Town Board Revisits Ticket Backlog: Police Will Deal With Town Issued Tickets

Town board members revisited the issue of the 5,000 traffic ticket backlog during their Feb. 8 work session. 

The two town justices, Sal Lagonia and Ilan Gilbert, have already to put in additional hours to deal with the tickets. In a previous work session on Jan. 25,  that court prosecutor Ingrid O’Sullivan will handle all plea bargains, including town and state tickets. 

Chief of Police Daniel McMahon said he was not consulted on the matter prior to the decision. 

After listening to him and three other police department officials, Det. Brian Shanahan, Lt. Robert Noble and officer Larry Eidelman, board members unanimously decided to restore police officers going into town court to deal with the tickets they've issued.

"The change was too drastic," McMahon said of the previous decision."We'll look [into the current system] to make sure it's running as efficiently as it can and make adjustments where necessary."

Supervisor Susan Siegel had proposed that the court prosecutor handles town police tickets, because she said it would be less expensive than paying police overtime. Councilman Jim Martorano said the town had received inaccurate numbers about the cost of police officers dealing with their tickets.

"Let's get the right facts so we can make the right decision," he said. 

Based on court records, Shanahan said, 60 percent of tickets the court deals with are state tickets, and the rest, 40 percent, are town issued tickets. 

"As police officers we observe violations and enforce the law by issuing summonses," he said.

As part of the judicial process when police officers go into court, he said, they are there to testify as to the facts of the violation of the law. During those court appearances, violators may enter a plea bargain, but officers are available to go to trial if necessary. If a police officer, who is familiar with the case of a persistent offender, is not present, the person negotiating may not have that additional information to take into consideration. 

"The supervisor has turned this into a revenue scheme and it misinforms the public by implying all officers are on four-hour overtime callouts," he said.

According to records, police officer Eidelman told board members that between July 1, 2010 and Jan. 31, 2011, 78 police officers were scheduled to go to court. Out of them, 41 officer went on overtime, and 37 were paid on straight time. 14 out of those on overtime, worked on a four-hour time slip; 11 of whom worked a midnight shift, and therefore did not have to come off their shift to go into court. 

Eidelman said 27 police officers, out of the 41 on overtime, had a total combined overtime of 31 hours, making it a little more than an hour per person.

Siegel raised the issue that if police officers who are on regular time and have a court appearance, they are taken out of regular street patrol time and are not responding to calls they would normally respond to, which she said was important.

"And that's important, right?" Shanahan said. "Because then I hope when the Chief comes up next for staffing that you are going to increase manpower [...] You can't have it both ways, Supervisor."

The Yorktown Police department is down three police officers this year. Sergeant Kurt Gullery will be retiring at the end of the month, and two more officers have submitted their papers. 

Although there has always been backlog, it got worse when state troopers stopped coming into town court to deal with the traffic tickets. 

McMahon said the backlog issue could be taken care of if judges were to sit on the benches for a longer period of time. He said that 30 years ago, there were no plea bargains, and now those people who plead not guilty, can clog up the system.

"Nobody pleads guilty anymore," he said. 

Siegel said case dismissals is an issue and said in her analysis out of 185 cases 30 were dismissed, whether because an officer didn't show up, it was dismissed beforehand, or a plea was negotiated.

McMahon said there will be times when a police officer is sick, and Lt. Noble should get notified as well as the court, so the case could be postponed and not dismissed. 

Lt. Noble thanked the board for discussing the matter.

"With all these extra tickets coming in, we get more defendants in there," he said. "The bottom line is most of the people making mistakes are decent people, every once and then you get a bad person and they might have some bad intention."

Having a police officer in the courtroom, he said, makes it safer for the people coming in.