The End Of The Eric Adams Prosecution : Holier-Than-Thou Federal Prosecutors

February 20, 2025/ Francis Menton  @ Manhattan Contrarian 15 Comments 

 

Since my post a few days ago about the demise of the Eric Adams prosecution, controversy has continued to swirl around the matter. On the side supporting the action of the Trump/Bondi Justice Department, several new voices have emerged to join what were previously the lonely cries of a handful of people like myself and Josh Blackman. These new voices include James Copland and Rafael Mangual (of the Manhattan Institute), writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 18; and Alan Dershowitz in a column in the New York Post on February 19.

On the other side of the argument, an ex-colleague of mine sends me a copy of an “open letter” dated February 17, and signed by a gigantic list of well over 1000 former federal prosecutors. This letter essentially adopts the arguments set forth in the resignation letter of ex-SDNY US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, including echoing some of her language. A fair description is that these guys adopt a holier-than-thou attitude, claiming to be wholly pure and above politics and devoted only to the “facts and law.” Here are some excerpts:

As prosecutors, we were rightly prohibited from making criminal charging decisions based on someone’s political association, activities or beliefs, or because of our personal feelings about them. We knew it was impermissible to treat a defendant more leniently just because they were powerful or well-connected, or more harshly because they were not. We were taught to pursue justice without fear or favor, and knew our decisions to investigate and charge should be based only on the facts and the law. . . . 

Against this backdrop, we have watched with alarm as these values have been tested by recent actions of the Department’s leadership. Some of you have been ordered to make charging decisions based expressly on considerations other than the facts and the law, including to serve solely political purposes.  

To all of you, we communicate this: We salute and admire the courage many of you have already exhibited, and that will guide all of you as you continue to serve the interests of justice. You have responded to ethical challenges of a type no public servant should ever be forced to confront with principle and conviction, in the finest traditions of the Department of Justice.

The bold is in the original.

Does all of that seem persuasive to you? If so, try for starters reading the Copland/Mangual and Dershowitz pieces. Both make the obvious point that achieving policy priorities of the Justice Department in return for deferring or foregoing prosecution is not just common practice, but nearly universal. Dershowitz’s piece focuses on trading leniency for testimony against others and/or wearing a wire to snare higher-ups:

[D]ropping prosecutions or reducing charges on the basis of quid pro quos is common in all prosecutorial offices. . . . I have represented numerous criminal defendants who were offered quid pro quos by the Southern District and other prosecutors. The most common offer is, “We will drop the charges against you, if you testify or wear a wire against the higher-up in your company or organization.“ 

Another common quid pro quo is: ”If you are willing to plead guilty, we will reduce the charges.” Indeed, it is fair to say that quid pro quos in the form of plea bargain offers are essential to the operation of that office, since the vast majority of prosecutions are resolved by quid pro quo plea deals. Nor are there constitutional differences between the kind of quid pro quo plea allegedly offered Adams and the more traditional quid pro quo plea bargains offered to ordinary criminal defendants.

Copland and Mangual go into a recent ubiquitous federal prosecutorial practice known as the “deferred prosecution” agreement. These are sorts of plea deals, usually involving corporations, where prosecutors threaten some entity with a charge that may be trivial to the overall business of the entity, but could be life-threatening (think Arthur Andersen). There then emerges a deal where the prosecutors agree to “defer” the prosecution (essentially the same thing that has occurred for Adams) in return for the agreement of the corporate entity to perform some actions that the prosecutors want.

How common are these deferred prosecution agreements? Copland and Mangual:

Since the turn of the century, the Justice Department has entered into 667 deferred- and nonprosecution agreements. Since 2010, one-fourth of Fortune 100 companies—the largest American businesses by revenue—have been operating under the thumb of Justice Department agreements not to prosecute.

