In a high-profile showdown with Mayor Eric Adams, the City Council will vote Tuesday on whether to override the mayor’s vetoes of a pair of law enforcement bills.
One measure proposes to ban solitary confinement in city jails. The second, known as the How Many Stops Act would require NYPD officers to document all encounters with the public.
The measures were introduced into the Council by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Adams, a former NYPD captain, has been a persistent opponent of both bills, warning of consequences for public safety.
“When it’s the cumulative of many different incidents and times, it impacts them, it impacts that officer doing his job,” he said Monday to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer regarding the police bill.
The city’s police and corrections departments, as well as the unions that represent uniformed officers, have been publicly and vocally against the measures.
But both bills passed by a supermajority, more than two-thirds, of the City Council. If the Council can keep that margin of approval in its override vote Tuesday, the measures will become law.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) said Monday she felt “very confident” going into the veto-override voting.
What are the bills supposed to do?
Intro. 549-A will institute a ban on solitary confinement in the city’s jails aside from overnights and limited other circumstances. Mayor Adams has denied the existence of solitary confinement — saying e last week “we don’t have solitary confinement in New York City … 2019, prior to becoming mayor, it was disbanded.”
But advocates and Council members said solitary has continued under different names — and that the bill would ensure no one will be held in isolation for extended periods.
Mayor Adams has been especially vocal about the “How Many Stops” act, aimed at police transparency. Intro. 586 requires the New York City Police Department to report on all stops and investigative encounters by officers.
This will require officers to record so-called Level 1 encounters, which are defined in the NYPD patrol guide as a request for information with a credibly objective reason to approach a person.
Currently, the police are tracking Level 2 and Level 3 encounters, which are stops and conversations with suspicion of criminal activity, but not submitting this data to the City Council.
The bill would require the NYPD to submit summarized reports on all of these encounters quarterly to the Council.
What’s a Level 1 stop?
A Level 1 stop is one in which an officer approaches a member of the public seeking information, not simply a casual conversation.
The legislation plainly explains they are for an “investigative encounter” — which the council defines as “an interaction between a member of the department and a member of the public for a law enforcement or investigative purpose.”
If the bill is enacted, officers who have Level 1 encounters with the public will be required to log each person’s perceived race, gender, and other information into an app — a tool is still being worked on — for reporting. Reports on these stops will be released to the public quarterly.
What do supporters say about the bills?
The bill is an extension of past concerns about police overreach, supporters say. They see it as a way to get critical data to measure if New Yorkers’ rights are being violated.
Michael Sisitzky, the assistant policy director with the New York Civil Liberties Union, told THE CITY that this bill “arose out of a lot of what we saw in the abuses of stop and frisk.”
In 2013, then-Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin issued a landmark order that stated the NYPD routinely violated the civil rights of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers by stopping and frisking people based on their race and ethnicity.
The police disclosed who they were stopping based on the department’s reporting of Level 2 and Level 3 stops — but the public didn’t have the fuller picture without the Level 1 stops.
Council Speaker Adams said it will expand transparency with the police.
“The NYPD still continues to engage in unacceptably high rates of unconstitutional stops and it does damage police/community relations,” she said Friday on WNYC.
“The trauma of these stops continues to fall disproportionately on young Black and Latino New Yorkers.”
“We don’t know the full extent of New Yorkers being stopped,” Sisitzky said.
What do Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD say about the police reporting bill?
The mayor and the police department have gone on the offensive, with the mayor vetoing it two weeks ago alongside the bill to ban solitary confinement.
The mayor railed against How Many Stops at a teen’s bar mitzvah, and released an animated video warning of dangers to public safety.
City Hall and the police department have taken issue with the inclusion of Level 1 encounters, saying it will jam up officers with paperwork.
“Their hearts are in the right place, but the wording of Level 1 stops, we agree with Level 2 and Level 3s,” the mayor said at a press briefing last week. “The Level 1 stops is the area where they’re misunderstanding the rule.”
To try and sway Council members, Adams invited them to ride along with patrolling police officers on Saturday.
Nearly a dozen Council members joined, donning bulletproof vests. The mayor praised them for taking part, but Speaker Adams said in a TV interview Monday that she didn’t think it would alter any votes.
“I’m not sure if minds were changed. I’m inclined to believe that opinions were already set,” she said on NY1.
One of the first Council members to agree to a ridealong had been Yusef Salaam, a member of the Exonerated Five who was recently sworn in to represent Harlem. But hours before the event, he released a statement saying he had been pulled over by police the night before while driving with his family.
The NYPD later issued body-camera footage of the stop, and said the Council member was pulled over for illegal tinted windows on his car, which also had Georgia license plates. (A spokesperson said Monday he now had his cars registered in New York.)
What happens if the veto override succeeds?
If the Council overrides the reporting bill veto, the NYPD will have to start submitting reports to the Council on all Level 1 encounters by the end of the third quarter of the year, which ends Sept. 30. From then, they will have to submit quarterly reports within a month of the end of each quarter.
These reports will be broken out by precinct, and include the race, ethnicity and gender of the person involved in each stop, according to the bill.
The bill to ban solitary confinement goes into effect 60 days after it’s passed, and also has reporting requirements attached to it. This includes data on the number of people who are put in any kind of confinement, how long they were isolated for and any mental health treatment that was offered.
Does the mayor have to follow the law?
You might think. But already, the mayor’s side of City Hall has balked at following through on a law after Adams had a veto overridden.
The first Council override of an Adams veto required the city social services agency to make apartment rental subsidy vouchers available to a wider range of people, an action the mayor’s administration said was too costly.
In January, the commissioner of the Department of Social Services declared to the Council that the housing law “cannot be implemented at this time.”