Cops, in particular, are wary of the supposed law-and-order candidate.
Heather Mac Donald
June 7, 2021 @ City Journal
If Eric Adams wins New York’s June 22 Democratic mayoral primary, all
but guaranteeing a win in November’s general election, he would be only
the second former police officer to preside over city hall. (William
O’Dwyer, mayor from 1946 to 1950, was the first.) Adams retired from the
New York Police Department in 2006, served four terms as a New York
state senator, and is now Brooklyn’s borough president. Many New
Yorkers, desperate for a mayor who will fight the city’s rising violence, have embraced Adams’s candidacy, encouraged by his recent statements in support of law enforcement.
NYPD cops and commanders, however, are decidedly unenthusiastic. A
newly retired captain with 26 years on the job characterizes the choice
of Adams versus the other candidates as: “Do you want to break your
right leg or your left leg?” A lieutenant observes that Adams will “say
and take any position that will help him”—what he actually believes is
impossible to know. A retired sergeant from the detective bureau
reports: “Many cops thought he was an out-and-out racist and two-faced
phony.”
Adams’s public persona during his nearly two decades on the force was
as the leader of the activist group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who
Care. In that role, he relentlessly called the NYPD racist. His most
influential contribution to public policy came during the long-running
lawsuit Floyd v. New York. That case, brought by a
coalition of civil rights organizations and elite law firms, challenged
the constitutionality of the NYPD’s pedestrian stops (sometimes known as
“stop, question, and frisk”). As a plaintiffs’ witness, Adams accused
then–NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly of announcing: “We stop African
American and Hispanic youths because we want to instill the fear in them
that every time they leave their home, they can be stopped and searched
by the police.” Kelly issued this pronouncement twice, according to
Adams: first during a July 2010 meeting with then-governor David
Paterson, state assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, and state senator Martin
Golden; and second at an August 2010 policing forum at CUNY’s Medgar
Evers College.
The allegations were incredible. Uncharacteristically, Adams said nothing about Kelly’s statement until Floyd.
Nor did any of the other attendees at the two meetings utter a word
about Kelly’s purported admission of racial intimidation. Martin Golden
denied that Kelly said anything like what Adams claims; then–NYPD deputy
inspector Juanita Holmes, who attended the Medgar Evers gathering,
testified at the trial that Kelly did not make the comment that Adams
attributes to him; and Kelly swore by affidavit that Adams’s charges
were untrue.
Even without these sworn denials, the accusations didn’t make sense.
Kelly had met with Paterson in 2010 to try to persuade him to veto a
bill that the NYPD deemed inimical to crime-fighting. All the officials
except for Golden at that July 2010 meeting were black, yet according to
Adams, the commissioner chose to make his case by stating that the NYPD
gratuitously harasses blacks. This scenario was just as fanciful
regarding the Medgar Evers meeting, whose audience included the Central
Brooklyn Black Legislative Coalition.
U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin had a low threshold for
crediting anti-NYPD evidence, however. Her opinion, declaring the
department guilty of unconstitutional conduct, cited Adams’s testimony
to support her finding that NYPD top brass approved of racial profiling.
Scheindlin referred to Adams’s testimony again in accusing Kelly of
suggesting “that it is permissible to stop racially defined groups just
to instill fear in them.”
Adams brags of his role in the case. “Inside the ruling the federal
judge acknowledged it is Eric’s testimony that talked about the abuse in
the police department,” Adams said during a mayoral debate this month,
speaking of himself in the third person. And he continues to make
statements that stretch the limits of credulity. He claims to have been
instrumental in building the “first computerized system for tracking
crime in the city”—referring to the heralded CompStat crime analysis
method developed in 1994 under then-commissioner William Bratton. That
instrumental role is news to several of CompStat’s architects. Perhaps,
one of those architects speculates, Adams is referring to his time in
the transit bureau before Bratton took over the NYPD. But that bureau
was still using pin maps, not computers, for crime-tracking. A former
chief says that Adams’s claimed role in creating CompStat is “akin to me
working the assembly line at a Tesla factory tightening the lug nuts on
the tires and claiming I was instrumental in the development of Tesla
automobiles.”
