Mayor Adams told a class of NYPD recruits Friday that City Council members want cops to prioritize "paperwork" over "patrolling" — a thinly-veiled rebuke of a bill recently passed by the chamber that'd place new transparency requirements on the Police Department

 

Mayor Adams told a class of NYPD recruits Friday that City Council members want cops to prioritize “paperwork” over “patrolling” — a thinly-veiled dig at a bill recently passed by the chamber that’d place new transparency requirements on the Police Department.

“Council members believe you should not have the empowerment you need,” Adams told hundreds of incoming NYPD officers during a Police Academy graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden. “Instead of patrolling, they want you to do paperwork.”

The mayor’s broadside referenced the “How Many Stops Act,” a bill adopted by the Council this month that’d require NYPD officers to document all encounters they have with civilians that are investigative in nature. Under current regulations, officers only need to log information into a department database about so-called Level 3 stops, where there’s reasonable suspicion of a crime in progress.

Council members and city Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who authored the bill, have argued the new reporting requirements would prevent biased policing and add needed transparency to the NYPD at a time when its federal monitor says unconstitutional police stops of Black and Brown New Yorkers are still common. Williams has also said that logging information about Level 1 and Level 2 stops, the first of which can be conducted without a suspicion of a crime, should take cops no more than “literally 10-20 seconds” via a smartphone app.

But Adams and NYPD leaders say it would take cops much longer to compile reports on Level 1 and Level 2 stops.

They’ve maintained the additional reporting requirements would thereby jeopardize public safety as it would distract cops from doing actual policing.

The mayor — who has not ruled out vetoing the bill — drew pushback for his graduation speech from a spokesman for Council Speaker Adrienne Adams who said his remarks were factually dubious.

“It’s often said that those most afraid of transparency have something to hide. It begs the question what Mayor Adams’ administration wants to hide from its increasing number of police stops of primarily Black and Latino New Yorkers,” the spokesman, Rendy Desamours, said. “If a police stop intrudes into a New Yorkers’ day, basic reporting on it is the least that should be done to ensure transparency and trust towards improving public safety. Those seeking to exaggerate what the [How Many Stops Act] requires are unnecessarily misleading police officers and the public.”

Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, a Democrat who chairs the Council’s Finance Committee, echoed Desamours’ sentiment.

“We don’t believe this at all, actually,” Brannan wrote on X in response to the mayor’s graduation ceremony remarks. “What a reckless thing to say.”

If Adams vetoes the bill, the Council could force it into law by overriding him as long as such a move is supported by two-thirds of the chamber’s members. The bill passed with support from 35 of the Council’s Democrats — just above the 34-veto override threshold.

Also in his graduation speech, Adams criticized the “numerical minority,” a phrase he’s previously used to describe progressive Democrats.

“You’re going to have a small numerical minority that no matter what happens, they’re going to complain about everything you do,” he told the officers.