Our thousand-plus ex-federal prosecutors claim to be outraged about a deferral of prosecution of Adams in return for an agreement for “solely political purposes.” Are we to believe that these hundreds of deferred prosecution agreements somehow avoided “political purposes”? In fact, of course, it was the opposite:

[F]ederal prosecutors have used the threat of criminal indictment as leverage to extract money for favored groups and constituencies, outside the congressional appropriations process. After the financial crisis, Obama administration officials forced many banks to underwrite new “affordable housing” developments, to give grants to “community organizers,” to direct money to legal aid groups and to fund various “housing activist” outfits.

Thank you to Copland and Mangual for at least bringing some attention to this issue; but their description just quoted does not nearly indicate the enormity of the corruption that has been endemic in these agreements. For starters, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-09, the Obama administration used threatened prosecutions of banks and other financial institutions to have the Justice Department extort tens of billions of dollars to fund their friends on the Left. Much was written about this subject, including here at Manhattan Contrarian. For today, I’ll focus on a piece from Paul Larkin at the Heritage Foundation from October 2014. Excerpts:

The practice of identifying third-party recipients of monies that a corporation pays out in an N/DPA [Non-/Deferred Prosecution Agreement] is tantamount to dispensing taxpayer funds to whatever particular recipient the Justice Department selects. That practice raises important public policy issues that neither Congress nor the federal courts have yet addressed. . . . 

In 2014, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and other banks “have coughed up close to $50 billion for supposedly misleading investors in mortgage-backed bonds.” . . . Then there is BP’s $13 billion settlement for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Toyota’s $1.2 billion settlement over alleged faults in its automobiles, among many others. . . . 

Radical Democrat activist groups stand to collect millions from Attorney General Eric Holder’s record $17 billion deal to settle alleged mortgage abuse charges against Bank of America. Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation’s largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.

The Heritage piece contains a list of some of the groups that got payouts from these agreements:

• La Raza, which pressures banks to expand their credit box to qualify more low-income Latino immigrants for home loans;
• National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Washington’s most aggressive lobbyist for the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act;
• Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, whose director calls himself a “bank terrorist;”
• Operation Hope, a South Central Los Angeles group that’s pressuring banks to make “dignity mortgages” for deadbeats.

Non-political? Completely absurd. And this list comes from just a handful of these N/DPAs. There have been 667 of them since 2000.

And now we have these thousand-plus ex-federal prosecutors suddenly in high dudgeon that some of their number have been asked to sign off on a dismissal without prejudice (essentially, the same as a deferred prosecution agreement) for Eric Adams in return for some level of cooperation in immigration enforcement. This is not remotely at the same level of either politics or corruption as the day-to-day activities of the Justice Department in crafting deferred prosecutions during Democratic administrations to benefit friendly leftist institutions.

OK, there are more than a thousand of these signatories. Can anyone out there find a single example of even one of them objecting to the Justice Department in a Democratic Administration extorting one of these completely political and completely corrupt agreements to fund leftist institutions? It’s my challenge to the readers: see if you can find it.

And while I’m at this, another one of my ex-colleagues points out that the now-famous Sassoon resignation letter is unusual not only in its length and detail, and accusations of improper conduct against her superiors, but also in appearing promptly in the press, and in disclosing confidential information that could be damaging to the further pursuit of the Adams case (should the government decide at some point to go there). Since when is it OK for a prosecutor to write a letter containing confidential information about a case and then promptly leak the letter to the press? Indeed, the letter appears to have been written for the purposes of leaking to the press.

Overall, the “courageous” federal prosecutors seem to have completely lost track of both their constitutional and ethical obligations. I guess it’s the “culture” of the Justice Department.

New York Faces Budgetary Death By A Thousand Cuts

Police, education, and sanitation on the chopping block.

by Kelli Ballard | Nov 20, 2023 | Articles, Illegal Immigration @ Liberty Nation News

New York has seen an influx of migrants so overwhelming that city officials are facing a crisis point. It has already spent well over a billion dollars this fiscal year on food, housing, medical, and other services and expects to fork out another $11 billion in 2024 and 2025. Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who historically espoused nothing but solidarity with illegal migrants, has claimed this crisis could “destroy” the Big Apple. To find ways to pay for the formerly welcomed “sanctuary” seekers into the city, Adams announced a series of sweeping cuts that threaten to do irreparable harm to the belabored New Yorkers he represents.

