What to Know
- The New York City Council voted to override Mayor Eric Adams' veto on a bill that would require the NYPD to log all public interactions
- Advocates have emphasized the How Many Stops Act will support transparency in the department. But critics have said it creates too much paperwork and can slow down police work
- The bill, which passed through City Council at the end of 2023 by a 35-9 margin and seven abstentions, was vetoed by Eric Adams earlier in January, setting up the battle with the legislative body; the council voted 42-9 in favor of overriding the mayor on Tuesday
Should police have to report any time they stop a person on the street?
In New York, the question has divided local government as the City Council voted to pass a bill, over the objections of Mayor Eric Adams, that would require officers to document basic information. The issue was thrust into the national spotlight in recent days when NYPD officers pulled over a Black council member without giving him a reason.
The bill, dubbed the How Many Stops Act, was voted on in a final council vote Tuesday afternoon, with the override passing 42-9. Mayor Adams had vetoed the legislation earlier this month, but the council needed 34 votes in favor to override the veto, which was easily reached. Supporters erupted in cheers afterward.
"The Council answered decades-long calls from communities most impacted by police stops and the harmful legacy of stop-and-frisk, to deliver much-needed transparency to policing and advance true public safety for New Yorkers,” said Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. "By collecting and disclosing data on investigative stops, the How Many Stops Act will bring forth a fuller picture of these encounters, fostering accountability and trust between the police and the communities they serve."
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She said earlier in the day that "there should not be resistance to telling people who is being stopped in this city and why."
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The law gives police reform advocates a major win in requiring the nation’s largest police department and its 36,000 officers to document all investigative encounters in a city that once had officers routinely stop and frisk huge numbers of men for weapons — a strategy that took a heavy toll on communities of color.
In a statement following the vote, Mayor Adams said that the vote "may end up undermining" the city's steps to bring crime down, arguing it would bury police under unnecessary paperwork over casual encounters — like asking someone on the street if they saw someone running if they are lost.
"These bills will make New Yorkers less safe on the streets, while police officers are forced to fill out additional paperwork rather than focus on helping New Yorkers and strengthening community bonds," Adams said in the statement. "Additionally, it will make staff in our jails and those in our custody less safe by impairing our ability to hold those who commit violent acts accountable."
Under the proposal, officers will have to record details on the apparent race, gender and ages of people they stop in low-level encounters where police are asking for information from someone who isn't necessarily suspected of a crime.
Officers also will have to report the reason for the interaction and the circumstances that led to stopping a particular person. The data would then be posted on the police department's website.
“All the How Many Stops Act does is it says whenever the NYPD is engaged in an official investigative encounter, they document it,” said Michael Sisitzky of the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
But Adams, a Democrat, has said the reporting requirements for low-level stops would be too time-consuming for officers, forcing them to fill out forms every time they speak to a person rather than focusing on solving a crime.
"When you talk about one individual incident, no, that doesn’t take a long time. But when it’s the accumulative of many different incidents in times it impacts that officer doing his job. It drives up overtime. It becomes duplicative," Adams, a former NYPD captain, said Monday during an interview on WNYC radio.
Adams said that he shares "the City Council’s goal of increasing transparency in government...But the answer is not to compromise public safety or justice for the victims of violence."
The mayor also didn't think city council intended for the low-level interactions to be documented — implying councilmembers did not understand their own bill, despite his efforts to educate them. He said he had hoped changes could be made to the bill.
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams, who sponsored the bill, disputes the mayor's characterization. He says the reporting could be done in less than a minute on an officer's phone and that it would inform the public about how officers are policing the city.
"These votes are a victory for public safety in our city, no matter what the mayor would like New Yorkers to believe," said Williams. "The How Many Stops Act will help us get basic information on how policing practices are in effect on our streets, and craft public safety policy moving forward."
Republicans, by far the minority on the council, raised their own objections Tuesday, with some suggesting the bill only served to further racial divisions in a city that’s seen its share of otherwise innocuous police stops turn deadly.
“Please don’t make this a racial issue. It isn’t,” Council Member Vickie Paladino, a Queens Republican who is white, said after a number of her council peers spoke strongly in favor of the bill, with a number even speaking in Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin and Haitian Creole.
In response to the council's override, Police Benevolent Association President said officers will comply with the new law "despite the increased workload and the NYPD’s critically low staffing levels." Hendry's statement also said that "ultimately, it will be City Council members – not PBA members – who must answer for rising 911 response times and diminished police presence in our neighborhoods.”
Others noted that this coming Sunday marks the 25th anniversary of when a young, unarmed Black immigrant named Amadou Diallo was shot dozens of times by NYPD officers in the Bronx.
“We didn’t make this a race thing,” Riley said. “This is a race thing.”
Police stops in New York have long been the subject of scrutiny and intense debate.
In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD had violated the civil rights of Black and Latino residents with its use of the tactic known as “stop and frisk,” which was part of an effort to get guns and drugs off the street by frequently stopping and searching people on the street. Since then, the department has reported a large decline in such stops, though an ACLU report found people of color were still the targets of the vast majority of stop-and-frisks in 2022.
After the council first approved the How Many Stops Act in December, Adams and the NYPD went on the offensive to publicly campaign against it. On Friday night, the mayor hosted a police ride-along for council members in an effort to sway some lawmakers from voting to override his veto.
But the event was overshadowed earlier that evening when an officer pulled over Council Member Yusef Salaam, an exonerated member of the “Central Park Five” who with four other Black and Latino men were falsely accused and convicted of raping and beating a white jogger in Central Park in 1989. Their convictions were eventually overturned through DNA evidence.
In the very brief encounter, an officer asks Salaam to roll down his windows and identifies himself. Salaam tells the officer he is on the City Council and asks why he was pulled over, according to audio of the encounter published by The New York Times.
The officer backs off and tells Salaam, “Oh, OK. Have a good one” before walking away, body camera footage shows. The NYPD later released a statement that said Salaam was pulled over for driving with dark window tints beyond the legal limit. Adams praised the conduct of both the officer and Salaam in his WNYC interview.
Though such a stop would not be covered by the transparency bill — police already have to record information when they pull a driver over — Salaam argued the encounter underscored the need for greater police transparency.
“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.
In an emotional moment just before casting his vote to override the mayor's veto, Salaam said "if these laws were in place in 1989..." before trailing off, his voice breaking as he got visibly choked up, referring to his arrest and conviction.
City Council Member Kevin Riley, a Bronx Democrat who is Black, related his own experience of being detained by police simply for hunting for a parking spot on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while fresh out of college as he voted for the law.
“This is something we deal with on a daily basis,” he said. “When we see those red and blue lights, our hearts drop into our stomachs.”
The Council also voted Tuesday to override Adams' veto of a bill that would ban solitary confinement in the city’s jails.
The law places a four-hour limit on isolating inmates who pose an immediate risk of violence to others or themselves in “de-escalation” units. Only those involved in violent incidents could be placed in longer-term restrictive housing, and they would need to be allowed out of their cells for 14 hours each day and get access to the same programming available to other inmates.
In his letter vetoing that bill, Adams argued the restrictions would put inmates and corrections officers alike at risk. He also cited concerns raised by a federal monitor appointed to evaluate operations at the city’s jails.
