Mayor Vetoes How Many Stops Bill

By BoroPark24 Staff

Friday morning, Mayor Eric Adams announced that he chose to veto the How Many Stops bill passed by the City Council on Wednesday.

The reason the mayor gave during this morning's press conference is that the passage of the bill would "slow NYPD response times, undermine community-oriented policing, and add tens of millions of dollars in overtime to NYPD's budget."

The law would have required NYPD officers to record and document encounters not previously required to be recorded. Until now, officers were only required to document "Level 3" interactions, where there's a reasonable level of suspicion that a crime has occurred. The veto measure would have required cops to record and document "Level 1" and "Level 2" interactions, which includes questions regarding information. 

The documentation required would have meant that police officers would have to record each encounter and then file additional paperwork detailing where the person was stopped and questioned, as well as information about their race and gender.

While the measure was lauded by city Democrats, who said the bill would have minimized "bias-based policing", the mayor, the NYPD, the Council's Republicans, and some of its moderate Democrats countered that the bill would put an unnecessarily heavy bureaucratic burden on cops. 

"This bill, despite its possible good intentions, does not make our city any safer," Police Commissioner Edward Caban said during the press conference. "Instead, it turns everyday engagement between the community and their cops into transactional record keeping. Its purpose is to oversee the police department, but in practice, it looks and feels like oversight of the people we are out there protecting... We don't make connections by asking for or guessing at personal information, such as their age, race, or gender, every time we speak to them. This is not building relationships. This is just fueling mistrust and alienation and does nothing to build safety and quality of life in our city."