The Not-So-Essential Essential Programs

The new budget – set at $110.5 billion – will see cuts across several agencies and departments. This represents a 5% cut and is the first of three rounds Adams claims are needed to support the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers flooding the city. He is expected to expand the cuts to 15% by Spring. Mayor Adams said, “In all my time in government, this is probably one of the most painful exercises I’ve gone through,” and that “It’s going to impact every area of delivery of services in the city.”

The New York Police Department will freeze hiring, bringing law enforcement below 30,000 officers by the end of fiscal year 2025. “This is truly a disaster for every New Yorker who cares about safe streets,” said police union president Patrick Hendry. “Cops are already stretched to our breaking point, and these cuts will return us to staffing levels we haven’t seen since the crime epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

Adams said that eliminating a new class of 250 school safety personnel means parents need to step up, adding that the way to combat the loss would be “leaning into parents and parent groups to do some volunteerism.” He added, “We are going to be straining at a very high level to get this done correctly.”

Another hard-hit department is education. After-school and summer programs, as well as extra-curricular activities, are being reduced, and the Department of Education will see more than $1 billion reduction in its budget through fiscal year 2025. That breaks down to $547 million this fiscal year and $600 million next year. “In addition to making cuts to the Summer Rising summer program for middle school students and eliminating thousands of spots for universal prekindergarten for 3-year-olds, community schools are being cut by $10 million in the current fiscal year,” The New York Times summarised.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, noted that 653 schools would have to make midyear budget cuts, which is about 43% of the school system. “Class sizes will rise, and school communities will be needlessly damaged,” he warned.

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Libraries have been hit too and warn that they will have to close facilities on Sundays because of the cuts. In a statement from the leaders of the Brooklyn, Queens, and New York Public Library, a spokesperson complained that “Without sufficient funding, we cannot sustain our current levels of service, and any further cuts to the libraries’ budget will, unfortunately, result in deeper service impacts.”

With the homeless issue compounded by thousands of migrants, Adams has also cut the Sanitation Department by nearly $100 million over the next two fiscal years. This goes against his initiative to address the rat problem in the city and climate change concerns. For citizens, it means fewer public trash cans and dirtier streets and parks… and that’s just the start.

New York Cuts That Run Deeper

Not many seem enthused about these cuts. Progressive Democrats argue this move will hurt working-class families. Lincoln Restler, a chair of the City Council’s progressive caucus, criticized the cuts, saying that his group will not cooperate with them:

“Mayor Adams’s unnecessary, dangerous and draconian budget cuts will only worsen New York’s affordability crisis and delay our city’s economic recovery by cutting funding for the schools, child care, food assistance and more that help New Yorkers live and raise families in this city.”

Adrienne Adams, a speaker for the city council, said, “The administration’s response in providing services for asylum seekers has relied far too much on expensive emergency contracts with for-profit companies that cost the city billions of dollars.” Think the leasing of hotels.

Firefighters have not escaped unscathed either. Fire sources told the New York Post that the decision to cut out personnel who are out on “long-term light duties” – such as if they have been injured on the job or are out sick.

Leaders of the Working Families Party said the lawmaker was blaming migrants for the cuts when the blame should be laid on his shoulders. “Mayor Adams is pursuing an agenda of death by a thousand cuts,” the group said. “As any teacher, librarian, or health care worker will tell you: There’s nothing left to cut.”

 

Read More From Kelli Ballard

 

Remember When Anyone Who Criticized Sanctuary States and Cities Was a Racist Xenophobe? Not Anymore!!!!

The Inevitability Factor. When Reality Reaches It's Apex.  And Reality Bites.

 By Rich Kozlovich 

Over the years I've read a lot about why New York goes Democrat based on the dominance of NYC with it's over eight million voters.  Is this really true though?

In NYC Democrats outnumber Republicans almost two to one, but if you add in those with no party affiliation, it becomes around three to one. But what about the rest of the state? It turns out the numbers are also about two to one, and with those with no party affiliation, it's about two and a half to one statewide.  Okay, so, what's the point of all this.  

