Shaquana James is due to give birth any day now. Over the past few months, she has restricted herself from frivolous movement and rarely left her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to go anywhere but her doctor’s office. But in June she saw a Facebook post about Begin Again, Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson’s new initiative offering city residents a chance to work with an on-site attorney and judge to resolve open arrest warrants for low-level offenses. James asked her mother to accompany her to Begin Again’s first event, at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, on Father’s Day weekend, to clear her warrant before she gives birth.
“I don’t know what happened,” James said of the initial summons. She kept one pink earbud in as we talked outside the church. She had just successfully cleared her warrant. In March, she recounted, she was sitting on a bench with her cousin in Fulton Park when a police officer approached. “She gave us both tickets for public drinking, but I wasn’t even holding anything,” James said. She stretched the length of the earbud wire across her stomach. She thought her pregnancy must have been visible to the officer that night. James was unable to travel to the summons court, in lower Manhattan, the day she had been assigned to answer the citation. As generally happens with unanswered summonses, a warrant was put out for her arrest.
The process for clearing James’s open warrant was short and easy. “I gave my name. I saw the attorney. I told him what happened. And then I saw the judge inside the church,” she told me. As we spoke, she kept her right hand on her stomach and occasionally raised her left hand to block the sun. We walked down the church steps, into a tented street resource fair. The district attorney’s office had invited the youth-development agency Good Shepherd Services, the criminal-justice research nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, and more than twenty other local organizations to set up shop. An intern with the Campaign Finance Board registered James to vote. A nurse in the SUNY Downstate Medical Center tent measured her blood pressure.
Amnesty programs for minor offenses have some precedent within the borough. In 2012, the Legal Aid Society and the office of Charles Hynes, the district attorney at the time, ran a similar program, Operation Safe Surrender. The difference between the names of the two programs—between assumed criminality and innocence—says a lot about recent changes at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Hynes’s tenure was marked by a legacy of questionable prosecutorial actions, including pushing weak cases and a number of wrongful convictions, the victims mostly being black people. Since he took office last year, Thompson, Brooklyn’s first black district attorney, has prioritized efforts that, he told me in a phone interview, “keep young black and brown New York City residents from having to interact with the N.Y.P.D.”
Since taking office in January, 2014, Thompson has established a conviction-review unit; by early 2015, Thompson had vacated the wrongful convictions of a dozen men. Thompson has also stopped prosecuting some individuals for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. With Begin Again, he has created a potential template for a larger warrant-amnesty program. (Last May, N.Y.P.D. Commissioner William Bratton expressed openness to such a program, but did not offer any details.) “If someone was given a summons for riding a bike on the sidewalk, or for loitering, then that person is not a criminal,” Thompson told me. A second Begin Again event—with a similar mobile courtroom setup at a church—will take place in East New York, on September 12th.
In an attempt to combat skepticism and increase awareness about Begin Again, Thompson’s office launched an effective public-education campaign, sending personalized letters to Brooklyn residents, postering hair salons, barbershops, and schools, and stationing volunteers with flyers at subway entrances in East New York, Brownsville, Canarsie, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East Flatbush, Vinegar Hill, and other predominantly black and heavily policed neighborhoods. The week of the event, Thompson went on "The Breakfast Club," a local morning radio show, to speak to concerns that might keep people from attending. When one of the hosts asked whether a person could be arrested at the site itself, Thompson replied, “This is not a sting. This is not a trick.” Later, he reiterated, “This is going to require a leap of faith.”
More than a thousand people came to Emmanuel Baptist on Father’s Day weekend. Five hundred warrants came from the borough of Brooklyn; sixty-one came from Manhattan; fifty-three were from Queens; and the remainder came from the Bronx and Staten Island. Outside the church, the Reverend Anthony Trufant blessed the carriages of justice within his church and prayed for justice in Charleston, South Carolina, where, days before, a gunman killed nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church. “Churches are sanctuaries,” Thompson said as he introduced Trufant*. “Today we are transforming Emmanuel Baptist Church into a sanctuary of justice.”
About halfway through the event, organization representatives, N.Y.P.D officers, clergy, and elected officials spoke outside Emmanuel Baptist’s eastern façade. “Our criminal-justice system should be a foundation that stabilizes our community, and not an anchor that weighs us down,” New York City's public advocate, Letitia James, said. Of the 1.2 million open warrants in the New York City court system, more than a quarter originated in Brooklyn. “The settlement of warrants for low-level offenses that District Attorney Thompson is proposing is a critical step in rebuilding police and community relations,” James continued.
Black pedestrians with wandering gaits stopped under a trio of trees to listen. One man balanced his weight on the left pedal of his beginning-to-rust bicycle, which he had wheeled noiselessly onto the sidewalk from a block away. A couple of teen-age boys perched on locked Citi Bikes, both listening, until one crossed the street to wait in line at the church.
*An earlier version of this post misidentified the speaker of the quotation.
