Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are walking around with outstanding warrants tied to summonses they never answered, and Brooklyn's top prosecutor is reviving a dormant program to help them clear the slate. On Saturday, October 3, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office will host a Begin Again event at Bridge Street AME Church on Stuyvesant Avenue in Bed-Stuy, offering free legal help and a temporary courtroom for people with warrants stemming from minor, unanswered summonses.
The event, confirmed by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, will provide on-site legal services before a judge hears eligible summons and bench warrant cases in a makeshift courtroom set up inside the church at 277 Stuyvesant Avenue. The office is partnering with Congressmember Hakeem Jeffries' office, the New York State Office of Court Administration and the Legal Aid Society to run the day. As Gothamist reports, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez is also working with local judges and other elected officials to pull the event together.
Begin Again isn't new. The Brooklyn DA's Office first launched it in 2015, leading to the dismissal of thousands of warrants, before pausing the program in 2018. Officials now describe its return as urgent, pointing to an accumulation of hundreds of thousands of new warrants since the pause. The backlog of summons warrant cases has reached a level the office itself has called staggering, according to Gothamist's reporting.
Why So Many Warrants Piled Up
Criminal warrants get issued when someone fails to respond to a criminal summons by its deadline, and according to Gothamist, people carrying those warrants will likely be arrested if they later run into law enforcement during something as routine as a traffic stop. Gonzalez has said that fear keeps people away from police and prosecutors altogether, which he argues makes everyone less safe — and he has said the burden falls hardest on the city's poorest neighborhoods, where he says ticket enforcement is often concentrated and where, per his account relayed by Gothamist, 85% of the tickets go to people of color.
The numbers behind the backlog are striking. NYPD criminal summons issuance climbed from more than 45,000 in 2021 to more than 95,000 in 2024 and topped 117,000 last year, per the Brooklyn DA's Office. Gothamist's reporting adds that the NYPD issued more than 220,000 summonses for minor civil and criminal violations in the last fiscal year, a 13% jump over the year before, a figure City Hall addressed in a report released in September. An NYPD spokesperson, Bradley Weekes, told Gothamist that the number of criminal summonses issued this year is virtually flat compared with the same period last year.
Courts Keep Throwing Out the Tickets
Much of the enforcement has not held up once it reaches a judge. Research from the Data Collaborative for Justice found courts threw out more than 65% of criminal summonses issued in 2024 because of paperwork or legal-insufficiency errors, and only 9% of summonses that reached arraignment ended in a conviction. Gonzalez has said he expects most tickets handled at Saturday's event to be dismissed, much as they would be in a regular courtroom — though he's also said he doesn't want to micromanage or second-guess the criminal tickets NYPD officers issue in the first place.
Civil tickets haven't fared much better. Nearly half of the NYPD's 98,000 civil quality-of-life tickets were dismissed last fiscal year, a dismissal rate of 47%, according to Gothamist's review. The same reporting found the vast majority of those dismissals were tied to issues labeled defective service or defective notice of violation — paperwork problems, not findings on the underlying conduct. By comparison, the city's Department of Buildings, which issued 80% of its summonses electronically last fiscal year, had only about 13% of its summonses dismissed over the same period.
What Attendees Can Expect Saturday
Warrant holders from all five boroughs are eligible to attend regardless of where their summons was originally issued, and eligible Criminal Court summonses dated before September 10, 2026, will be heard by the court that day, per the Brooklyn DA's Office. Pre-registration is encouraged but not required, though the office says it can help speed up how a case is handled. Attendees need to bring photo identification, and anyone whose warrant is resolved will receive a disposition letter documenting that the warrant was vacated and stating the outcome of the underlying summons.
The office has also said immigration status will not prevent someone from having an eligible low-level Criminal Court summons warrant resolved at the event. City Hall spokesperson Sam Raskin told Gothamist that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration supports Saturday's event, noting that old summons warrants can make it harder for people to get jobs, secure housing or apply for citizenship. Dawn Ryan, also quoted by Gothamist, said the need for an initiative like this raises serious questions about why so many summonses are being issued in the first place.
Ahead of the event, the Brooklyn DA's Office has sent letters to people in surrounding areas carrying warrants for unpaid criminal quality-of-life tickets. NYPD officers continue to respond to 311 calls flagging quality-of-life concerns from residents, even as the department's broader quality-of-life enforcement has expanded across the city — the same enforcement push that's now feeding the warrant backlog Begin Again is trying to clear.
