Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.

In case you were curious how much it would cost if you were caught drinking a beer on your front stoop and caught again urinating it out on the corner a couple of hours later, Judge Eugene L. Schwartzwald has come up with a handy reminder: “Twenty-five on the way in, and 50 on the way out.”

It’s the joke he delivers at the start of most days. The judge — an amateur comedian on the stand-up circuit at nursing homes, and at Caroline’s, a midtown comedy club — has a packed and captive audience here, in a courtroom on the second-floor of the old New York Life Insurance building in Lower Manhattan. Assuredly, those present would rather be doing something else with their time.

Schwartzwald presides over the Summons Part — New York’s go-to court for petty violations charges, including open containers of alcohol (132,225 summonses in 2009), public urination (a k a “litter liquids”; 11,246 summonses), riding a bike on the sidewalk (22,136 cyclists), and making more noise than one’s neighbors can bear (7,044 partiers). Taken together, those nuisances earn the city about $8.8 million a year, which makes Schwartzwald as much of a collection agent as a judge.



The Summons Part is the lowest possible rung on the sequence of ladders that constitutes the city’s criminal justice system. This is, in other words, the place where New Yorkers go to regret what they did — or got caught doing (or didn’t do, of course) — on a Saturday night. With around 600,000 summonses issued a year, each day is an exercise in speed justice, the kind befitted to a diverse, cantankerous, ticked-off and harried resident of a city like ours. The court is a study in the lengths people will go to to not pay $25. But it is also a litmus test, one that raises very real questions about what happens when expediency drives a justice system and a fine is so low that the actual punishment is just having to show up.

How many people who walk into that courtroom will leave owing nothing to the city but their frustration?

On any given day, the line of people waiting to get into the courtroom stretches down the hallway. The defendants are almost entirely black and brown-skinned, and male, a sea of puffy winter coats and knockoff Timberland boots. “Trying to find legal parking in this city is like trying to find the holy grail!,” bemoaned Dan, 23, a restaurant equipment repairman, who had a traffic ticket. Beside him was a middle-aged mechanic who looked antsy: he was parked illegally outside, and his work van was idling. The prospect of getting in and out quickly that morning was looking increasingly unlikely.

Behind the mechanic were two 20-something women — the only women in line, actually — who had been drinking wine in Central Park before heading off to a gallery exhibition on the Upper West Side. (Later on, the court officer separated the women for being too chatty.)

“I figured it out, if I get one ticket a day, I’m making less than minimum wage,” Dan explained. At that point, Dan estimated he was racking up three to four parking tickets a month — so many, in fact, that his three-person company considered the tickets to be a business expense, and he splits the cost with his boss. After all, he figured, it’s nearly impossible to repair restaurant equipment in the 20 minutes allotted for parking in a commercial loading zone.

Another man waiting in line planned to plead not guilty to an open container violation and request a trial. The man, who claimed he hadn’t had a drink since 1999, was carrying a leather folder stuffed with a certificate of exceptional service to his Brooklyn church and a card that identified him as a substance abuse counselor.

“I already did my time in Rikers,” he said. “If it’s something I did, I’ll take my lumps like a man. But I ain’t pleading guilty to something I didn’t do!” He looked down the line, at the people around him. “You all understand, don’t you?” Some shrugged. Down the hallway, a Pace University acting major was explaining to a bemused-looking clerk why he couldn’t show up for his court date; he was going out of state for winter break. The student had been urinating outside his dormitory.

Anna Parini

The courtroom is one of those quintessential New York situations where people are just sort of cobbled together, trying to make sense of it all. Like an apartment building, it is a self-contained world, peopled with its characters, conforming to its own logic. The court attorneys, often former prosecutors who now give counsel to 200 plus people a day, shuffle in and out, jotting down the bare bones of people’s sagas and stories, sifting through gripes and vituperations, offering advice on the fly. As in any court, the attorneys know the predilections of the judges: some don’t like cyclists; another has a thing against dogs. One judge, a court officer told me, used to charge higher fines for people caught drinking imported beer than for those drinking domestic ones.

