NYPD: Driving Down Crime By Creating It

Plainclothes New York City police officers have a new hobby: leaving wallets in public places such as department stores and fast-food eateries, then staking out the spot. The idea is that maybe someone will pick up the wallet and not turn it in right then and there. In that case, the cops pounce and arrest the freshly-minted criminal (a solid majority of those nabbed have no prior arrests).

I'm no law wiz, so I couldn't say if this scheme meets the legal definition for police entrapment.

It's asinine regardless. That's partly because it's specifically designed to do disproportional damage to the alleged perp.

The earliest decoy operation, last year, involved purses and wallets stuffed with a couple of hundred dollars at most. If you tried to make off with one, you'd get charged with petty larceny, a misdemeanor, though you might still be looking at a year in jail. Now the NYPD, obviously pleased with its fine handiwork, has upped the ante. The new decoy wallets contain at least one credit card in addition to some cash. What's the difference? This:

Because the theft of a credit card is grand larceny, a Class E felony, those convicted could face sentences of up to four years.

To its credit, the Manhattan District Attorney's office has begun dismissing last year's cases, perhaps in part due to a ruling by a Brooklyn judge who reminded the NYPD that people are in fact by law allowed 10 days to turn in found property.

Unfortunately, the local cops must be hard of hearing, or maybe they believe they're the final arbiters of what the law ought to be, because they're still at it, creating interesting cases such as this one:

Aquarius Cheers, a 31-year-old Manhattan man who said he was on a shopping expedition with his wife, spotted a Verizon shopping bag with a cellphone and iPod inside at the 59th Street station of the No. 1 train. As he was looking in the bag, a train arrived. Mr. Cheers said he and his wife boarded, rushed past a uniformed officer, bringing along the bag with the intention of looking for a receipt. Undercover officers then grabbed him. After his case was reported by NY1, the prosecutors vacated the charges.

Mr. Cheers, at the very most, might be guilty of having a name too unlikely for even a T.C. Boyle novel.

Considerably more bizarre than his name, however, is the fact that New York's finest have such obscene amounts of time on their hands that they must go out and create crime in order to fight it.

Comments

[benpal]

I'm not sure that picking something up somebody has disposed of on purpose(!!) can be considered theft.
But even if it was a lost object, as long as you cannot identify its legal owner, you cannot give it back. Bringing it to a police station is of no help either, because you don't know if the police officer on duty is trustworthy, unless you know him/her personally.

[David]

The whole system is fucked up at this point. Why would picking up a lost wallet constitute theft?

This would make some sense if (maybe) if the police were doing things like putting down a bag or backpack before entering a bathroom to catch the sort of person who robs you as soon as you look the other way. But just a random wallet left where no one knows when the owner might return strikes me as very lazy.

Of course, given that these guys are trained to regard any non-officer as a criminal, they probably don't see it that way.