Mayor Eric Adams said his team is “looking at all of our options” when asked about two bills the City Council passed earlier Wednesday.
The City Council passed two high-profile bills — one requiring NYPD officers to report some low-level encounters with the public and the other banning solitary confinement in most forms in city jails.
“It was just passed, and we’re looking at all of our options, and the legal team is going to make the final determination,” Adams told NY1 political anchor Errol Louis on “Inside City Hall” Wednesday. “We want to make sure we review it and we’re going to continue some conversations.”
Adams will have 30 days to either sign the bills into law or veto it.
The How Many Stops Act mandates quarterly reporting of all police officers' formal interactions with the public.
Adams continued to express opposition to the bill.
"This is not only duplicative, it is also time-consuming at a moment when you want police on patrol, not doing paperwork," he said.
“There is so much reporting that police officers are doing that is taking away from the public safety aspect, and it’s going to impact overtime, something that the City Council is always asking about,” Adams said.
In response to his recent budget cuts, he said the city is “in a very precarious place right now.”
“We want to make sure that we do not cut services to the point that it’s going to impact the everyday lives of New Yorkers, and we’re going to need support from Albany and Washington, D.C,” Adams said.
Adams said the city cannot spend its way out of “this crisis that we are facing,” and once again referenced the influx of migrants coming to the five boroughs.
“We have to be able to make sure that something is sustainable, and that is why we continue to call for the end of this onslaught of migrants and asylum seekers that we’re seeing in our city,” he said. “It’s wrong for the migrants and asylum seekers, and it’s wrong to New York taxpayers.”
Adams continued to push for public officials, and other constituents, to speak up about the influx of migrants in the city.
“Washington is the center of our national government,” he said. “And if Eric Adams is going alone with just a coalition of other mayors, it’s not going to send the same message than when those constituents are going there and say, ‘This should not be happening to our city.’”
According to city officials, more than 150,000 migrants have arrived in the five boroughs since spring 2022.
In response to NY1’s report on Deputy Mayor Phil Banks potentially leaving the administration, Adams said Banks has "done one heck of a job" and said he will "be here until he's ready to do something else."
“I’m pretty sure New Yorkers are gonna see Phil around for a little while,” he added.
The MTA board earlier this month approved a congestion pricing plan that includes $15 base fare for E-ZPass drivers entering Manhattan south of 60th Street during peak commuting hours. Adams called the plan a “major change in our city.”
“We have to just do it right,” he said. “We need to be deliberate and think through as we move forward with this important change in our society.”