The law gives police reform advocates a major win in requiring the nation’s largest police department and its 36,000 officers to document all investigative encounters.
New York City police officers will be required to record the apparent race, gender and ages of most people they stop for questioning under a law passed Tuesday by the City Council, which overrode a
“We didn’t make this a race thing. This is a race thing,” responded Riley as he related his own experience of being detained by police simply for hunting for a parking spot in Manhattan while fresh out of college.
Others noted that this coming Sunday marks the 25th anniversary of when a young, unarmed Black immigrant named Amadou Diallo was shot dozens of times by NYPD officers in the Bronx.
In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD violated the civil rights of Black and Hispanic residents with its stop-and-frisk tactic. Since then, the department has reported a large decline in such encounters, though an ACLU report found people of color were still the targets of the vast majority of stop-and-frisks in 2022.
Tuesday’s vote came after Adams and the NYPD launched a last-ditch effort to peel off some supporters from the measure by hosting police ride-alongs for council members.
But the Friday event was overshadowed that same evening when an officer pulled over Council Member Yusef Salaam, an exonerated member of the “Central Park Five” who with four other Black and Latino men were falsely accused and convicted of raping a white jogger in Central Park in 1989. Their convictions were eventually overturned through DNA evidence.
In the very brief encounter, an officer asked Salaam to roll down his windows and identified himself. Salaam told the officer he was on the City Council and asked why he was pulled over, according to audio of the encounter published by The New York Times.
The officer told Salaam, “Oh, OK. Have a good one” before walking away, body camera footage showed. The NYPD later released a statement that said Salaam was pulled over for driving with dark window tints beyond the legal limit.
Though such a stop would not be covered by the transparency law — police already have to record information when they pull a driver over — Salaam argued that it showed the need for greater police transparency.
The council on Tuesday also overrode Adams’ veto of a bill that would restrict the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails.
The law places a four-hour limit on isolating inmates who pose an immediate risk of violence to others or themselves in “de-escalation” units. Only those involved in violent incidents could be placed in longer-term restrictive housing, and they would need to be allowed out of their cells for 14 hours each day and get access to the same programming available to other inmates.
In his letter vetoing that bill, Adams argued the restrictions would put inmates and corrections officers alike at risk. He also cited concerns raised by a federal monitor appointed to evaluate operations at the city’s jails.
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