Despite the criticism leveled at former Mayor of New York City Bill De Blasio for slashing the budget of the NYPD, a year and a half into Mayor Adams’s term the cut has still not been reversed, nor is there even talk that it will be any time soon. At the same time, both the number of violent attacks on ordinary New Yorkers and the shoplifting epidemic continue to grow.
That is why we were incredulous at the news that the City Council is poised to impose massive new reporting responsibilities on officers, which will only serve to reduce available policing time even further.
According to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, “New York City’s current policies on access to body worn camera footage have unfortunately fallen short of prioritizing public transparency.” Officers are presently required to issue detailed reports only in connection with “reasonable suspicion” stops, where an officer has the legal authority to detain someone and prevent them from leaving, but one of the measures being considered would require officers to file a detailed report on all low-level “police-civilian investigative encounters.”
These are instances when a police officer interacts with someone who is not considered a suspect in a crime and isn’t being stopped, questioned, and frisked. This new policy would require detailed reports for all levels of police stops and encounters, including speaking to witnesses to a crime, attending to a sick passenger, or seeking information about a missing child. There are an astonishing 3.2 million such occurrences annually.
Other proposed measures would similarly end up significantly diminishing the time officers have to fight crime. For the progressives in control of the City Council, however, the only thing that matters is that officers must routinely demonstrate in the regular course that their conduct was proper.
Let us not be fooled. While the catchy phrase “defund the police” may have lost its former allure, there are those who have come up with a way to accomplish the same thing another way.
