Mayor Adams’ fight with City Council over vetoed bills escalates into spat over City Hall turf — and chairs

Jan. 23, 2024, 4:47 p.m.

The mayor’s deputy chief of staff abruptly ordered reporters to give up their chairs at the Council's press conference at City Hall on Tuesday.

A City Hall facilities worker holds a pushcart as one of Mayor Eric Adams' aides tells reporters to relinquish their chairs in the rotunda on Jan. 23, 2024.

Mayor Eric Adams’ public campaign against a pair of City Council bills he vetoed last week took another bizarre turn on Tuesday when a squabble erupted over the Council’s use of City Hall's rotunda for a press conference intended to counter Adams' attacks on the legislation.

The argument, which revolved around chairs provided for reporters, resembled a playground dispute fronted by the mayor’s deputy chief of staff, Menashe Shapiro. Although the mayor and the Council both use City Hall as a workplace and a venue for public events, the mayor controls the space on a day-to-day basis.

“I just want our chairs,” a visibly annoyed Shapiro told reporters before the Council’s press conference was scheduled to start. “If the City Council wants to give you something to sit on, it’s for the City Council [to do].”

A facilities staffer holding a hand truck stood next to Shapiro, awaiting the outcome.

But Shapiro's complaint did not appear to move the half-dozen reporters in attendance, who remained seated. Shapiro declined to comment on the incident when reached by phone later on Tuesday afternoon.

Council spokesperson Mara Davis said the conference was originally scheduled to be held on City Hall's steps, but was moved indoors because of rain.

“We would have hoped that our neighbors in the building would have been courteous of the extenuating circumstances,” Davis said in a statement.

The altercation was the latest episode in Adams’ bitter battle with the Council over the bills, which ban solitary confinement in city jails and require NYPD officers to report all their investigatory stops of civilians. Adams has recently railed against the legislation in some unusual settings, including a bar mitzvah as well as a gala for real estate executives, where he chided attendees for not aiding him in the fight.

Adams vetoed both pieces of legislation last Friday, saying they would compromise law enforcement’s ability to ensure public safety. The bills' proponents say they would boost police transparency and reduce harm to incarcerated people if enacted.

The policing bill would require officers to provide demographic data on civilians encountered in the course of investigations, including low-level stops that do not involve suspicion of criminal activity. The legislation would also require the NYPD to publish the data on its website every quarter and report when someone declines to grant an officer consent to search them.

The solitary confinement bill would prohibit the practice in most cases across the city’s jail system, including Rikers Island, which faces a potential federal takeover. The bill’s passage followed years of debate over solitary confinement and what qualifies as overly harsh discipline.

The Council passed both bills with veto-proof majorities last month, though several new councilmembers elected in 2023 have taken office in the new year. Adams has sought to influence those members and others ahead of the Council’s expected override of his vetoes next month — including by holding press conferences and releasing videos on the bills’ purported hazards.

The mayor has said the policing bill would burden officers with hours of additional work and that the solitary confinement bill would hinder correction officers from isolating violent detainees to protect jail staff and other incarcerated people.

During his own regular press conference on Tuesday, Adams said the spat over the chairs at the Council’s event amounted to keeping order at City Hall.

But staffers for Council Speaker Adrienne Adams also said a large studio light in the rotunda wouldn't be turned on for the event, leaving councilmembers to hold their conference in unusually dim settings.

“We want to maintain control in the rotunda area,” the mayor said, adding that in the past the Council would submit a written request to use the space to the mayor's office. “That was not done this time.”

Adams noted that his team would reach out to the Council's speaker and “communicate so that we can be good tenants together.”

Davis, the Council spokesperson, said the Council was “baffled” by the mayor’s actions, which she described as “muzzling” critics, including members of the city’s religious community who participated in the press conference to oppose Adams’ veto of the policing legislation.

“Attempts to impede pastors, rabbis and imams from standing together to share their thoughts about the impact of police stops on their communities only highlight the administration’s lack of confidence in their arguments and false claims against the bill,” she said.

Mandela Jones, the speaker’s spokesperson, told Gothamist the use of the rotunda was never an issue before Tuesday and denied that a formal written request to the mayor’s office was ever required.

During the press conference, Speaker Adams joined roughly a dozen councilmembers and Jumaane Williams, the city's public advocate, to criticize the mayor’s veto of the police reporting bill, and said she was confident the Council had enough votes to override it.

“All of us share one goal, and that is to ensure that our neighborhoods are safer and that we all have equitable access to public safety,” she said.

The parents of Antonio Williams — who was fatally shot by police during a low-level stop in 2019 — also spoke at the event. They said their son’s death was an example of how quickly low-level stops can escalate into violence or police use of force.

“It is disgusting to me how much time and resources that Mayor Adams is spending on his campaign of lies about this bill,” Williams’ father Shawn told reporters. “He clearly cares more about protecting the NYPD than taking steps to ensure more families don’t have to suffer like mine.”

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