I once had my own experience with this court, when I was issued an open container summons while on a really bad date. No sooner had we opened up a bottle of muscadet –- on a bench right outside my apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn — than a cop drove right up and ticketed us. I never wanted to see the guy again, but three months later, we were forced to spend an awkward afternoon waiting in line for our cases to be heard by the summons judge. (They were dismissed, and I flew out of there.)

Inside Schwartzwald’s courtroom, the proceedings move at an astonishing pace. A skinny man in a leather jacket approached the bench. “Dismissed. Proof!,” Schwartzwald announced, within seconds. The police officer writing the summons had failed to indicate whether the beverage the man was drinking was actually alcohol. (“It could’ve been orange juice!,” his attorney said.) On his way out of the courtroom, the man stopped and gave a little triumphant nod to the people left behind on the benches, who would sit out the better part of the day.

A gypsy cab driver next took the stand. “Red lights are for you too, sir,” said Schwartzwald, barely looking up. “That’ll be $50, thank you.” Next up was an African-American woman wearing braids close on her scalp, orange headphones in her ears. “Please keep that dog on a leash!,” Schwartzwald demanded, and sentenced her to community service. The woman rolled her eyes like she’d heard it before. (She had, in fact. Since last February, the East New York woman said she had been to the courtroom three times on summonses related to her German Shepherd.)

And so it went, on into the afternoon. A woman charged with that vague catchall known as disorderly conduct was asked what she had been doing to get herself arrested. “I was arguing,” the woman unapologetically told the judge, who then gave her a pass in the form of an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, meaning that if she stayed out of trouble, the case would be dropped in a number of months.

A large portion of the cases get A.C.D.’s, or are dismissed outright, often because whatever an officer wrote on a ticket didn’t satisfy the charges at hand. Indeed, while the city does not provide exact numbers in its annual report, a few veteran court attorneys estimated that between 35 and 45 percent of cases are ultimately dismissed. (And this is on top of an additional 20 percent or so of summonses that are thrown out routinely by the court system before a person ever gets a notice of a hearing date!)

On the one hand, the large number of dismissals is heartening: We have access to a legal system in which, even for the smallest violations, we can defend our rights and be acquitted. But on the other hand, it raises a few questions: why are so many summonses being issued in the first place? Why are people being put through the hassle? How many people who walk into that courtroom on Lower Broadway — or any of the three other city courts where summonses are processed — will leave owing nothing to the city but their frustration? To have the court conduct itself in this way might appear to some to be a tremendous waste of time and money.

As advocates and even police officers have explained to me, there is another, deeper purpose behind these low-level “quality of life” summonses: they represent a fishing expedition for individuals with outstanding warrants. If that is true, then in effect the city has made a decision to inconvenience a large portion of the population in the service of a particular policing strategy.

This also relates to a big debate happening in the city right now, over whether the New York Police Department is pressuring officers to issue more summonses, and retaliating against them if they don’t keep their arrest numbers up. (The police department staunchly denies using quotas for summonses and arrests, but reporting in the Village Voice and in this paper over the past year has suggested otherwise.) In any case, it is useful to think about what might change if officers were evaluated not on the number of summonses they give out, but on those which actually lead to convictions. Perhaps a lot fewer people would have to take needless days off of work, and end up face-to-face with Judge Schwartzwald.

One recent afternoon, I watched two young men leaving Judge Schwartzwald’s courtroom and going to pay their fine. The two friends were arguing among themselves over whether it had been a good idea to plead guilty — both were adamant that they hadn’t had an open beer bottle in their car. The only redeeming part of the experience was Judge Schwartzwald; they liked his decency, and his jokes. “That was the coolest judge I had,” one said, as he consoled his friend that it was, after all, only a loss of $25. The friend retorted: “Nah B, time’s is rough. What would have been cool is if we would’ve won.”

Elizabeth Dwoskin is a staff writer for the Village Voice, where she covers housing and the courts.

