Police are now required to report low-level encounters with citizens after the City Council passed the How Many Stops Act on Wednesday.
The bill garnered 35 votes at the Council’s last meeting of the year. Mayor Eric Adams has 30 days to veto the measure. If he does, the Council can override the veto with a majority vote.
The NYPD is already mandated to document stops where officers detain people even briefly, including stops, frisks and arrests. Now, officers have to report low-level stops, including when an officer asks someone for their ID, where they’re going or for voluntary consent to search them.
Councilmember Alexa Avilés, who introduced the bill with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, previously told Gothamist the goal is to gain an understanding of what really happens on the street.
“We’re trying to understand the scale and scope of policing in New York City,” said Avilés, who introduced the bill in July 2022.
The second bill in the package, introduced by Councilmember Crystal Hudson, will require police to report when someone does not consent to an officer search. That bill passed with 39 votes and will take effect on July 1, 2024
Under the new legislation, the NYPD will have to post data on “level one” and “level two” stops every quarter on its website. Police stops are on the rise under Adams, Gothamist has previously reported.
“This is not about individual officer behavior,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said on Wednesday. “It’s about having broader data on policing that helps inform public safety policy.”
The police department and Adams opposed the bill. Adams on Tuesday said the legislation would “damage our ability to keep the city safe” by overburdening officers with administrative work. NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said he agreed with Adams, telling Gothamist that the bill would make officers’ work more cumbersome.
“We encounter millions of people throughout a year, but it doesn’t tell you what the tone of the stop was like,” Maddrey said. “It could be the most innocuous conversation.
While police stop a fraction of the people they did during former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk era, even starker racial disparities exist now. Of the tens of thousands of pedestrians who’ve been stopped since Adams took office, just 5% of them were white compared to 9% under Bloomberg, Gothamist previously reported.