A New York judge sided with two men arrested for so-called "manspreading" on the subway, which in some cases violates the rule against taking up more than one seat.
Gothamist.com reported that the peculiar case was dug up by police watchdog group Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), whose volunteers spend long hours monitoring arraignment and summons courts.
The two men observed by PROP, both Latino, were apparently sitting with their legs spread apart just after midnight when they were confronted by police. According to the Metropolitan Transit Authority rules of conduct, it is illegal to take up more than one seat when the train is full and it interferes with the "comfort of other passengers."
In its "That's How They Get You" report, PROP wrote of the men's arraignment in Brooklyn's criminal court that, "the judge expressed her skepticism about the charge because of the time of the arrests: '12:11AM, I can't believe there were many people on the subway.'"
The judge ultimately gave the two men an adjournment contemplating dismissal, which means that the charges will be dropped if the defendants don't get arrested for a certain amount of time.
PROP's report details 117 arrests that led to court dates, and many of the stories are like the manspreading case. Elsewhere in the report, PROP said its volunteers observed proceedings in which defendants have been arrested for putting their foot on a subway seat and walking between train cars.
PROP and several news organizations speculated that arrests like those were driven by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton's championing of "broken windows" policing, in which officers pay close attention to low-level offenses in order to maintain law and order.
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