed through midtown Manhattan, Peppers stretched out, closed his eyes and nodded off.
Then came the tap. It was a police officer.
Peppers had put his feet up on a subway seat, and that, the officer informed him, was a crime— one that, in his case, would lead to his arrest. He spent twelve hours in jail before he saw a judge, and was released after pleading guilty. “I can see if it was rush hour, but there was no one else on the train. Why not just say, ‘Put your feet down’? ” said Peppers, a maintenance man at the bakery. “I lost a day of work because of their pettiness.”
It is perhaps the most minor crime New Yorkers are routinely arrested for: sitting improperly on a subway seat. Seven years ago, rule 1050(7)(J) of the city’s transit code criminalized what was once simply bad etiquette: passengers putting their feet on a subway seat. They also cannot take up more than one seat if it interferes with other passengers’ comfort, nor can they block movement on a subway by doing something like standing too close to the doors.
Police officers handed out more than six thousand tickets for these violations in 2011. But a fifty dollar ticket would have been welcome compared with the trouble many passengers found themselves in; roughly 1,600 people like Peppers were arrested, sometimes waiting more than a day to be brought before a judge and released, according to statistics from district attorneys’ offices.
In some instances, passengers were arrested because they had outstanding warrants, or did not have photo identification. Some arrests were harder to explain, with no apparent cause other than the seat violation. In at least one case, the arrest led to deportation.
It is not clear why Peppers was not just given a ticket. He had an arrest record that dated back three decades and involved firearm possession, robbery, and the sale of crack cocaine; in 2009 he was released from prison, where he has spent much of his adult life. But he and his lawyer said there was no warrant for his arrest.
In interviews, public defenders who represent many of the passengers arrested say their clients tend to be among the working class, often kitchen workers who are exhausted as they begin or end long shifts at Manhattan restaurants. Lawyers say many of the cases originate on the F train at the Rockefeller Center stop.
In a recent decision, a Brooklyn judge, Noach Dear, dismissed the case of a man cited for taking up more than one seat on an A train at 3:10 a.m. on 24 December. "There appears to be a disconnect between the code’s goals and its enforcement,” Judge Dear wrote in his decision. He said that he and other Brooklyn judges had found these arrests happened “late at night or early in the morning when subways are generally at their least crowded levels.”
Some cases have cost the city. In November, court records show, New York City paid $150,000 to Juan Castillo, a diabetic, who was arrested for putting his feet on a subway seat after he briefly lifted his leg to inject himself with insulin while riding a Manhattan-bound F train to work. Police officers put him in jail and refused to give him access to his insulin for thirty hours, Castillo said in court papers. He ended up hospitalized for two days.
The city is now defending itself against a lawsuit brought by Abdi Omar, a thirty-year-old messenger who was arrested on 1 September at 10:40 p.m. and charged with having his feet on a subway seat. Omar said that an officer told him after removing him from the train that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest, which he denied. When Omar refused to be fingerprinted without proof of a warrant, officers sent him to Bellevue Hospital Center for a psychiatric evaluation, according to Omar’s suit. Ultimately, it says, the police never produced a warrant for Omar; he contested the seat summons and won.
Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, said enforcement of subway regulations had made the transit system much safer. “One of the reasons that crime on the subways has plummeted from almost fifty crimes a day in 1990 to only seven now is because the NYPD enforces violations large and small, often encountering armed or wanted felons engaged in relatively minor offenses, like putting their feet up, smoking on a platform, walking or riding between cars, or fare beating,” Browne said.
In April, for instance, the police arrested a nineteen-year-old man, Kyron Hughes, for stretching out across a number of subway seats. After officers at the police station recognized him from a wanted poster, Hughes was charged with a string of robberies, Browne said. In another episode, officers arrested a man for taking up two seats in car at 3 a.m., and later discovered he was a suspect in a gunpoint robbery, Browne said.
Steven Banks, the chief attorney for the city’s Legal Aid Society, which represents many riders arrested for seat violations, suggested that police officers who make arrests for seat violations are driven by the prospect of overtime pay and the pressure to produce arrests periodically.
Some of the arrests are made by the Police Department’s homeless outreach unit, even though many of those arrested are not homeless. Defense lawyers suggested in interviews that homeless outreach officers found these arrests easier to make than their primary job, coaxing homeless people into shelters.
“It is far easier to give the back of the hand than a helping hand,” Banks said.
One police officer who works in the transit system acknowledged that there were a lot of “petty arrests”, but he said that officers were under pressure from supervisors to “bring in one collar” each month. The officer, speaking anonymously, was generally disdainful of making arrests for seat violations, but pointed out that stopping people on these charges allowed officers to check them for outstanding warrants. “It quite often happens with people laying down on the seats— sure, it could be an empty train, but you stop them and if they don’t have their ID, you have your collar,” he said.
Many defense lawyers question if the Police Department has taken these cases too far.
Michael Weaver, 20, a construction worker, was heading home to Harlem after having Thanksgiving dinner with his girlfriend’s family. As he rode an empty E train, Weaver said, he nodded off and his right knee and thigh leaned on the empty seat next to him. Just before 1 a.m., he said, he was jolted awake by a police officer who accused him of taking up more than one seat. After he spent the night in a cell with two dozen men, he appeared before Judge Toko Serita. The judge offered to dismiss the case if he stayed out of trouble for six months.
“This is one of those cases that makes people lose faith in our criminal justice system,” Joel Schmidt, the Legal Aid lawyer representing Weaver, said at his arraignment. “Makes me wonder what our police officers are really doing at 1 o’clock in the morning.”
An extreme result was the deportation of Flavio Uzhca, a 32-year-old line chef from Ecuador, who was returning home to Woodside in Queens from his gym before 8 p.m. on 10 March. When he stood at the door of a packed Number Seven train, an officer escorted him off and asked to see identification, he said in an email. Uzhca said he showed identification from Ecuador. By the time he was arraigned, the authorities learned that an immigration judge had issued an order in 2002 for his deportation.
Uzhca called his bosses the owners of Bistro Vendome, a French restaurant in Midtown where he worked, to tell them he would not be at work that day. He never did return.

Rico says it's another good reason not to ride the subway in New York City...