Mayor Eric Adams vetoed two criminal justice reform bills, Intro. 586-A and Intro. 549-A, last week. As expected, the move has been met with a maelstrom of criticism from advocates, the City Council, and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who are already demanding an override.
The City Council passed two bills in December 2023: one to ban the use of solitary confinement in city jails and one that would require the NYPD to publicly report on all police-civilian Level I and II investigative stops. The solitary confinement ban and the How Many Stops Act (HMSA) is sponsored by Williams.
Adams publicly expressed hesitancy about the bills. He said he was concerned about the legislation making jails less safe for correctional officers and the incarcerated, and streets less safe, considering that statistically, crime in the city is down. On January 19, he announced his official veto of HMSA and the solitary confinement ban. He has consistently pointed to his time as a police officer for why he believes the bills are “misguided,” however well-intentioned they are.
“I know that many people are pushing back around our conversation on two bills I vetoed the other day. Right here, we talked about it with community leaders, religious leaders, and others,” said Adams at his morning presser.
This Tuesday, Jan. 23, he and Speaker Adrienne Adams held competing press conferences on separate floors from one another in City Hall. Speaker Adams and other electeds were joined by interfaith leaders to discuss the HMSA and their full-blown support of an override of the mayor’s veto.
“They know, as so many of our colleagues know, that our Black and Latino communities bear the overwhelming brunt of police stops,” said Speaker Adams. “No one is left unscathed. They have a ripple effect that deteriorates the trust needed to make our community safer.”
At the press conference, Speaker Adams and Williams presented a united front and called out Mayor Adams for spreading “misinformation.”
In 2013, the City Council passed the Community Safety Act, overriding former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto, to improve policing tactics. The use of “stop and frisk” was deemed unconstitutional back in 2014 because of its disproportionate impact on Black and brown people in the city at that time. Then the Council enacted the Right to Know Act in 2018 to make NYPD officers identify themselves to civilians and outline protocol for stops or searches without consent. Only Level 3 stops are defined as “reasonable suspicion” stops.
In 2019, Antonio Williams, a 27-year-old Black man, was killed by plainclothes officers in the Bronx while waiting for a taxi. He was chased, tackled, and punched by officers who “jumped” out of an unmarked car. At least six officers drew their guns and opened fire. Officer Brian Mulkeen and Williams were both shot to death. Shawn Williams, his father, has been a staunch supporter of the HMSA since his son’s death. He pleaded for an override at the press conference.
“Antonio’s story is the worst-case scenario of what happens during a Level I and II stop. The NYPD had no justification to stop Antonio. His crime was only waiting for a cab while being Black,” said his father.
Public Advocate Williams clarified that the bill does not state that police need to report on “casual stops” nor are they suggesting there be additional physical “paperwork” during an emergency or pressing investigation. At the end of their tour, officers normally have to fill out their electronic reports on their phones, he said, and they have collaborated with officers to find a way to integrate their questions into their existing system. They have to report their observations and aren’t mandated to collect personal information during each stop. Williams explained that the reporting is critical for two reasons: to narrow down searches on body cam footage and to have accurate data.
“We didn’t choose the color of our skin, but we are being judged by it and not the content of our character,” said Public Safety Committee Chair and Councilmember Yusef Salaam at the press conference. “I’ve been stopped many times.”
Salaam said there are plans to rally around an override of the veto to the solitary ban as well. The NYC Department of Correction (DOC) has said, to the Amsterdam News, that it “does not practice solitary confinement and has not practiced solitary confinement since 2019” under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. In 2015, Kalief Browder’s suicide garnered national outrage against solitary confinement in city jails. He was never convicted of the crime he was accused of: stealing a backpack. Yet Browder was arrested as a teenager and subjected to roughly two years of solitary confinement on Rikers Island. He took his life after his release.
Adams maintains solitary confinement ceased roughly five years ago, but Brandon Rodriguez died on Rikers in 2021 while isolated in a caged shower cell. The 25-year-old suffered from mental health conditions.
“It’s very disheartening, and it’s telling me that [Adams] doesn’t care what I personally went through losing my son,” said his mother, Tamara Carter. “I mean it’s a slap in the face, because everyone knows my son was in solitary confinement. It’s not a secret—he was in the shower cell and that’s where he ultimately died.”
Victor Pate, co-director of the #HaltSolitary Campaign, called Adams’s claims of solitary confinement’s end “untruth and misinformation,” pointing to other practices in city jails involving isolating detainees like the one that Rodriguez was subjected to.
“Punitive segregation, administrative segregation, any type of separation from the general population where people are held alone or separated [in] cells 23–24 hours a day [without] receiving any significant programming or out-of-cell time, by any means is still solitary,” said Pate. “And it’s still harmful, not only to the individuals, but it’s also harmful to the staff, because having solitary confinement does not make the jails safe. It truly does not make our communities safe, and it does nothing for the individual’s well being if there is a need to separate them.”
As the debate rages on between Adams and the City Council, directly affected advocates are the ones who actually shaped bills like Intro 549-A. Pate said he continues to experience trauma from his time in solitary confinement decades ago. Another organizer, Five Omar Mualimm-ak, said the movement to end the practice stems from a “campaign of survivors.”
“We’re not speaking from a lack of experience, we’re not speaking from a book [where] we read about it,” said Mualimm-ak. “We’re speaking because we’re victims, but also survivors of this torturous system. When you have a collective of survivors from multiple states, because now the movement has grown nationally, it is not just something you can negate.”
Strange bedfellows stem from the veto as federal monitor Steve Martin—an independent watchdog appointed to ensure court-mandated reforms at Rikers Island—argued Intro 549-A would “likely exacerbate the already-dangerous conditions in the jails” and “that definition of solitary confinement in this bill is not aligned with any definition of solitary confinement known to the Monitoring Team.” He said the legislation, if passed, could prevent reforms ordered in the Nunez litigation, including handling detainees after “serious acts of violence.” Traditionally, Martin and Adams find themselves on opposite sides over federally appointing a receiver to manage Rikers Island.
Calvin John Smiley, associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College, said New York City remains the “majority feeder” to state prisons, so interactions with police, addressed by Intro. 586-A, directly lead to incarceration and jail safety—the battleground over Intro. 549-A.
“The NYPD is that frontline because you don’t end up in Rikers [or] state prison without being arrested,” said Smiley. “Police and what police do are the first line of how many people are going to end up in the New York state prison system.”
He pointed to data determining that 72% of the state prison population stemmed from residents in just seven New York City community boards during the 1980s, when mass incarceration spiked under the Reagan administration. Of course, those neighborhoods were predominantly Black and brown, and subject to the harshest policing.
Mayor Adams and NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban issued an open call to members of the City Council to ride with officers this weekend as they patrol the city to observe them filling out reports after Level 1 interactions. They also extended an invitation for Council members to ride along during bus transfers between correctional facilities.
“In an effort to continue our good-faith discussions with the authors and supporters of this bill, we invite any and all members of the City Council to join our officers as they do the vital work of keeping our city and its people safe,” said Caban in a statement. “We want to show them firsthand the sheer scale of what NYPD cops and detectives do every day. And we need them to understand how essential it is that our officers spend their time doing police work, not paperwork.”
So far, Williams and a handful of Council members said that they would attend the ride-alongs. Williams said he’s currently looking for a time in his schedule because he does genuinely think it’s a “wonderful idea.” However, he doesn’t think his ride-along will change the bill and that it’s being used more as a “distraction” from the override than an olive branch.
Ariama C. Long and Tandy Lau are Report for America corps members who write about politics and public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep them writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.