The New York Times provides a glimpse into the antiseptic world of the Manhattan District Attorney’s complaint room, called ECAB for early case assessment bureau.  This the place where arrests are put to paper and turned into complaints, the accusatory instrument that initiates formal prosecution. 

Nearly every arrest in the borough is processed here, so a rowdy night in the city would be reflected by a surge in paperwork. It is the intersection of cases simple and complex, predictable and quirky, providing a perspective of the city unlike any other.

If there was a place where lives were either lost or saved, before being tossed into the burning pit of the criminal justice system, this would be it.  Cops call in their arrests and tell their story.  Prosecutors make snap decisions to toss it or write it up.  Should they decide to write it up, as they do with the vast majority, the number and nature of charges is determined and the description of a defendant’s conduct is framed.

According to what the prosecutor puts on paper, the defendant may find himself a guest of the City or not.  For many defendants, they may enjoy the City’s largesse for a long time, unable to make even nominal bail.  Of course, it’s not completely dependent on what the complaint says, as the arraignment assistant and the defense lawyer also have an opportunity to put their thoughts in the mix, but the foundation will be the allegations of the complaint.

Notably, at this stage of the proceedings, the allegations are taken as true.  There is little opportunity to seriously challenge the veracity of the allegations, only in the rarest of instances can a defendant (usually via a family member) demonstrate that an element is patently false by documentary proof.  More problematic is that the allegations of a complaint, which is required by law to allege both legal and factual basis for the charges, are most often cursory and conclusory. 

Inadequate allegations of fact shouldn’t be sufficient for a judge sitting in arraignments to subject a defendant to the rigors of prosecution, as part of the judge’s job is to stand guard at the gate to protect individuals from being needlessly subjected to prosecution.  Sadly, many judges have very low expectations of the prosecution, and their expectations are usually met.  There’s a huge volume of paper and smelly bodies walking through the arraignment courtrooms, and each gets a few seconds of the deepest attention of all the players in the system before being relegated to the system.

So who gets to make the critical decisions about who moves forward to the Inferno and who gets to walk out of the precinct?

Prosecutors on these shifts face a delicate calculus: churning out criminal court complaints with assembly line-like speed, yet lawyerly consideration.

“We have our staffing model down very well,” said Karen Friedman-Agnifilo, chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s trial division. “We can very much handle the volume that comes.”

Last year, about 109,000 arrests, mostly misdemeanors, came through ECAB, also called the complaint room, in Manhattan, according to the district attorney’s office. It can be an introduction to prosecution, often the first stop for new assistants.

Tucked at the end of a hallway in the Manhattan Criminal Court Building on Centre Street, the bureau is staffed in nine-hour shifts by about eight assistant district attorneys and a supervisor. There are also other assistants on call to handle specialty cases like sex crimes and child abuse, and paralegals to help with the legwork.

These are the folks, “often the first stop for new assistants,” whose finger is on the button of prosecution, making the initial decision on the fate of others.  And they do so with “assembly line-like speed, yet lawyerly consideration.”  Some more so than others.  Whether new assistants are equipped to make life-and-death decisions is a difficult question, but more seasoned ADAs don’t want to spend their time in the bowels of 100 Centre Street when they could be standing up in a courtroom.  Who can blame them?

What these new assistants do is take telephone calls from police officers, who give them the quick and dirty story of why they arrested someone. 

“It starts with the police officer telling the D.A. what happened,” Ms. Crotty said. “So yeah, they can say there’s a miscommunication, but then there’s also lying.”

Most seem to acknowledge that phone calls are not an ideal form of communication between the police and prosecutors.

In the early days of ECAB, officers were required to go there to meet with prosecutors in person. But that was slow and led to exorbitant overtime costs. So some boroughs began using videoconferencing in the early 1990s. Today, in most cases, the officer and prosecutor speak only by telephone.

Ms. Friedman-Agnifilo said it was “very, very important” to avoid miscommunication between the ECAB staff and police.

As the ECAB assistant listens to the officer’s story, she’s supposed to take notes on her write-up of what the officer tells her.  Some take fairly good notes.  Others just write a word or two.  Few take verbatim notes or come anywhere near a fully comprehensible story. And yet, this initial write-up is a critical moment in the life of a prosecution.

The initial call from a cop is the most unguarded expression of fact available.  It comes before anybody tells the cop that his story makes no sense, fails to constitute a crime or offends the rules of physics.  It comes before he knows that someone took a video that proves him a liar.  It comes when he’s on his own.  The only limitation is the competency and will of the assistant to write down the cop’s words as offered.  To the assistant who is inclined to clean up the allegations, the opportunity for the unvarnished allegations of the police officer can be lost forever.

Most of the time, the content of the allegations is relatively clear and clean, the officer relaying reasonably accurate information about relatively trivial offenses.  Sure, there’s that compulsion to add the occasional embellishment and flourish, just to milk the bust and make sure it sticks (especially if a defendant has done something to annoy the cop along the way), but the claims are true and the crime occurred.

In those instances where it’s a bad bust, however, this is closest thing to a confession one will get from a cop.  His unguarded statement, if subsequently shown to be false, a fabrication, a lie, is forever memorialized in the write-up.  It’s hardly the equivalent of a good brow-beating in a windowless interrogation room, but it’s the best we’ve got.

Now if only we could get these assembly line prosecutors to make the effort to put all the words on paper in the write-up, accurately and honestly, we might gain a fairly good idea of what’s really happening on the street and have some evidence to challenge the sanitized and corrected version of allegations that come later.  Oh yeah, and “furtive gestures” is not an allegation of fact, kids.