As Mayor Adams tees up to veto the lunatic NYPD paperwork bill passed by the City Council late last year, will the new chair of the Public Safety Committee stand up for safety and let the law die?
Freshman Harlem Councilman Yusef Salaam was just named chairman of the Council’s Public Safety Committee, which oversees the NYPD, among other agencies.
Salaam, who was exonerated in the notorious 1989 Central Park jogger-rape case, said after his insurgent primary victory last year that he was ready to work with the NYPD to keep the streets of Harlem safer.
“Most people would think that I would be pro-defund [the police], but the truth of the matter is we need police,” Salaam, 50, told The Post then.
Now he must ask himself: How does this bill make Harlem safer? It doesn’t.
The measure mandates that cops complete detailed paperwork for every single person they come across during a probe, including noting down everyone’s race, age and gender, and to record all street stops — even the low-level ones.
Which will burn up a lot of police time on paperwork instead of taking gun-toting thugs off the street and other crime-fighting.
The city can’t afford overtime for this work, so that’s likely an hour or more of the average cop’s shift stuck in the stationhouse pushing paper.
That’s why Mayor Adams slammed the bill: “This public assault on public safety is just wrong,” and why he’s set to veto the “How Many Stops Act” on Friday.
But it initially passed with more than enough votes to override that veto; Adams will need to win new support.
The council’s five new members, who joined since the bill passed, are an obvious place to start, along with those who abstained on the original vote.
Do they want to side with the anti-crime mayor, or Public Advocate Jumaane Williams — notoriously anti-cop and an NYPD defunder?
Yussef Salaam and others representing high-crime communities surely understand that when cops investigate crimes committed in those neighborhoods, the persons questioned will reflect the demographics of the victims and the surrounding area; this new paperwork will tell nothing about police “bias.”
If the bill becomes law, the real victims will be New Yorkers who deserve better.
Salaam holds real promise of being a different kind of politician; he can certainly show it by standing up for common sense and his constituents and helping the mayor turn the tide.
