John Minchillo/AP Photo
Eric Adams, Brooklyn borough president and a Democratic mayoral candidate, is a former NYPD officer and has called himself ‘extremely conservative on crime.’
Wednesday, May 5 marked the first day of the 2021 New York City mayor’s race in which Andrew Yang did not lead Democratic primary polling. The honor instead went to Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, coming in at 21 percent support; Yang ran second with 18 percent.
The poll, conducted by Washington, D.C.’s GQR, confirms recent trend lines suggesting that Adams has been chipping away at Yang’s lead.
Adams, who has strong ties to the city’s Black and Orthodox Jewish communities, is well funded and amply endorsed. Politico reports that he has yet to spend much of his “$7.9 million campaign war chest” and could blitz the airwaves in the closing stretch of the primary campaign. With his stable voting base and establishment ties, he is clearly a strong contender.
He also boasts an interesting story, one that he has leaned into heavily over the course of his career. As a teenager, Adams was arrested with his brother for “criminal trespassing” in Queens and beaten and brutalized by officers at the police station.
He recounted this traumatic event to Terry Gross during an NPR interview last year.
“They picked us up from school, took us to the precinct,” said Adams. “And they were filling out the paperwork, and out of nowhere, they said, you feel like a beat down? And they brought the two of us—we thought we were being transported somewhere. But they took us to the lower part of the 103rd Precinct, the same precinct Sean Bell was killed in. And they just started kicking us in the groin, you know, repeatedly.”
Adams goes on to describe his PTSD after being beaten by police, as well as some short-term health effects, such as “urinat[ing] blood for a week.”
However, he does not tell this story to garner sympathy or dredge up anti-police sentiment. In fact, he tells this story to explain his motivation for joining the NYPD in 1984 and why he stayed on the force for 22 years before his election to the New York state Senate in 2006.
“I understood that there was a demon inside me,” he told Gross in a 2016 interview. “And the only way I can get it out is for me to go in, and going in meant becoming a police officer.”
Adams referred to himself as “extremely conservative on crime” as recently as July 2018.
Adams has been telling the story a long time. He was the focus of a New York Times profile in 1999, well before his political career began. At the time, he was an NYPD lieutenant stationed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
That piece, entitled “PUBLIC LIVES; Behind a Badge, Confronting Issues of Race,” told the story of Adams’s arrest and subsequent beating, and recounted his thoughts on his policing career and his feelings about law enforcement in general. Adams described taking what he believed to be a pragmatic approach to Giuliani-era policing tactics by leading seminars for young Black men on how to “behave” during stop-and-frisk situations. He believed (and still believes) that there are good cops and bad cops, and that a simple institutional restructuring would suffice to heal the ills of the NYPD.
Buried just before the profile’s kicker is a sentence that is a bit of eyebrow-raiser, to say the least.
“Lieutenant Adams, who calls himself a conservative Republican, says he was as pleased as any New Yorker who owns a co-op (his is in Prospect Heights) and a stock portfolio when a reduction in crime produced economic windfalls” (emphasis added).
This article appeared in print some 21 years before Adams announced his run for mayor. Today, to be sure, Adams is mainly proposing the standard centrist/center-left Democratic party fare: some green infrastructure investment, “moderate” income tax increases on the wealthy, expanded “access” to health care, and so on. Despite that, Adams referred to himself as “extremely conservative on crime” as recently as July 2018 and is centering his mayoral campaign on hawkish, right-wing policing and public-safety policy.
ON FEBRUARY 28 OF LAST YEAR, Adams sat down for an interview with WLNY’s Marcia Kramer, who introduced him as a “man who wants to be New York City’s next mayor.” About halfway through the broadcast, Kramer asked Adams about his feelings about the controversial “stop-and-frisk” program.
“Use it, use it often, great tool,” Adams answered. “We should never remove stop-and-frisk.” He went on to add a caveat that the policy had not always been used “correctly,” that stop-and-frisk had been “overused” in stopping “almost a million Black and brown boys” in New York City “at the height” of the policy. Nonetheless, Adams noted that he himself utilized and supervised stop-and-frisk during his law enforcement career and once again called it a “great tool.”
