Since its passage last year, Eric Adams has made no secret of his opposition to a City Council measure that would require police officers to further document lower-level stops of civilians. On Friday, the mayor officially announced that he would be vetoing the bill, reiterating his previous comments that the legislation would impede the ability of NYPD officers to do their jobs.
Intro. 586-A, part of a package referred to as the How Many Stops Act, would requires officers to provide reports on Level One and Two stops, encounters that don’t require a “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has occurred or is occurring. Last December, the legislation was passed by the City Council with a 35-9 vote, a vetoproof majority.
“We cannot handcuff the police. We want to handcuff bad people who are violent,” Adams said Friday at City Hall. The mayor, speaking alongside several police-union heads and community leaders, cited the recent arrest of a suspect in a stabbing spree, saying the search for the perpetrator would potentially have been hindered by the proposed law by requiring officers to report on every interaction in their search.
“Those are minutes that are being taken away from finding the person who’s committing the stabbings,” he said. “That’s our focus. It’s not paperwork. It’s police work.”
NYPD commissioner Edward Caban echoed Adams’s words, saying the bill will turn “everyday engagement” between officers and New Yorkers into “transactional record keeping,” particularly criticizing the legislation’s requirement that officers note identifying information about the people they speak to.
“We don’t make these connections by asking for or guessing at personal information — their age, their race, their gender — every time we speak to them,” Caban said. “This is not building relationships. It’s just fueling mistrust and alienation, is doing nothing to improve safety and quality of life in our city.”
Hours later, Adams confirmed in a press release that he is also vetoing Intro. 549-A, the Council’s ban on the use of solitary confinement in city jails, citing concerns raised by the federal monitor that it could impact jail safety.
This is not the first time that Adams has utilized his veto power on Council bills during his tenure. Previously, the mayor vetoed a measure on zoning penalties and a series of housing bills. The latter veto was ultimately overridden by the Council after a contentious back-and-forth, the first since the Bloomberg administration. Though Adams made a point of saying that his impending veto was not “an anti-Council veto or an anti-Speaker veto,” this action will likely do little to address the tension that exists between the mayor and some members of the body.
In a joint statement, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Public Safety Chair Yusef Salaam condemned the mayor’s action, saying the Council is prepared to override his veto once again.
“It is deeply disappointing that the Mayor is sending the message that Black and Latino communities do not deserve transparency regarding interruptions to their daily lives from investigative police stops. At a time when one out of every four stops made by the Mayor’s new police unit has been found to be unconstitutional, and civilian complaints are at their highest level in more than a decade, the Mayor is choosing to fight to conceal information from the public,” the statement read.
In the run-up to veto deadline, critics of the bill came out in full force. The NYPD released a video on social media, simulating the impact the legislation could have in practice by using the example of a mother looking for her missing child. Days later, Adams issued his own animated video featuring his narration, the clip showing a cop seated at their desk as piles and piles of papers stack up around them. Both videos featured a similar slogan: “Do we want our cops doing paperwork or police work?”
In an interview prior to Adams’s announcement, City Council member Crystal Hudson said that many of the bill’s critics were promoting misinformation about what’s actually required under the new law.
“The bill doesn’t actually dictate how the NYPD collects the information. So if the NYPD makes collecting the information burdensome for officers, that is on the NYPD. It is not on those of us who have sponsored the bill and those of us who have certainly voted on to pass the bill,” said Hudson, a co-sponsor of the legislation.
The Council member said officers won’t be required to return to the precinct or to complete physical paperwork and that not all minor interactions will need documenting. The bill’s language says that a “casual conversation” between an officer and a civilian would not meet the criteria.
“Simple basic encounters like a tourist looking for directions don’t count as a Level One stop and would not need to be documented,” she said.
During a press availability after Adams’ announcement, Council member Alexa Avilés, another co-sponsor of the legislation, pushed back against the notion floated by the mayor that Council members needed to fully read the bill to understand the issues with it.
“This legislation was developed in partnership with impacted people, with legal experts, with law enforcement, with criminal-justice advocates and has been in the making for over a decade. So the notion that we know nothing about what is being proposed here — that it wasn’t deliberate, it wasn’t intentional, it wasn’t thought through — is not only offensive, but terribly inaccurate,” she said.
Overturning the mayor’s veto will require a two-thirds majority of the Council’s 51-member body. The Council has 30 days to take a vote on overriding the measure.
