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…
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