He is committed to bringing back the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime units, arguing that a reinstatement could be done right and would reduce gun violence.
The ACLU has determined that during Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year, three-term tenure as New York’s mayor, the NYPD recorded a staggering 5,081,689 stops; even more staggering is that 4.4 million of those stops were of innocent civilians. The ACLU’s report goes on to note that 52 percent of the stops included frisks, and that half of the innocent 4.4 million were frisked—this despite the stop-and-frisk law’s stipulation that the act should “be conducted only in the unusual situation when an officer reasonably suspects the person has a weapon that might endanger officer safety.”
The report notes that “young black and Latino men were the targets of a hugely disproportionate number of stops. Though they accounted for only 4.7 percent of the city’s population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41 percent of stops between 2003 and 2013. Nearly 90 percent of young black and Latino men stopped were innocent.”
In all, 54 percent of the stops were conducted on African Americans, while 32 percent were conducted on Latinx New Yorkers.
In August 2013, a federal judge declared Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional, though she stopped short of ruling on stop-and-frisk in general, which opened the door for Mayor Bill de Blasio to authorize the practice in more limited forms.
In 2020, The Intercept reported that “while overall the number of stops is down,” during the early De Blasio tenure, “racial disparities in who is getting stopped run as deep as they did at the height of stop-and-frisk.”
This is a policy that Adams aims to continue and potentially expand. He is also looking to resurrect the recently disbanded NYPD “anti-crime” units. These plainclothes units, largely dissolved in June 2020, supposedly kept firearms off the streets and were known for aggressive, Bloomberg-style stop-and-frisks targeting Black and brown neighborhoods, and for a disproportionate share of fatalities at the hands of the cops. It was an “anti-crime” officer who murdered Eric Garner; and an officer of the “street crime” division, the precursor to the “anti-crime” one, who killed Amadou Diallo in 1999.
Adams is committed to bringing back these plainclothes anti-crime units, arguing that a reinstatement could be done right and would reduce gun violence in New York City. “We do need an Anti-Crime unit that can deal with the immediate threat that many New Yorkers are facing, particularly around gun violence,” Adams told Gothamist. “The threat of gun violence is really destroying the foundation of belief that people are safe in this city.”
Reinstating the anti-crime unit would not be too hard to do, considering that the officers from these units were merely reassigned to other divisions last year. NYPD observers believe that the so-called dissolution of the unit was little better than a cute “shell game,” and that an anti-crime rebirth is inevitable.
Critics argue that the concept of “community policing” is meaningless and does nothing to prevent abuse, brutality, and murder by police.
Adams, who has also been vocally critical of the “defund” movement, has given some lip service to notions of NYPD reform and “community policing.” “Service at a community level builds greater trust,” states Adams’s campaign website in its “Safety in NYC” section. Adams proposes hiring, recruiting, and promoting Black and brown officers and placing them in “the very same neighborhoods” they come from; fostering “connection” between precincts and their communities through hiring “specialized outreach and public information staff to change the culture of the [precinct] houses into places where residents can come to learn about and participate in social and NYPD services and programs, particularly for families, children and youth”; and “empowering” neighborhoods to select their precinct leadership.
“Community policing” has long been popular with establishment Democrats, and was recently touted by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. Critics argue that the concept is meaningless and does nothing to prevent abuse, brutality, and murder by police.
“Time has shown that community policing is merely an expensive attempt at public relations, after a long history of racialized police violence and injustice, and does little to reduce crime or police violence,” wrote Philip McHarris in a December 2019 article in The Appeal. McHarris notes that Bill Clinton’s (and Joe Biden’s) 1994 crime bill dedicated more than $14 billion to “community policing,” which in the end merely “saturated cities with more police and police resources despite research suggesting the grants have had little to no effect on reducing crime.”
Community organizer Robert Gangi of the Police Reform Organizing Project cast a cold eye on an Adams mayoralty. “‘Greater diversity,’ ‘community policing’—we’ve heard it before and nothing will change,” he told me. “It’s old wine with new bottles.”
The ranked-choice New York City Democratic primary will take place on June 22. The candidates, including Adams and Yang, will soon take part in three televised debates beginning on May 13. Progressives will be hoping a less reactionary candidate can emerge before the voting commences.