Though Adams now portrays himself as a supporter of law enforcement,
he has not foresworn race-baiting regarding the police. His campaign
literature claims that the “NYPD continues to be plagued by incidents of
bias and brutality” and that “systemic bias” is “entrenched” in the
department. The reason for this alleged bias, in Adams’s view, is that
“about half of the force is white.” The only way to eradicate this
systemic bias is to “add as much diversity to the NYPD as fast as we
can.” In other words: white officers, bad; officers of color, good.
There is no evidence that white officers are more likely to use
excessive force than black and Hispanic officers, however; in fact, some
studies show
the opposite. And if “about half of the force is white,” that means
that about half the force is nonwhite, a high proportion compared with
other departments. Adams’s remedy for the deplorable whiteness of the
NYPD—“adding Black and Brown officers who will respect and protect New
Yorkers”—is hardly a novel idea. The NYPD recruits minorities
relentlessly and has done so for decades. Putting an even greater
emphasis on racial quotas will only water down entry standards further.
Adams’s other solution for the NYPD’s “systemic bias” is to appoint
the “city’s first woman police commissioner.” He is thus eliminating 83
percent of available talent from consideration, assuming he promotes
from within. Such an artificially narrow search could in theory result
in the best possible candidate, but the odds are against it.
Adams does not confine his race-mongering to police matters. He even accused the New York Times
of racism for reporting on his apparent violations of campaign-finance
laws. “Black candidates for office are often held to a higher, unfair
standard—especially those from lower-income backgrounds such as myself,”
he complained in a statement.
Adams’s supporters have seized on his intention to reconstitute at
least some part of the undercover anti-crime unit as evidence of his
support for law and order. (Police commissioner Dermot Shea disbanded
the unit in June 2020 in response to the city’s race riots.) No other
candidate has offered a like proposal. Recreating the unit would be a
solid start to combating rising gun violence, assuming that Adams stands
up to the inevitable opposition.
In an aggressively anti-law-enforcement mayoral field, Adams is one
of the only candidates speaking reasonably about crime. Like his
minority-recruitment plan, however, many of his alleged innovations
merely recycle what the NYPD has been doing since the mid-1990s. He
wants to “deal with crime spikes before they get out of control.” That
is the essence of CompStat policing: the rapid identification of, and
response to, emerging crime patterns. He wants to “reinvent the
anti-crime unit as an anti-gun unit.” But the anti-crime unit was
an anti-gun unit. He wants to shift officers from “low-crime areas to
crime hot-spots when surges occur.” The NYPD redeploys to crime hot
spots every summer. He wants to be “laser-focused on violent
crime—especially guns.” But that laser focus on violent crime is the
mantra of progressive reformers as well. Those reformers call for an
exclusive focus on violent crime, as opposed to low-level public-order
enforcement, which they oppose as racially discriminatory.
Adams says nothing about such public-order enforcement, otherwise known as Broken Windows policing.
Broken Windows enforcement has been radically dialed back under Bill De
Blasio’s mayoralty. The resulting increase in public disorder is
driving New Yorkers out of the city. Restoring quality-of-life policing
would do more to fight the growing anarchy than anything else the NYPD
could do.
Broken Windows policing has been discredited and discarded—as with every other unwinding
of the criminal-justice system over the last decade—because it has a
disparate impact on minorities. But there is no law enforcement practice
that does not have a disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics,
because the vast majority of street crime is committed by blacks and
Hispanics—against a vast majority of black and Hispanic victims.
Standing up to the disparate-impact charge will be the prerequisite
to reversing New York’s descent into lawlessness. Would a Mayor Adams do
so? His record of racial demagoguery suggests not. A former
high-ranking official warns that it is a “big threat to put someone that
dishonest in that position of power.” Adams lacks the gravitas for the
job, the official says, arguing that Andrew Yang, a “smart guy,” is the
least harmful of the Democratic field.
Perhaps, however, Adams has turned a corner. The desperate desire of
New Yorkers to believe that he has done so is understandable and may
prove justified. “Adams is at least saying some good things,” says the
newly retired captain. “If I did not know his history, I would probably
say he is the best of the worst.” The question for voters is: has Adams
transcended that history? In a tragic indictment of New York’s present
political culture, many New Yorkers feel that they have no choice but to
find out.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestseller The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
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