City Council's Police Reforms Fail To Reduce NYPD's Footprint, Critics Say

On Thursday afternoon, the City Council passed a package of bills aimed at reforming the NYPD. The bills, which Mayor Bill de Blasio said he will sign, include a law that makes it easier for New Yorkers to sue police officers for violating their constitutional rights, and another that requires the police department to record and release demographic data on traffic stops.

Yet some advocates and councilmembers told Gothamist that the legislation still falls short of its stated aim to meaningfully “reduce the NYPD’s footprint” and create more rigorous systems of accountability.

Brooklyn Councilmember Brad Lander said the package “adds up to a lot less than meets the eye.”

“Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD put together a sham process for thinking about what kind of transformation we need in policing, and especially policing accountability,” said Lander, who is currently running for City Comptroller. “This is not a serious response to the protest of the killing of George Floyd and there's no reason to believe it will change core accountability structures.”

Two of the bills that passed—to transfer final disciplinary authority from the NYPD commissioner to the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), and require NYPD officers to live in New York City—were “resolutions” in support of state legislation that is out of the council’s jurisdiction.

Another significant bill from the original package introduced in January, which would have required the mayor to get City Council approval for their choice of police commissioner, was not voted on.

Brooklyn Councilmember Stephen Levin, the main sponsor of the legislation that would hold NYPD officers liable for violating New Yorkers’ protections against unconstitutional search and seizure and excessive force, said his bill would force cops to have “more skin in the game.”

“For the first time now in New York City you can bring a lawsuit based on an infringement of your constitutional rights under the 4th Amendment, and the officer has to be able to answer for that,” Levin said. “He can’t go in and say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m unassailable in this regard.’”

The goal of Levin’s legislation is to blunt the effects of “qualified immunity,” a legal doctrine that essentially shields police officers from any personal liability stemming from misconduct on the job. Legal advocates said that while it was an important first step, NYPD officers will still be able to use qualified immunity as a shield in many cases when they are sued for misconduct.

Taxpayers will still pay for any damages awarded, and the city’s Law Department will continue to defend sued officers, a necessary tweak for the mayor’s support of the bill. The qualified immunity doctrine can still be invoked in state and federal lawsuits.

“We think it’s great that people will have the opportunity to sue individual officers for violating their constitutional rights,” said Andrew Case, senior counsel at LatinoJustice. “But it’s a small part of a lot of misconduct that is still protected by qualified immunity.”

The mayor’s Law Department is currently using qualified immunity as a defense in a lawsuit brought against the NYPD by Attorney General Letitia James for officers’ misconduct during the protests last summer.

“This is where the cynicism of the city’s position kind of gets to me,” Levin said. "They testified in our hearing that it’s so rarely invoked, ‘Oh it’s only been invoked twice in the last year.’ OK, well, they wrote a letter to a judge like, two months ago, invoking it.”

A spokesperson for the Law Department hasn’t yet responded to questions about whether they will continue to use the qualified immunity defense in the lawsuit, nor has the Mayor’s Office.

One bill sponsored by Queens Councilmember Adrienne Adams requires the NYPD to release quarterly reports on all the traffic stops and officers make.

“Compelling them to report traffic stop data will allow everyone to see whether or not the police department is racially profiling drivers the same way they racially profile pedestrians,” said Case, the LatinoJustice attorney.

Another piece of legislation that passed would remove the sole responsibility from the NYPD for investigating serious vehicle crashes. Instead, a new unit under the Department of Transportation will serve as the lead investigative agency, with the power to interview witnesses, issue public statements, and recommend street design changes.

The change was hailed as a victory by safe streets advocates, who have long accused the NYPD's Collision Investigation Squad of victim-blaming crash victims and failing to properly investigate reckless drivers. But others described the bill as a half-measure, noting that the language was reportedly softened at the last minute to allow some NYPD discretion over investigations, in exchange for the mayor's backing of the proposal.

"The NYPD is still going to do the same set of things," said Lander, who co-sponsored the legislation. "It's not changing what's broken in CIS."

Reform advocates were particularly scathing of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s state-mandated plan for NYPD reforms, which the counsel also approved on Thursday in a resolution. Last year, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered all localities across the state to come up with a police reform plan by April 1, or lose state funding.

While the plan creates 5,000 more spots in the summer youth employment program, and commits $15 million in more funding for anti-violence programs and social services, it also expands the reach of the NYPD into communities, something that many police reform advocates have spent years arguing against. Two initiatives initially proposed by the mayor have the NYPD working with NYCHA and the Parks Department to “rehabilitate basketball courts,” but are absent from the council's resolution.

“We don’t need police officers to put nets on basketball hoops, we need them to have a smaller role in policing the community,” Case said.

Keli Young, the civil rights campaign coordinator for the advocacy group VOCAL-NY, said that reform aimed at helping Black, Brown, and low-income communities “can only be achieved by significantly reducing interactions with police through defunding the NYPD and reinvesting those resources into housing, social services, and care."

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson insisted that this package was “just the beginning.”

“We are going to push to go further. However, we had to pass a plan before April 1 because if we didn't the governor under his executive order could have withheld billions of dollars of aid from our city,” Johnson said.

Councilmember Adams, who is the chair of the public safety committee, and sponsored the stalled “advice and consent” bill requiring council oversight of the police commissioner, also stressed that the legislation was not dead.

“I am committed to moving forward with more police reforms, including the advice and consent bill that will bring more accountability and scrutiny to the process of choosing a police commissioner,” Adams said in a statement.

The NYPD continues to oppose the legislation, and also opposes the state legislation that would give the CCRB final disciplinary authority over police officers; currently, the NYPD commissioners deviates from their recommendations 71% of the time.

“What people are calling for is accountability. When you take that accountability away from the chief executive of the organization and hand it to a committee, you have the opposite of accountability,” NYPD deputy commissioner John Miller said in a statement. “When something goes wrong, all you get is finger pointing.”

Michael Sisitzky, the senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that the more significant battle over NYPD reform will occur during this year’s budget negotiations.

“We had a real fight last year over calls to reduce the NYPD’s budget and the city made some cosmetic shifts, moved some funds from one column to the other without actually reducing our investment in law enforcement,” Sisitzky said. “Those calls to defund the NYPD are not going to go away. This reform plan cannot be cited as an excuse for not taking those necessary steps.”