As the number of arrests in Baltimore City dipped toward the end of last year, police officers started writing more tickets for nuisance crimes. What they didn’t do, prosecutors say, is fill thousands of them out properly.

District court prosecutors dropped nearly 80 percent of 1,355 citations handed out in October alone for crimes such as public urination, loitering and open-container violations, according to the State’s Attorney’s Office. The charges don’t hold up in court when the citations are improperly written, prosecutors say.

“Most of the time, they’re not giving me any facts to support the charge,” prosecutor Patricia Deros said.

Citations have to include a detailed description of the crime, including whether the requisite warnings were given first for loitering, or what brand of beer was in hand, she said.

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“I need to know that it is truly an alcoholic beverage,” she said. “I had a few of them that were charging O’Doul’s.” O’Doul’s is nonalcoholic.

The city police department recognizes “that we have some training issues,” and officers “need to know exactly what needs to be in a citation,” police spokesman Matt Jablow said.

Jablow said the department “would welcome” training from the State’s Attorney’s Office on filling out citations — something Deros herself spent months doing back in 2005. She taught officers at in-service training sessions to cite the correct statute and specify on the ticket that the suspect provided a photo ID, guarding against identity theft. Then money got in the way.

“If she spends a day training, that means somebody else has to pick up her whole docket,” State’s Attorney’s spokeswoman Margaret Burns said.

State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy wrote the commissioner a letter asking for reimbursement for Deros’ training time. The issue has never been resolved, Burns and Deros said, and the training was since canceled.

Even if the charges are relatively minor, Deros said, the city suffers when the vast majority of them are dropped. “We get college students all the way up to 75-year-old men,” she said, and they need to “clean up the neighborhoods that they affect.”

kcullinan@baltimoreexaminer.com