Arrests have surged citywide in the past week – apparently because NYPD brass eliminated caps on cop overtime, The Post has learned.
The dramatic increase in the number of busts – up 40 percent in one borough – has already led to overflowing jail cells and arraignment courts, sending authorities scrambling to deal with the influx of perps, sources said.
On Jan. 1, The Post revealed that the NYPD was ending its cap on overtime because police brass wanted more arrests to counteract the upward trend in murders and shootings, which jumped 9 percent and 2 percent respectively in 2006.
“The more bad guys you put in jail, the less likely they are to shoot and kill people,” said a law-enforcement source.
The old OT system had been seen as discouraging officers from making arrests after they hit their limit, because the average collar is a time-consuming process.
Many of the additional arrests made in the past week have been for narcotics, although a number were also the result of outstanding warrants being executed, sources said.
As of Friday evening, cops in Manhattan had made about 1,400 arrests since Monday, sources said.
Normally, those sources said, what would be considered a “high” number of arrests for the same five-day period would be close to 1,000 arrests.
In Brooklyn, there were more than 1,650 arrests made between Monday and Friday night, even though that borough typically lags behind Manhattan in total arrests.
In The Bronx, cops had made about 2,000 arrests in little under a week, compared to 1,600 arrests for the same week last year.
The number of arrests has so overwhelmed the jail capacity in that borough that authorities had to ship some suspects to jails in Manhattan and Queens while they awaited arraignment.
“That’s a serious problem,” said one source. He noted that because people have to be arraigned within 24 hours in the same borough where they were arrested, shipping them to other boroughs’ jails to be temporarily held means that they have to be transported back for arraignment within a tight time frame.
In Queens, there were so many arrests during the week that officials had to bring in a second judge and another set of court support staff to handle arraignments Saturday, a source said.
“It’s definitely going to have to be monitored,” one source said about the increases in arrests. “If this continues, they’re going to have to make contingency plans” for jails and court staffs.
That source also said that while it seems the boost in arrests shows that “the cops are responding to the no-overtime cap, it could also be cops being cops – they’re grabbing it [the money] while they can, because they know it’s not going to last forever.”
In fact, sources said, the Post article detailing the end of the OT policy – announced by department Chief Joseph Esposito under Commissioner Ray Kelly – had been posted in precincts throughout the city, and cops were sending faxes of the story to each other.
OT pay had been capped at the end of every month or quarter, depending on the command, with a typical limit of about $8,000 per quarter. OT hours worked beyond that limit were compensated with time off.