Mayor Adams defends ‘How Many Stops’ veto on eve of NYC Council override

Mayor Adams remained defiant Monday in defending his veto of the “How Many Stops Act” as City Council leaders mounted a final internal push to line up support for overriding him, a move that’d force the police transparency bill into law despite his opposition.

The bill, which passed the Council with overwhelming support last month, would require NYPD officers to log basic information — like age, gender and race — into a department database about all civilians they have investigative encounters with. That’s an expansion of current law, which only requires cops to document encounters with civilians who are reasonably suspected of committing a crime.

What would NYC Council’s ‘How Many Stops Act’ actually do?

The mayor vetoed the bill earlier this month because he believes the proposed transparency rules would jeopardize public safety, but the Council is scheduled to vote to override him Tuesday.

Multiple Council sources told the Daily News that Speaker Adrienne Adams appeared as of Monday to have secured backing from enough of her colleagues to pull off the override, and that an 11th hour effort was underway to also lock in support from a few members who didn’t vote for the bill when it passed in December. Talks behind closed doors were ongoing late Monday, though, and the sources cautioned that nothing was set in stone.

In addition to the How Many Stops measure, the Council is expected to vote Tuesday on overriding Adams’ veto of a separate piece of legislation that’d ban solitary confinement in city jails.

In a Monday morning appearance on NY1, the speaker said she was “very confident” her chamber would be able to override both vetoes.

Against that backdrop and with just over 24 hours to go until the override vote, Mayor Adams said in his own Monday morning appearance on WNYC that he stands by his veto because he’s concerned about the How Many Stops Act’s proposal to make so-called “Level 1” stops subject to the new transparency requirements.

Levels 1 stops can be conducted without a suspicion of a crime, and could for instance involve an officer asking an individual on the street if they’ve seen a missing person.

While he voiced support for beefing up reporting rules around other forms of stops, the mayor, a retired NYPD captain, said that the proposed documentation requirement on Level 1s would place an excessive bureaucratic burden on cops that’d distract them from actual police work.

“The Council had the right spirit, but the Level 1 stops is the step we are in opposition of,” said the mayor, who has argued that filing a single report on a Level 1 stop could take an officer several minutes.

In a rare statement provided to The News, Zachary Carter, who served as the city government’s top lawyer for most of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s time in office, disputed Mayor Adams’ argument about how long it should take to report a Level 1 stop.

Echoing Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who penned the bill and argues such a report should take seconds on a cellphone app, Carter said that “this reporting will serve as an important management tool for NYPD leadership to evaluate and enhance the quality of these important investigative encounters with the public.”

“Mayor Adams’ veto was wrong, and the City Council is right to hold an override vote Tuesday,” said Carter, who also previously served as the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn.

Supporters of the How Many Stops Act have said requiring documentation of Level 1s is especially important at a time that the NYPD’s federal monitor reports that unconstitutional police stops of Black and brown New Yorkers remain common. Under the bill, the NYPD would need to compile quarterly reports with data about all police stops that supporters believe would shine a critical light on the department’s practices.

In an appearance on PIX11 on Monday, Speaker Adams pointed to this past weekend’s police stop of Harlem Councilman Yusef Salaam as an example of why she believes there must be more transparency requirements at the NYPD in general.

“It really did prove a point,” the speaker said, noting that body cam video showed the officer who stopped Salaam did not give a reason for why he pulled him over while he was driving with his wife and children in Harlem. The NYPD later released a report stating the stop was conducted due to Salaam’s car windows being tinted in a potentially illegal way — a type of encounter that must already be documented by law.

“Once the Council member identified himself, he was told to have a good night, which was fine. My problem with it was that he was never told why he was pulled over to begin with,” the speaker said.

To successfully override the vetoes Tuesday, the speaker needs at least 33 of her colleagues to join her in voting for it.

The How Many Stops bill passed in December with support from 35 of the Council’s Democrats. That means that in order to stave off an override, the mayor needs to convince at least two of those Democrats to switch sides and also retain support from all members who opposed the bill when it passed.

Two Democrats who did not support the bill in December, Manhattan Councilman Erik Bottcher and Queens Councilwoman Linda Lee, were leaning Monday afternoon toward joining the speaker in voting for the override, according to three sources familiar with the matter. If they flip to support the override, that would complicate the mayor’s efforts to avert it.

Lee and Bottcher did not return requests for comment.

The mayor has since last month staged an aggressive PR campaign against the bill that included offering Council members to ride along with NYPD officers this past weekend.

At the same time, top aides to the mayor have privately told Council Democrats to oppose the override, sources said.

For instance, Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff who’s expected to help lead his 2025 campaign, contacted multiple Council members last week urging them to stop supporting the How Many Stops Act, according to a source directly familiar with the matter.

Carone confirmed the outreach, saying in a text Monday he engaged in it because he’s “personally against the bill as written as many New Yorkers are.”

In her appearance on NY1, the speaker suggested the outreach from the mayor’s team hasn’t been all that successful.

“I’m not sure if minds were changed,” she said.

If the Council overrides the mayor Tuesday, it’ll be the second time he has suffered such a rebuke since taking office.

Last summer, the Council overrode his veto of a package of bills reforming the city’s housing voucher program. That marked the Council’s first successful reversal of a mayoral veto in a decade.

Brooklyn Councilwoman Shanana Hanif, a Democrat and frequent critic of the mayor who helps lead the Council’s Progressive Caucus, argued his team is having a hard time lobbying against the How Many Stops Act because they’re operating “without much data” to prove the notion that the bill would bury cops in paperwork.

“This is not making for a strong legacy for this mayor,” Hanif said.