On Wednesday afternoon, the New York City Council passed two bills, Intro 538 and Intro 586, known collectively as the How Many Stops Act — both with majorities large enough to defeat the mayor's threatened veto.
JFREJ members should be incredibly proud of the role we played in passing this critical legislation. Our members turned out again and again to push for passage of the bills — in the streets, online, on the phones, and behind the scenes in Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) meetings and planning calls. In particular, the members of the Freedom to Thrive leadership team played a key role in making this victory possible. And their work would not have been possible if not for the efforts of our electoral arm, The Jewish Vote, which helped to elect all of the lead sponsors of the How Many Stops Act: Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and Council Members Crystal Hudson and Alexa Avilés.
The How Many Stops Act is a package of common sense reporting bills that will finally shine a light on an entire category of police stops that were hidden from public scrutiny before today.
Intro. 586 requires the NYPD to report on Level 1 and 2 police stops – investigative encounters in which officers ask questions but in which officers do not have “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity, the legal standard for stop-and-frisk. The NYPD would be required to report where they happen, demographic information on the person stopped, the reason for the encounter, and whether the encounter leads to any use of force or enforcement action.
Intro. 538 requires the NYPD to report a much fuller set of data that they are currently required to report about their use of “consent searches” — stops in which an NYPD officer asks permission to conduct a search of a person or their belongings. This data would include the total number of requests for consent to search, including those requests that were refused and instances when the NYPD uses consent searches to collect DNA information from New Yorkers, as well as information about language access.
In 2013 JFREJ and our CPR partners took on the NYPD's unconstitutional stop and frisk regime. Since then, we have won every legislative battle we've fought in the city council on this issue — from the Community Safety Act, to the Right To Know Act, to the How Many Stops Act. While Mayor Adams may make good on his threat to veto the bills, our majorities make clear that we have the votes to overturn any veto. Until the bills are signed, we still have work to do, but we have every reason to believe that we have finally closed an important chapter that began with the passage of the Community Safety Act ten years ago.
