The New York City Council is facing off against Mayor Eric Adams, who wants to scrap a law that would require NYPD officers to document all encounters they have with the public.
The tension between Mayor Adams and the city council was on full display on Tuesday when the mayor’s deputy chief of staff abruptly entered the rotunda of City Hall and demanded chairs from reporters seated in the area awaiting a press conference held by the New York Council speaker, Adrienne Adams.
“We just want our chairs,” the mayor’s representative said in a video widely shared on X.
In December, council members passed the How Many Stops Act, which is comprised of two bills that mandate police officers to log specific information about their street and traffic stops and investigative encounters, including where they take place, demographic information on the person stopped like their race, age, and gender, the reason for the encounter, and whether the encounter leads to any use of force or enforcement action.
The law also requires officers to report on their consent searches.
Currently, officers only have to log information when they stop a person while investigating a crime and include details on where the stop was and what led up to it.
The measure was lauded by the city’s police reform advocates, who believed it would strengthen police transparency and accountability and ultimately lead to less prejudicial policing, especially since NYPD misconduct complaints rose 51 percent just last year.
However, last week, Adams vetoed the legislation, citing in a statement that the ordinance could “slow NYPD police response times, erode years of progress building police-community relationships and preventing crime through community-oriented policing, and add tens of millions of dollars in additional NYPD overtime each year.”
Adams also posted a video on his X account saying that the bill will require police to take down “additional, unnecessary information” and will subject police officers to more paperwork.
“You cannot handcuff our police,” Adams said in a news conference at City Hall following the veto. “I’ll say it over and over again, the goal is to handcuff bad guys who do bad things in our city.”
Some of the bill’s proponents directly challenged Adams’ rationale about the increase in paperwork. Activist and co-sponsor of the bill Jumaane Williams called it a “massive exaggeration.”
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams told CBS News that civilian complaints are higher than they’ve ever been in more than a decade.
“Despite being less than half of the city’s population, Black and Latino stops make up 97% of those stops on a daily basis. The federal monitor and NYPD’s own auditors have also shown the department to consistently underreport stops,” Adrienne Adams said.
The City Council just needs 34 votes to overturn the veto. Council members previously passed the bill with 35 votes in a 51-member chamber.
“If City Council wants to give you something to sit on,” Menashe Shapiro told reporters Tuesday at City Hall. “Explain to City County. Let’s go.”
Mayor Adams launched a program inviting members of the public to accompany officers on police calls. Only newly elected council member Yusef Salaam has taken up his offer.
In his time as mayor, Adams, a former top cop, has come under fire from much of the police reform community for supporting police use of the stop-and-frisk tactic, restoring anti-crime units that were directly connected to the deaths of Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, his handling of the city’s migrant crisis, and his response to the death of Jordan Neely.
The unseating of the journalists on Tuesday is not the first time the mayor’s office has attempted to shake down reporters, according to The New York Times. The mayor’s schools chancellor excluded major publications from access to speech about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the city’s schools this week and moved reporters from the press room at the police headquarters to a trailer outside earlier this month, the Times reports.