 (11 Sanctuary States:  California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington.)

There are eleven sanctuary states, and New York is one of them, and they chose the nitwits who made New York a sanctuary state.  It isn't like they didn't know their views and policies.  They were quite clear about their views, so since the people of New York voted for these halfwits, we can now reasonably conclude after all that virtue signaling and finger pointing, they're just xenophobic racists after all. 

Remember all that virtue signaling claiming illegal immigration was a huge benefit for America?  Well, the border states, especially Florida and Texas, decided it was unfair for them to horde all those benefits for themselves, so they decided to share them with the Sanctuary cities and states, and shipped them off to places like New York City.  They also sent a bunch to Martha's Vineyard.  Who shipped them out just as fast as they could.  Apparently they, like Texas and Florida, felt it was unfair to hoard all those benefits illegal aliens brought to their "sanctuary" city and decided to let others reap those rewards instead. So, they sent them on their way, just as quickly as they could.   

Now, before we proceed, let's properly define who these people really are.  They're criminals.  They've entered this nation illegally, and that makes them criminals.  

That brings me back to New York City, a Sanctuary City, and their remarkable new Mayor, Eric Adams who apparently thinks these illegal aliens aren't beneficial after all, in fact, he claims they're a problem, and it's "unfair" for NYC to bear such a burden.  It seems NYC Mayor Adams has opened a migrant camp that will cost the taxpayers of New York City a mere twenty million dollars a month, and Gov. Kathy Hochul has created a jobs program for these criminals even though over 380 thousand New Yorkers are unemployed.

Wow! Reality bites and all that virtue signaling has turned into a self made immigration crisis.  They've put them up in hotels to the tune of three hundred dollars a day, where many of these criminals are out of control, city services are being slashed in order to pay for all this, and the city is ignoring all the crimes being committed by these criminals, and again, they are criminals as they entered this country illegally, and now Adams says they've no place to put them.  

So now Mayor Adams, a political and intellectual giant standing tall amongst ordinary mortals, has an idea.  Have the people of New York City house them, along with owners of vacant property, by force of law if necessary by changing zoning restrictions that would allow commercial office space to be converted into apartments, and force the owners to accept them, whether the owners like it or not, and do it in spite of the fact these criminals have trashed the hotels they were housed in. 

Let's keep this in perspective, the number he's dealing with is a fraction of what the border states are facing, and it turns out all that virtue signaling is breaking them.  Adams claims all these illegal aliens  are destroying the city, and eventually that will include the neighborhoods.  Wow!  It's clear Adams was really great at talking the talk, but he's incapable of walking the talk, and one can only conclude, Adams must not be a giant among men after all.  He must be a racist. 

In Guy Benson's August 15, 2023 article, What Exactly Do They Think 'Sanctuary' Means?, he says:

We've covered the subject of hypocrisy and virtue signaling among Democrat-led "sanctuary" jurisdictions pretty extensively in recent years.  It's basically been impossible not to notice the yawning, political disconnect between leaders' preening rhetoric and policy preferences during the previous administration, and their incoherent meltdowns when directly confronted with the consequences of their stated preferences and alleged principles throughout the Biden border crisis.  We've seen this in places ranging from Martha's Vineyard, to Chicago, to California, and beyond.  But ground zero for this phenomenon might be New York City, where officials' 180 degree heel turn has been quite a sight to behold. 

A taste of their own medicine August 28, 2023 by J.R. Dunn. 

There is yet another beneficial aspect to the bussing of illegals to welcoming, open-armed blue destinations that hasn’t yet been mentioned. A large part of the purpose in allowing illegals into the country involves using them to punish and harass the working and middle classes – particularly the White elements. So there’s no mystery as to why illegals have been brought into the country and then deliberately dispatched to blue-collar and middle-class towns across the U.S. Things like that don’t just happen, comrades – they’re made to happen

Let's move on to another virtue signally sanctuary state, New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Murphy in 2017 is quite clear saying this about Trump's policy on illegal immigration: 

“We will stand up to this President. If need be, we will be a sanctuary not just city but state.”

