City Council Deals Major Blow to Adams on Criminal Justice

Photo: Gerardo Romo/NYC Council Media Unit

On Tuesday, City Council resoundingly defeated Eric Adams’s veto of two criminal-justice bills, dealing a significant blow to the mayor, who has made his opposition to the legislation a top issue over the past few weeks.

In a 42-9 vote, the Council approved Intro. 586-A, also known as the “How Many Stops Act,” a measure that would require police officers to further document lower-level civilian stops, as well as Intro. 549-A, a ban on the use of solitary confinement in city jails. Both bills, which initially passed with a enough votes to override a veto, received even more support this time around.

This is the second time the Council has overridden a veto from Adams during his tenure, the last occurring over a package of housing bills in 2023. Prior to that, the last time the council took such action was under Michael Bloomberg in 2013, when he issued six vetoes near the end of his final term. During his two terms in office, Bill de Blasio never once issued a veto. The Council’s rejection of Adams’s veto was yet another sign of the strained relationship between the mayor and the Council, at a time when Adams is contending with dipping approval ratings and the emergence of primary challengers.

The mayor centered his opposition to the bills around public safety, maintaining that the city could become more dangerous if the legislation were implemented. He cited concerns from the Rikers federal monitor that a ban on solitary would worsen already-harsh conditions inside the jail system.

On the “How Many Stops Act,” Adams claimed that officers will now be required to do additional paperwork on the smallest civilian interaction, which he described as a burdensome task that will keep them off the streets solving crimes while causing taxpayers to foot the bill for increased overtime.

“We cannot handcuff the police. We want to handcuff bad people who are violent,” he said during his veto announcement.

Ahead of the vote, supporters of the “How Many Stops Act” rallied outside of City Hall Tuesday morning, at times chanting “Override! Override! Override!” Backers of the bill say its critics are spreading misinformation about the legislation and claim that casual conversations would not be required to be documented and that the documentation process itself is fairly simple.

“The How Many Stops Act doesn’t prevent police work. It is police work,” said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, the prime sponsor of the legislation. He later added, “And for the last time, there’s no damn paperwork. Everything is automated and electronic.”

The debate surrounding the police bill grew tense and, at times, personal. Adams called out Williams’s support for the measure, suggesting he didn’t truly understand public safety because he lived on an army base. Williams retorted that Adams was acting like a “5-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.” But things came to a head this past weekend after Councilmember Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five, was pulled over by an NYPD officer while driving with his family, just days before the vote was scheduled to take place. The department officially disputed his version of events, saying the councilmember was stopped for driving a car with tinted windows, though the officer cannot be heard giving Salaam a reason for the stop on the released body-worn camera footage.

For Salaam and many of his council colleagues, the stop was emblematic of the need for more transparency around police encounters. “This experience only amplified the importance of transparency for all police investigative stops, because the lack of transparency allows racial profiling and unconstitutional stops of all types to occur and often go underreported,” Salaam said in a statement.