Minutes before Mayor Eric Adams was scheduled to address the media in the Blue Room at City Hall on Tuesday, one of his foremost political opponents held a competing press conference a few feet away in the building’s Rotunda.
Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, was joined by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, several Council colleagues, faith leaders and activists to condemn the mayor’s decision to veto a pair of criminal justice reform bills. She has said she has the votes to override the mayor’s veto, and intends to do so.
The mayor did not directly address the speaker, but just before the Council's press conference was set to begin, Menashe Shapiro, the mayor's deputy chief of staff, asked several reporters to stand up so he could remove the chairs.
The mayor and the Council both use City Hall as a workplace, but typically Council members submit written permission to use the Rotunda for public events; the press conference was originally scheduled to be on the City Hall steps but was moved inside because of rain.
“We want to maintain control in the Rotunda area,” the mayor said. “We're going to sit down with the speaker, the team is going to sit down and really coordinate how you properly control using the space there in the rotunda area. … We're going to communicate so that we could be good tenants together in this building."
The dispute over the chairs reflected how the two leaders were on opposite sides over the bills, which would place new transparency requirements around police officers and ban most forms of solitary confinement in prisons, respectively.
Adams contends that the first bill, commonly referred to as the “How Many Stops Act," would bury the police in paperwork and take them away from doing their jobs. As of now, police officers are only required to document so-called “Level 3” stops, defined as those with “reasonable suspicion.” The bill would call for officers to also report “Level 1 and Level 2” stops. Adams said on Tuesday he’s fine with the inclusion of Level 2 stops in the bill, but not Level 1 stops.
The mayor said several council members have confided in him that, if they “were able to vote their conscience,” they would not support the first bill, but did not name them.
“I know communities in Rockaways, the South Bronx, Washington Heights, they want their police policing not doing paperwork,” Adams said. “So for someone to say that this is wrong for Black and brown communities, I say, yes, it is wrong for Black and brown communities because we're taking that police off to the streets and we're putting them behind a desk. And that's not what we should be doing.”
Adams also pushed back on the sentiment that the second bill was about solitary confinement, which he said was disbanded in 2019.
