06/13/2012
By Ivan Pereira
Two city councilmen want a watchdog to keep an eye on the NYPD.
Councilmen Jumaane Williams and Brad Lander said the bill they introduced Wednesday to create a NYPD inspector general was a long time coming.
They said recent police actions, such as the “stop and frisk” policy, showed the NYPD needed someone who could give better oversight.
“I believe they will fill a void in the NYPD,” Williams said.
More than 600,000 New Yorkers, most of whom were minorities, were stopped by the NYPD last year, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Only 10% of those stopped were arrested.
If the bill gets approved, the inspector general would probe the NYPD’s policies and make recommendations to the department and the mayor.
The inspector general would have a seven-year term and cannot be a current or former member of the NYPD, so he or she would not be burdened by one administration, according to Lander.
Although the bill would give him power to choose the inspector general, Mayor Michael Bloomberg dismissed the proposal. “I think we have enough supervision and oversight,” he said.
“We have to get back to just getting the bad guys, the guns off the streets and the guns out of their hands.”
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a potential mayoral candidate in 2013, declined to comment about the legislation but acknowledged she is troubled by the large number of “stop and frisks.”
“It’s an amount that is causing tremendous divide between people and the NYPD,” she said.
