A week after claiming victory in the administration's decision to hire an additional 1,300 police officers, the City Council has scheduled a hearing for next Monday on a series of police reform proposals, including some that are opposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD.
The public safety committee will hear nine bills, including two that have enough sponsors to pass, but fall short of having enough votes to override a mayoral veto. A third bill is two votes shy of passage.
Among the bills with the most support, one would ban officers from using chokeholds on suspects. Twenty-eight members are sponsoring that legislation, which was introduced by Councilman Rory Lancman, a Democrat from Queens, after Eric Garner died while being placed in a chokehold by a police officer on Staten Island last July.
“The Council is looking at reforming police and community relations comprehensively, and if you look at the nine bills, they all touch on different aspects of police-community relations,” Lancman told Capital.
Two bills, known as the Right to Know Act, would require officers to identify themselves by providing a business card and obtain verbal or written consent before searching an individual when there is no warrant or probable cause.
The police identification bill has 30 sponsors; the proof of consent bill has 24, two votes short of passage in the 51-member Council.
Police commissioner Bill Bratton opposes the Right to Know Act and de Blasio has expressedconcerns about it, citing the New York Police Department's internal policy prohibiting chokeholds as being enough to prevent misuse of the maneuver.
The other bills have nowhere near enough support to pass.
Among them is a proposal to require reports from the NYPD on the location of officers who have been cited by Civilian Complaint Review Board. Other bills would require the department to submit annual reports to identify the city’s top 35 high-crime areas, create a task force to study the body camera program and require the department to issue quarterly reports on the use of force and how often it is related to quality of life offenses.
In addition, Lacman is also sponsoring the bill to require the NYPD to publish annual reports on how often officers use force, and another to allow officers to only use “injurious physical force” only when they need to protect themselves or others from the threat of injury or death.
Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has not taken a public position on any of the bills.
In a statement, her spokesman, Eric Koch, said the Council “look[s] forward to a very thoughtful and informative hearing on this very important issue.”
Public safety committee chairwoman Vanessa Gibson has not signed onto the chokehold ban or the consent bill.
De Blasio declared his opposition to the chokehold bill while he was in the midst of a public fight with police unions after the execution-style deaths of two police officers in December and widespread protests over a grand jury clearing a white officer in the death of Garner, who was black.
In an email, Monica Klein, a spokeswoman for de Blasio, said "the mayor would veto the chokehold bill as it is currently drafted."
Monday's hearing, at which NYPD officials are expected to testify, will highlight an issue that has become central to de Blasio’s mayoralty and has complicated his central campaign message of reforming policing tactics. As mayor, he has sometimes struggled with balancing the demands of police reform activists and others wary of the NYPD with the needs of Bratton and the department.
Bratton agrees with de Blasio on the past problems surrounding stop-and-frisk and has continued to sharply reduce its use. He also vowed to implement a “neighborhood policing” strategy in exchange for getting more officers, which is being unveiled Thursday afternoon.
Several Council members told Capital they believe Monday's hearing was scheduled to placate those members who are often critical of the NYPD and upset by the addition of 1,300 officers in the city budget.
While the committee chairs set their hearings, the speaker holds sway in the process.
"I’m hearing some members, not a majority, but I'm hearing some members were upset with 1,300 cops and this may be a way to now reach out to those members by having those hearings," said one member who would speak only on background. "That is one school of thought.”
Councilman Jimmy Vacca, one of the more conservative Democratic members, said “members who have this type of legislation and then say ‘well the Council supports the police’ I think have to realize that in many ways there's an inconsistency."
After Monday evening’s ceremonial budget handshake, some members privately admitted they were disappointed the NYPD headcount was increased and that not enough funds were included for programs to provide youth employment.
The Black Latino and Asian Caucus released a statement just before 11 p.m. Wednesday calling the budget a “missed opportunity.”
“We believed we missed an opportunity to fund programs aimed at creating job opportunities for young people at the same ambitious level that we funded new NYPD officers,” the statement read. “With the addition of police personnel, which many still support, we are disappointed that an amount of equal resources were not made to job programs for young people holistically improving our public safety discussion.”
Adilka Pimentel, a spokeswoman for Communities United for Police Reform, an advocacy organization, linked the bills before the Council to the decision to hire the additional officers.
"As the Council and mayor have chosen to add more police to our communities, it's vital that they also take responsibility for protecting our children and families from abusive policing that violates our rights by exploiting the power imbalance between police and civilians," Pimentel said in an email.
Lancman balked at that idea.
“I think it has absolutely nothing to do with that, and almost everything to do with the fact that we are fast approaching the one-year anniversary of Eric Garner’s death and the public rightly wants to know what we have done to make things better,” Lancman said.
UPDATE: This story has been updated to include a statement from Monica Klein, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio.