Should the police report it if they stop someone on the street?
In New York, the issue has divided local government, as the City Council pushes for a bill, over Mayor Eric Adams’ objections, that would require officials to document basic information when questioning someone. The issue came into the national spotlight in recent days when NYPD officers stopped a black council member without giving him a reason.
The bill, called the How Many Stops Act, is headed for a final vote in the council on Tuesday. Adams vetoed the legislation earlier this month, but council members expect to have enough support to override the veto and pass the bill.
Under the proposal, officers would be required to record details about the apparent race, gender and age of people they stop in low-level encounters where police request information from someone not necessarily suspected of a crime.
Officers should also report the reason for the interaction and the circumstances that led to the arrest of a particular person. The data is then placed on the police website.
“All the How Many Stops Act does is ensure that when the NYPD is involved in an official investigation, they document it,” said Michael Sisitzky of the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
But Adams, a Democrat, has said reporting requirements for low-level arrests would be too time-consuming for officers, forcing them to fill out forms every time they speak to someone rather than focusing on solving a crime.
“If you’re talking about one individual incident, no, it doesn’t last long. But if it’s the accumulation of many different incidents, it has consequences for the officer doing his job. It leads to overtime. It becomes double,” says Adams. , a former NYPD captain said Monday during an interview on WNYC radio.
New York Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams, who sponsored the bill, disputes the mayor’s characterization. He said the reporting could be done in less than a minute on an officer’s smartphone and would inform the public about how officers police the city.
“It doesn’t interrupt police work. It’s police work,” Williams said Monday.
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 Hispanic residents by using the tactic known as “stop and frisk,” a tactic that was part of an effort to regularly distribute guns and drugs to get off the street. stop and search people on the street. Since then, the department has reported a large drop in such stops, although an ACLU report found that people of color were still targeted by the vast majority of stops in 2022.
After the council first passed 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 organized a police ride-along for council members in an effort to keep some lawmakers from voting to override his veto.
But the event was overshadowed earlier that evening when an officer stopped Councilman Yusef Salaam, an acquitted member of the “Central Park Five” who, along with four other black and Latino men, was falsely accused and convicted of raping and beating a white jogger in Central Park. Park in 1989. Their convictions were eventually overturned through DNA evidence.
During the very brief encounter, an officer asks Salaam to roll down his windows and identify himself. Salaam tells the officer he is on the city council and asks why he was stopped, according to audio of the meeting published by The New York Times.
The officer pulls back and tells Salaam, “Oh, okay. Enjoy” before walking away, according to the body camera footage. The NYPD later released a statement saying Salaam was stopped for driving over the legal limit with dark window tint. Adams praised the behavior of both the officer and Salaam in his WNYC interview.
Although such a stop would not fall under the transparency law – police are already required to record information when they stop a driver – Salaam argued that the encounter underscored the need for greater police transparency.
“This experience has only increased the importance of transparency in all police investigations, as the lack of transparency allows racial profiling and unconstitutional arrests of all kinds to occur and often go underreported,” Salaam said in a statement.
The Council will also vote Tuesday to override Adams’ veto of a bill that would ban solitary confinement in the city’s jails.
