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The New York City Council appears set to override Mayor Adams’ veto of the “How Many Stops” bill, the controversial proposal that requires every interaction between the public and the NYPD to be fully documented, no matter how innocuous or mundane the conversation. Critics starting with the mayor contend police officers will spend far too much time writing reports and not enough time protecting the public.
Bill Bratton is another critic of the bill. As one of the police commissioners who helped turn New York around in the 1990’s, Bratton feels he is now watching his work come undone. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to denounce the City Council for doing a U-turn on common sense policing.
“How do you make sense out of anything the New York City Council [does] relative to police,” Bratton questioned with Berman and Riedel. “What makes it particularly offensive and intrusive is that it would require the officer to ask the individual they are speaking to, ‘What is your race? What is your sex? What is your gender?’ Can you imagine the average New Yorker responding to that question? And what is the purpose of it? The purpose of it is that [Jumaane] Williams, the public advocate, and many of the majority in the City Council, are so focused on the issue of race… ludicrous! This bill is bad legislation.”
Bratton feels the bill’s supporters are doing so only in the name of politics. “Mister Williams is planning to run for mayor against Mayor Adams, so as much as he can do to undermine Mayor Adams’ administration, there’s a lot of politics involved here. We also have a city council that’s not particularly supportive of the mayor in many respects... And, at the same time, let’s face it- the majority of the city council don’t like cops, even though the majority of the cops are, like themselves, minorities. Go figure; it’s so hard unscrambling the eggs that the City Council in New York continues to scramble.”
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