City Council Aims To Reduce The NYPD s Footprint With Sweeping New Police Reforms
arrow
The New York City Council announced on Friday that it plans to introduce a comprehensive bill package that would reduce the NYPD’s footprint in the city and improve police discipline and increase accountability.
Among the 11 proposals: stripping the police commissioner s final authority in disciplinary matters, ending qualified immunity for officers who commit misconduct, and giving the council the power to deny a mayor s choice for commissioner.
“Some of these issues, as I’ve been researching them, go back generations,” said one of the package s co-sponsors, Brooklyn Councilmember Stephen Levin. “So the police commissioner’s final authority on discipline that goes back 80 years.
The City Council moved aggressively to rein in the NYPD on Friday, focusing its legislative ire on bigoted cops and lax discipline but also advancing a policy long-sought by street safety advocates: taking the police department out of crash investigation in favor of a new Department of Transportation unit.
The Council’s just released 12-part agenda includes the demise of the NYPD’s flawed Collision Investigation Squad and the creation of a new DOT team to investigate “all vehicle crashes involving a significant injury.” That mandate would raise the number of crash investigations from the current several hundred to several thousand, given how many crashes maim and kill every year in New York City.