Police officers will be required to record the race, age and gender of most people they stop and solitary confinement will be banned in New York City jails after the City Council overrode Mayor Eric Adams’s veto of two criminal justice bills on Tuesday.
The 42-to-9 vote was a major defeat for Mr. Adams, and it laid bare a growing rift between the mayor and his Democratic colleagues who lead the Council.
Mr. Adams, a former police captain who ran for office on a public safety message, warned that the bills would make the city and its jails more dangerous. He fought the override until the last moment, but his efforts to persuade moderate council members to support him failed: The police accountability bill received seven more yes votes than when it first passed in December.
The two measures aim to track a broader number of police stops to guard against discriminatory patterns and to make jails more humane after the deaths of several people who were held in solitary confinement.
Or he expects the police to increase their bad faith and just reduce the number of random stops they make, which he also believes helps make things safer. Even though communities where police tried “work to rule” kind of actions actually saw improvements in safety because police harassing random people more often doesn’t make anything safer.