The police in New York City wrote 124,498 summonses last year for drinking in public — far more than for any other violation. After having to adjudicate so many of these public drinking cases, a Brooklyn judge has decided he has had enough.

The judge, Noach Dear, has signaled that from now on, he intends to hold the police to a highly impractical standard if they want to issue a summons for drinking alcohol from a cup: The police must prove that the beverage in question was alcoholic.

The sniff test, he wrote, was not enough.

Judge Dear made his intentions known in a written decision released on Thursday in a run-of-the-mill Criminal Court case: Julio Figueroa, 38, was cited for illegally drinking a cup of beer on a city sidewalk near his home in Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn.

It was not sufficient, the judge wrote, that a police officer had smelled the contents of Mr. Figueroa’s cup and detected beer. Nor was it enough that Mr. Figueroa had told the police officer that, yes, the liquid was indeed beer.