Blaz: Now, I get the anti-chokehold law

Mayor de Blasio has used the threat of a veto to stymie the passage of a police anti-chokehold bill for years.

On Friday, he said his understanding of the situation at the time “wasn’t the whole picture.” De Blasio’s prior concern over the bill was that it didn’t contain an exception for when an officer’s life was put in danger. That exception was not included in the bill the City Council passed with a veto-proof majority Thursday. But after its passage, the mayor said he would sign it into law anyway. Despite that, Council members have said that even right up until Thursday’s vote, administration officials were working behind the scenes to water down the bill.

The bill’s sponsor, City Councilman Rory Lancman, laughed when told about the mayor’s reversal Friday, saying that since 2014 he had been telling the administration state law provided the exception de Blasio desired. “We explained to him at the time that that defense was already available in state law,” Lancman said.

After a police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for over eight minutes in Minnesota, the bill was expanded to include forbidding officers to sit, kneel or stand on a suspect’s chest or back in the course of making an arrest.

Lancman said Friday that it was that provision de Blasio was working behind the scenes to dilute up until the bill’s passage in the Council on Thursday.

“Looking back, I now see that honestly, the information I had at the time I don’t think was the whole truth,” de Blasio said Friday. “I now believe based on consultation with some additional lawyers that there are those protections embodied in state law.”

De Blasio’s press office did not immediately respond to questions about when the mayor talked to those additional lawyers, and the mayor did not offer a timeline at his press conference.

“The way I understood the situation previously just wasn’t the whole picture and I have to own up to that,” he said. “I thought I was working from the right information and now believe I wasn’t, honestly. So now I am really quite clear that this bill can achieve its purpose and is the right policy for the City of New York.”