I write to express my strong opposition to a needless City Council police reporting bill that will take cops off the street to fill out paperwork instead of deterring, investigating, and fighting crime, threatens the viability of community policing, and is the latest chapter in the Council’s endless efforts to make the career of an NYPD officer utterly undesirable. Crime remains the single most pressing concern in our city, and yet the NYPD continues to face record levels of attrition, leaving the manpower of the NYPD lower than it has been in decades and resulting in slower response times to 911 calls across the five boroughs. This has downstream impacts on both the reality and perception that our communities are safe and means we are asking an increasingly young police force to do more with less. This bill would make this already dangerous reality much worse, and our city less safe as a result.
With that as a backdrop, it is unfathomable that Public Advocate Williams and more than half of the New York City Council support Int. 586, the so-called “How Many Stops” Bill, which would require NYPD officers to assume the gender, race, and age of New Yorkers with whom they interact, spend hours off patrol to extensively document these interactions, and permanently store this information in an NYPD database. In a tragic twist of irony, it was the collection and storage of the personal information of presumed innocent New Yorkers that caused the end of “Stop and Frisk” and now the Council is now eager to restore that type of data collection for these senseless purposes.
Is this how the majority of New Yorkers want their NYPD officers to spend their time, compiling reports on run of the mill encounters instead of patrolling their streets and communities? Do we think the public, particularly victims and witnesses of crime and undocumented New Yorkers, will be more likely to engage with the NYPD if they know their personal information will be guessed, stored, and reported on? Even if you are inclined to support the goals of this legislation, are we so naïve to think that this data will be accurate or will serve any legitimate purpose other than legitimizing the sponsors’ predetermined conclusion that the men and women of the NYPD are up to no good?
It must also be noted that many proponents of this terribly misguided bill are backers of community policing, especially when crime occurs in their neighborhood, as well as expanded discovery obligations for prosecutors, and of the recently enacted “Clean Slate” law to seal criminal records. This legislation works in direct opposition to those three priorities; cops and the community will talk to each other less, district attorneys will be swamped with even more paperwork, and the goals of Clean Slate will be stymied.
Public Advocate Williams was an outspoken supporter of Clean Slate, a bill that will automatically seal the criminal records of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, yet this legislation requires the NYPD to collect and publicly store the pedigree information of those who engage in encounters with the NYPD indefinitely. The NYPD cannot simultaneously comply with Clean Slate and this legislation. This is another example of legislative malpractice being
carried out by quixotic ideologues who prefer to govern by tweet and press release rather than by research and thoughtful dialogue with relevant experts and stakeholders.
This legislation also places an enormous burden on the discovery obligations required of my office and that of my fellow District Attorneys. As written, this bill will require the NYPD to create a new form to document these encounters and will ask officers to differentiate between Level 1, 2, and 3 encounters, a task that can sometimes stymie even a seasoned prosecutor, let alone a rookie cop. It will further require our prosecutors to immediately disclose even the earliest draft version of these reports; waiting until a final report is published by the NYPD will be insufficient under our discovery laws. This places a massive, practically impossible burden on the shoulders of our prosecutors who are already quitting in droves, leaving those that remain with no choice but to dismiss tens of thousands of cases citywide because of unrealistic discovery laws foisted on us by Albany.
Lastly, our city is facing a massive budget crisis and there are scores of public safety problems that should be the priorities of the City Council. The “problem” this bill purports to solve is not one of them, and will actually make the budget crisis worse as the storage and compilation of massive amounts of New Yorkers’ personal identifying information will cost the city millions.
We urge these sponsors to sit down with prosecutors and police and to listen to the public who are loudly asking a simple request: focus on keeping New Yorkers safe and holding criminals accountable, not on further tying the hands of law enforcement and making the noble career of an NYPD officer the least desirable job in our city.