What do you get when you take the former No. 2 man in the NYPD, make him a judge and ask him to reform the way arraignments are handled citywide?
You get “CourtStat,” the name that the Honorable George Grasso has given to his new multi-agency system designed to streamline how roughly 360,000 defendants a year are processed through city courts.
“This is not rocket science,” said Grasso, the former first deputy police commissioner and now New York’s supervising judge for arraignments.
“It’s accountability and communication,” Grasso said of CourtStat, which he created as the courthouse counterpart of CompStat, the NYPD’s revolutionary system of tracking and attacking crime trends.
CourtStat has cut the average time from booking to appearing before a judge from 27.58 hours in January 2012 to 20.09 hours in December, according to statistics from Chief Clerk Justin Barry.
Arrest-to-arraignment times were still averaging close to 30 hours when the state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, told the city’s top Criminal Court administrator, Judge Barry Kammins, to fix the problem.
Early last year, Kammins chose Grasso as the perfect hybrid — both a judge and an ex-cop — to start whipping the clunky, multi-agency arraignment system into shape.
Grasso says he “sat everybody down,” including judges, court clerks, defense lawyers, correction officials and the borough police chiefs.
After the meeting, the cops formed a Prisoner Transport Unit — a fleet of police vehicles comparable to the old-fashioned paddy wagons — to drive precinct to precinct, picking up defendants and bringing them to Central Booking, freeing the precinct cops from transporting them one by one.
He also changed every arraignment judge’s first half-hour on the bench, turning those 30 minutes into a productive powwow.
“The police supervisor, the DAs assigned to the court, the court officers, Legal Aid, corrections — everybody has to come to the bench and talk to the judge and go over potential problems, looking at the oldest cases, where the logjams are, and how to fix the problems,” he said.
“This sounds so simple, but before this it was so haphazard,” he said.
In one courtroom, the light bulb burned out in one of the two rooms where defense lawyers hold pre-arraignment meetings with clients, “and no one was fixing the problem” for days, Grasso remembered.
“Now, before the court session starts, Legal Aid will tell the judge about the light bulb, and the judge will make sure it will get fixed,” he said.
“Before, everyone would blame each other,” he said. “Now, it is b.s.-proof. If there is a logjam, we know who is responsible and we work on fixing the problem.”