Battle over pair of criminal justice bills unfolds at City Hall
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City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams defended the legislature’s passage of the How Many Stops Act on Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2024. Photo by Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The fight between the City Council and Mayor Eric Adams over a pair of vetoed criminal justice bills came to a boil Tuesday as both attempted to make their cases for and against the legislation from City Hall.
The argument over both the How Many Stops Act and a council bill banning solitary confinement in the city’s jails has played out over the past several weeks, intensifying over the past several days following the mayor’s veto of both bills on Friday.
The Council, which passed both bills with a veto-proof majority in late December, has accused the mayor and others opposed to the legislation of peddling misinformation about the bills’ potential unintended effects, while the mayor has accused the Council of failing to understand the consequences of their legislation.
On Tuesday, both sides made their case to the public simultaneously, just a few doors down from each other in City Hall – at one point, a top official in the mayor’s office attempted to pull chairs designated from reporters out of City Hall’s rotunda, where the Council was holding their press conference, and move them into the room where the mayor was speaking to the press.
At this point, the mayor’s efforts to kill the bills are likely moot – City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has vowed to get the Council to overturn both mayoral vetoes, a pledge she again made on Tuesday.
Late Tuesday morning, the speaker was joined by several councilmembers and a number of faith leaders to denounce the mayor’s veto of the How Many Stops Act, a bill aimed at bringing greater transparency to interactions police officers have with New York City residents.
The bill would require the NYPD to report on all levels of street stops and interactions they have with members of the public while conducting an investigation – reports of the stops will include details like demographic information on the person who was stopped, the reason for the interaction and whether or not the encounter led to use of force or enforcement actions.
While the mayor has said the bill will cause officers to be bogged down by paperwork, the Council and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who introduced the bill, have claimed the mayor is being dishonest about the amount of effort it will take for officers to make records of their stops, which the Council says can be recorded on smartphones.
Speaker Adams said on Tuesday that Adams and NYPD brass, which have also opposed the bill, have purposefully misled the public about the capabilities of the city’s police officers.
“For those who insist on continuing the campaign of misinformation under the guise of piles and stacks and mountains of paperwork – the NYPD is the most technologically savvy police department on the planet,” the speaker said. “If you go outside on any given day, you will see a robotic dog walking around crime fighting in the interest of all of us in the City of New York.”
“To do their jobs [under the How Many Stops Act], it can be but a click on a smartphone,” she added.
However, the Adams administration claims that the Level One stops the NYPD will be required to document will number in the millions each year, taking away time from investigations – Level One stops are the lowest level of stops made by the NYPD and may not be made because the person being stopped is suspected of criminal wrongdoing.
Speaking to reporters during his administration’s weekly “off-topic” press conference, Adams claimed that the bill will “restrain police officers.”
According to the mayor, the administration and the NYPD has been requesting the Council remove the need to document Level One stops from the bill.
However, Williams, who claims that the mayor and NYPD refused to negotiate the bill in good faith before it was passed, said that removing Level One stops from the How Many Stops Act would defeat the legislation’s purpose.
“That's the bill,” Williams said.
The How Many Stops Act was introduced by Williams as a way to better document NYPD officers’ interactions with members of the public, he said. The bill comes about a decade after a federal judge ruled that the city’s use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional. The practice disproportionately targeted Black and brown New Yorkers and violated the public’s 4th Amendment rights.
However, lawmakers say Black and brown New Yorkers are still targeted by police making low-level stops, some of which can escalate and turn fatal for those being stopped, despite having not been accused of committing a crime prior to the stop.
Williams said that the bill, when implemented, will allow the city to better assess whether or not the NYPD’s stop practices show any potential racial bias.
Mayor Eric Adams attempted on Tuesday to defend his veto of a pair of criminal justice reform bills passed by the City Council. Photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
“All of us share one goal, and that is to ensure that our neighborhoods are safer, and that we all have equitable access to public safety,” Speaker Adams said on Tuesday. “Our legislation will help us achieve that goal by expanding transparency and equipping the city with the necessary data to make smarter decisions about how to make our neighborhoods safer.”
In addition to the How Many Stops Act, the Council and mayor have also publicly argued the legislature’s ban on solitary confinement.
The bill to ban solitary confinement would prevent incarcerated individuals from being held in an isolated cell for more than two hours per day within a 24-hour period and for more than eight hours at night directly after an alleged offense occurred – the confinement would be referred to as a “de-escalation” period. Should corrections officials determine that further confinement is required to de-escalate a situation, an incarcerated person could be held for up to four hours total in a 24-hour period.
The bill would also require that staff meet with the incarcerated person at least once an hour to attempt to de-escalate the situation.
The mayor opened his press conference on Tuesday with a video produced by his office, showing detainees on a Department of Correction bus handcuffed to one another and to the bus itself. The mayor claimed that, if implemented, DOC officers would no longer be allowed to restrain detainees on a bus, leaving officers and other detainees at risk of potential violence.
“We need lawmakers to see the impacts of the laws that they're passing,” the mayor said.
At the heart of Adams’ discontent with the legislation is its mention of solitary confinement at all. The mayor, Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie and corrections officers claim that the city no longer uses solitary confinement, despite countless lawsuits, testimony from former detainees and accounts from oversight bodies claiming otherwise.
“You cannot put things in a bill and call it something different,” the mayor said. “Just like you cannot put 20 inmates on a bus without tools to keep them and correction staff safe.”
Though the speaker and public advocate did not comment on the solitary confinement bill on Tuesday, that Adams’ reasons for rejecting the bill were contradictory.
"The administration needs to get its stories straight before it decides to deceive New Yorkers about our bills, otherwise they’ll continue to contradict themselves and deliberately confuse the issues,” Williams said. “Which is it – that solitary confinement doesn't exist, or that they don’t want to ban it?”
