NYPD officers pulled over Harlem Councilmember Yusef Salaam last Friday, Jan. 26 while driving across 125th Street with his family. The department says the officer “conducted a legal and professional stop” over tinted windows. Salaam says the experience amplifies “the importance of transparency for all police investigative stops.”
“While it is imperative for all of us as New Yorkers to understand the difficult tasks that we ask the NYPD to take on, it is also critical to understand the lived experiences of those subjected to unjust police stops in this city,” said Salaam in his statement. “Many of us in the Council know what it’s like to feel vulnerable and powerless when stopped by an officer, because we have personally experienced triggering interactions like I had last night. It is our duty as public servants to collect the data necessary to determine the pervasiveness of these stops, and solutions to build the trust necessary to make our neighborhoods safer.”
The actual encounter only lasts a few seconds based on the officer’s body camera footage. Salaam is asked to roll down the back window of his blue BMW sedan and introduces himself as the district’s councilmember. The officer subsequently sends him on his way while Salaam asks if everything is okay—he later points out that he was not provided “a rationale for the stop.” The video was posted publicly over the NYPD’s social media and sent to reporters shortly after Salaam’s office recounted the incident.
RELATED: Councilman Yusef Salaam pulled over by NYPD
Despite the encounter’s banality, the deaths of Tyre Nichols and Philando Castile show the dangers of traffic stops for Black drivers, who are pulled over at higher rates.
Of course, Salaam is famously part of the Exonerated Five whose wrongful conviction stemmed from arrest and questioning by the NYPD. He also heads the public safety committee for the City Council, which overrode Mayor Eric Adams’s veto of the How Many Stops Act this past Tuesday.
Salaam refused a scheduled police ride-along extended by Adams after the stop. He says he plans on building “organic” relationships with local Harlem police precincts instead and later voted in favor of the veto override.
To be clear, the bill-turned-local law would mandate police reporting of low-level street stops. Vehicle stops are Level 4 encounters which already require police reporting predating the legislation, according to the NYPD. The report was also shared publicly over social media, and identified the stop’s basis as a VTL (short for Vehicle and Traffic Law) Infraction.
Mayor Eric Adams provided a statement commending both Salaam and the NYPD. He said the department followed “all proper police procedures.”
Police Reform Organizing Project Director Robert Gangi says such stops lead to a glut of cases for nonwhite New Yorkers witnessed by the organization’s court monitoring.
“Tinted windows charges, from my experience, always involve a New Yorker of color,” he said. “And sometimes, the people don’t even know they had a tinted window—they had a window replaced in their car and it turned out to be tinted. They’re not intentionally trying to prevent cops or anybody [else] from seeing what’s going on in the car.”
Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry said that the footage showed “the truth about the outstanding, professional work” union members perform “every day” and demanded an apology from Salaam and allied elected officials.
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
It’s illegal to drive as non law enforcement with front windows of a car that are very dark. Stop drawing police attention to yourself by driving a car with dark windows. He was stopped due to front windows being too dark (according to the police report), not his race.