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67-Year-Old Widow Arrested For Calling 311 Too Much
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 23, 2015
Modified Jan 23, 2015
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lempkin / Flickr
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 23, 2015
Modified Jan 23, 2015
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A 67-year-old Bronx resident is suing the city after she claims she was arrested for calling 311 too many times. But widow Arles Cepeda tells the Daily News she had a damn good reason for calling the city hotline 44 times during a stretch of 15 months: she was calling to complain about drug dealers around her NYCHA building because neither her building management nor cops would do anything to remove them.
"I kept calling, but no one ever did anything," she told the News. Cepeda, who moved into Castle Hill Houses in November 2011, says the housing project has been plagued by drug dealers. Most of her calls to 311 were about drugs; some were about noise in the hallways, and a few about broken elevators. She also made two calls during this time to 911.
It all came to a head Dec. 4th, 2012, when narcotics Detective Theodore Stefatos showed up at her apartment with two officers. She was told that the cops had searched an apartment above her and found no evidence of drug dealing...so she was being arrested instead. "I was handcuffed behind my back," she recounted. "And my neighbors saw me. I was so embarrassed."
She was put in a cell for several hours, and eventually released with a desk appearance ticket and a stern warning from Stefatos threatening to take her to the "psych unit at Jacobi Hospital" if she continued calling. "He was very cruel to me," she added.
Her misdemeanor ticket for 'offering a false instrument for filing' was dismissed, and her lawyer argues it never should have been given in the first place, because she never filed anything in writing. Her lawsuit alleges her civil and First Amendment rights were violated.
Cepeda is far from the first person to turn to 311 with both serious and existential complaints. And she's also far from the first person to be accused of abusing one of the city's hotlines—there have been some truly egregious examples.
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311
Arles Cepeda
arrest
lawsuit
nycha
the bronx
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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