By Michele Evans / NYweeklyRecord.com / Date: 9/15/2026
Category: NYPD / Government Accountability / Public Safety / Taxpayer Waste
NEW YORK CITY, NY –
Nearly half of the civil tickets written by New York City police officers last fiscal year were dismissed, leaving tens of thousands of New Yorkers to answer summonses that city hearing officers found could not stand.
NYPD officers issued about 98,000 civil summonses for quality-of-life violations during the fiscal year, according to data reviewed by Gothamist. The Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings dismissed roughly 46,000, or 47 percent.
Most of the dismissals were labeled defective service or defective notice of violation. Those categories can cover several problems, but officials at OATH, the Department of Investigation and the City Council pointed to the NYPD’s continued use of handwritten summonses as a major cause.
The system is an outlier. The NYPD writes all of its civil tickets by hand, according to the report, while other city enforcement agencies have moved much of that work to electronic devices.
A handwritten form can fail for a typo, the wrong legal code, illegible writing or missing information about how the summons was delivered. Each error creates work for officers, clerks and hearing personnel. It can also force a person to spend time contesting a ticket that should not have reached a hearing.
The Department of Investigation warned city agencies about the problem in 2020. Its report found that illegible summonses repeatedly made it difficult to enforce violations or collect penalties and urged agencies, including the NYPD, to adopt electronic ticketing.
The police department initially agreed to move to an electronic system and later said it could not, a Department of Investigation spokesperson told Gothamist. Six years after the recommendation, every NYPD civil summons is still handwritten.
Councilmember Gale Brewer, who chairs the Council’s governmental operations committee, said she is considering legislation that would require the department to use an electronic system.
The Department of Buildings offers a comparison. The agency said it issued 80 percent of its summonses electronically last fiscal year. About 13 percent of its tickets were dismissed, according to OATH figures, far below the NYPD’s 47 percent dismissal rate.
The comparison does not prove that handwriting caused every NYPD dismissal. Ticket types, enforcement practices and case facts differ by agency. It does show that the city has an electronic alternative and that another large enforcement agency is already using it.
An NYPD spokesperson said the dismissed summonses failed on technical grounds, not on the substance of the alleged violations, and said the department is retraining officers to reduce errors.
That answer leaves a larger accountability question. If technical defects can erase nearly half of a year’s civil enforcement, why is the department still relying on a paper process that city investigators flagged in 2020?
The public cost goes beyond uncollected fines. Police time is spent writing defective notices. OATH workers must process them. Residents must respond. Transparent data are harder to produce when handwritten records require manual entry.
Electronic summonses will not resolve the policy debate over low-level enforcement. They would make the system easier to audit and reduce preventable errors. Six years after a formal warning, New Yorkers are still paying for the delay.
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