City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said overriding the mayor’s veto on two bills will help address “inequity” and “injustices.”
“Both of these bills had to do with inequity and communities of color, predominantly, that have been going through injustices by way of the NYPD for decades,” she told NY1 political anchor Errol Louis Tuesday on “Inside City Hall.”
The interview came shortly after the City Council overrode vetoes of the “How Many Stops Act” and a measure to ban solitary confinement in city jails. The vote was 42-9, with zero abstentions.
The “How Many Stops Act” would have police officers document all investigative encounters with civilians.
Police currently have to document Level 3 investigative stops. The legislation will add lesser Level 1 and Level 2 stops — which generally are requests for information — to the requirement.
“So this was ingrained in us that we had to get this down,” she said.
Mayor Adams and other critics have argued the bill will burden police officers with administrative work, saying that it could impact response times.
For the solitary confinement bill, Speaker Adams said “solitary confinement has been called a lot of different things outside of solitary confinement.”
“The main thing is that we wanted to make sure that isolation would not be used anymore, no matter what you call it,” she said. “This is what we stood on and we had to pass this override.”
Speaker Adams said it has been a “very tough hill” to get the correct information about the “How Many Stops Act” out to the public, adding that misinformation has strained relationships with several communities across the five boroughs.
She emphasized that the importance of the bill is to collect data.
“We need to know why 97% of people of color are only being stopped. We need to know why there is still an exponential rise in percentages of stops that are undocumented to begin with,” Speaker Adams said. “We need the data to find that out.”