C
hristopher Howard never thought he would see the inside of a jail cell.
Growing up in a “dysfunctional family” in Gainesville, Florida, with an alcoholic uncle, a drug-addicted mother, and a wheelchair-bound grandmother, Howard dreamed of moving to New York and making it in the film industry. After a few unsatisfying years at Gainesville’s Santa Fe Community College, he dropped out and moved to a town in New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Soon enough, Howard, a tall African-American man with a deep voice and hazel eyes, began booking modeling and acting gigs and working as a waiter at Le Pain Quotidian to keep a steady income coming in. He quickly moved up the ranks, and now, at 30, owns his own production company, lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment, and has an eleven-month old daughter, Lian, whom he dotes upon. From his perspective, he’d beaten the odds. He’d left Florida and built the life he wanted.
But one afternoon this May, Howard found himself sitting behind bars at the NYPD’s 5th precinct in Chinatown.
“I was terrified,” he said, sipping a Blue Moon at Borough, a restaurant a few blocks from his apartment in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill. “I just have never wanted to be in that position at all in my life.”
Howard had been on a production job, driving a van to cross the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, when he was pulled over for running a stop sign. The sign was obscured by a double-parked car and he hadn’t seen it, as he explained to the officer who stopped him. The cop was sympathetic and told him he just needed to run his license before he could let him go. Moments later he returned and told Howard he had an open arrest warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket and would need to be taken to jail. Despite protesting that he had paid all outstanding tickets when he’d reinstated his license in Florida several years before, Howard was handcuffed next to the van, on a busy stretch of Canal street, and taken away in a squad car.
Howard’s story is surprisingly common. There are currently 1.2 million arrest warrants open in New York City. Many of the people who have them have no idea that these warrants exist, and many of the warrants themselves date back years, even decades.
The vast majority of warrants occur when people who receive summons for minor violations, such as riding a bike on the sidewalk or drinking a beer in public, fail to appear in court. Once they miss their court date, a bench warrant is issued for their arrest, meaning any interaction with a police officer, in which their ID is run and the warrant shows up, results in them being handcuffed and taken to the nearest precinct. For reasons ranging from lost tickets to lack of funds to pay fines to simple neglect, a full 40 percent of those ticketed failed to appear in court last year. These open warrants can interfere with their ability to find jobs, receive public housing, and achieve legal immigration status.
