Two years ago this month, Eric Garner was gang-tackled and smothered by New York City police officers on a Staten Island sidewalk. His death helped to spark a national outcry and a push for better ways of policing the police. Among the reforms sought by the New York City Council are two bills to protect civilians from being harassed and unlawfully searched.
The bills, known as the Right to Know Act, require officers to identify and explain themselves when they stop people, and to make sure people know when they can refuse to be searched. These are timely, sensible ideas, echoing recommendations made by President Obama’s task force on 21st-century policing. Though the Right to Know Act has been bottled up in the Council for two years, it has broad support among Council members and community organizations, and sponsors say it would pass easily if it ever came to a vote.
But there has been no vote. The Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, essentially derailed it this month. She told members that she had quietly struck a compromise with the Police Department to adopt some, but not all, of the act’s reforms administratively. Under the deal, officers who want to search people but have no legal basis to stop them must ask permission and wait to hear “yes” or “no.” They have to explain that a person can refuse to be searched, and give a business card to people who are searched or stopped at a checkpoint or to anyone who asks.
These rules will be added to the police patrol guide, as a matter of internal department policy, but will not become city law.
“This is change; this is reform; this is moving forward,” Ms. Mark-Viverito told The Times. The police commissioner, William Bratton, who testified strenuously against the measures, is no doubt satisfied. But Council members and police-reform advocates feel betrayed.
They say the backroom deal is a poor substitute for the Right to Know Act, which they said was more stringent than Ms. Mark-Viverito’s compromise and applied to far more of the everyday encounters that officers have with civilians on the street. They also say the compromise, lacking the force of law, gives far too much power to the commissioner to impose, enforce, change or reverse the rules at will — and to rank-and-file officers to ignore them with impunity.
Ms. Mark-Viverito’s defense of the deal is unpersuasive. She says the Right to Know Act would most likely have become ensnared in time-consuming litigation, on grounds that the city is exceeding its authority under state law. But supporters of the act, like the New York Civil Liberties Union, see no obstacles to the city’s taking legislative action to prevent abusive policing. If Ms. Mark-Viverito believed the act was vulnerable to legal challenges, she should have worked with the Council to fix it.
Mr. Bratton has denounced the Right to Know Act as an “unprecedented” intrusion into his domain. But the Council has the right and duty to protect New Yorkers’ safety and dignity. Mr. Bratton may insist that his officers are the model of professionalism and restraint. But even he must acknowledge the problem of pervasive disrespect and excessive force in precincts where citizen complaints are rife, and the perpetual problem of brutish hotheads like Daniel Pantaleo, who led the fatal assault on Mr. Garner. When he took Mr. Garner down, by the neck, he did not appear to be constrained by the patrol guide, which forbids chokeholds.
It would be comforting to trust Mr. Bratton’s commitment and to think that when this agreement takes hold, and the police get body cameras, better behavior and accountability will follow. But it would be far wiser for Council members to revive and pass the Right to Know Act, to keep the city moving toward police accountability.
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A version of this editorial appears in print on July 25, 2016, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Don’t Compromise on City Police Reforms. Today's Paper|Subscribe