NYPD officers must record race of people they question
New York City police officers will be required to record the apparent race, gender and ages of most people they stop for questioning under a law passed Tuesday by the City Council, which overrode a veto by Mayor Eric Adams.
The issue was thrust into the national spotlight in recent days when NYPD officers pulled over a Black council member without giving him a reason.
The law gives police reform advocates a major win in requiring the nation’s largest police department and its 36,000 officers to document all investigative encounters in a city that once had officers routinely stop and frisk huge numbers of men for weapons — a strategy that took a heavy toll on communities of color.
It requires officers to document basic information in low-level encounters, where police ask for information from people who aren’t necessarily suspected of a crime.
Officers also will have to report the circumstances that led to stopping a particular person. The data would be made public on the police department’s website.
City Council Member Kevin Riley, a Bronx Democrat who is Black, related his own experience of being detained by police simply for hunting for a parking spot on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while fresh out of college as he voted for the law.
“This is something we deal with on a daily basis,” he said. “When we see those red and blue lights, our hearts drop into our stomachs.”
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who sponsored the bill, said that reporting the encounters could be done in less than a minute on an officer’s smartphone through a system already in place.