But now, wait for it, here it comes, it turns out now, they don’t want to be a Sanctuary State after all.  It turns out reality bites, and they don't have the resources and can't afford it. Amazing, so, by their own standards, he too is a blatant racist!

Then we have Chicago, where residents, black residents, are upset they plan to house 300 of these criminals in a Hyde Park area motel.  Are they racists also? When black residents complained about this, far left Alderman Andre Vasquez called them racists who are dividing the Democrat party. So apparently Democrats, black Democrats, are also xenophobes and racists.

The federal government under the Biden Administration is spending hundreds of millions of dollars promoting this insanity,  and that's the tip of the iceberg"

Illegal immigration imposes an enormous burden on American taxpayers. Annually, the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. costs taxpayers more than $143 billion. That amount, though, does not include any of the social and economic costs — such as higher housing prices, depleted wages, lost jobs, increased crime, and strained public resources at hospitals and schools — associated with illegal immigration.

Immigration is destroying America, both legal and illegal.  Immigrants bring their own values with them, and with many of these immigrants those values are antithetical, and destructive to American values.   Biden's bringing disaster to America, and it's clearly intentional.

What are Americans doing about it?  Running away from these cities, and states, just as fast as they can.  But where can people go where this national policy disaster won't catch up to them?  Even here in Ohio, where we're not a sanctuary state, illegal immigration has become an issue, and people are saying we've had it, and enough is enough.   

That needs to be a national consensus.  

NYC Migrant Crisis: Microcosm of the Nation

Warring leaders fail to see the bigger picture.  

Mark Angelides August 30, 2023 @ Liberty Nation News 

New York City and New York state are on a collision course regarding how to handle the ever-increasing migrant crisis. Mayor Eric Adams appears to have had enough of the growing numbers of homeless migrants encamped on his doorstep and has sent his strongest message yet to Governor Kathy Hochul that she needs to do her part. It seems that what is playing out in the Empire State is really a perfect microcosm of what is happening across the nation, and it is an example that national leaders appear to neither notice nor understand.

Adams vs. Hochul

On Tuesday, August 29, Mayor Adams lashed out at the governor over her stance that incoming migrants should not be shipped out to other parts of the state. “I think the governor’s wrong,” he said. “She’s the governor of the state of New York. New York City is in that state. Every county in this state should be part of this.”

Adams asked Governor Hochul to issue a statewide order that would block counties from passing rules to bar migrants. She responded that migrants should not be forced on other counties, and insisted that the “right to shelter” mandate – a policy dating back to the 80s, which guarantees that accommodation shall be provided to the homeless – does not extend beyond New York City:

“This is an agreement that does not apply to the state’s other 57 counties, which is one of the reasons we cannot and will not force other parts of our state to shelter migrants, nor are we going to be asking these migrants to move to other parts of the state against their will.”

This sentiment echoes her earlier statements on the subject of moving excess migrants out of the Big Apple, in which she noted, “Putting someone in a hotel on a dark, lonely road in Upstate New York and telling them they’re supposed to survive is not compassion.”

Worlds Within Worlds

The NYC leader wants each county in the state to take its “fair share” of illegal migrants in order to ease the increasing burden on the Five Boroughs. It seems he now finds himself in a position endured by southern states for decades. His complaints echo those heard nearer the border and, in fact, this is an issue that certain Republican governors have taken to heart.

Despite verbal beatings from the legacy media and tongue-lashings courtesy of the White House, Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have been “sharing” their illegal migrant population by flying people to areas of the country that have declared themselves Sanctuary Cities. The reasoning behind the governors’ stance goes something like: You invited them, you said you wanted them, time to take your share.

The longstanding predicament of border states is all too similar to that now facing Mayor Adams. As resources run dry, and more than 100,000 migrants in need of assistance, the policeman-turned-politician delivered a warning to his state leader: “[W]e are the economic engine of this state. New York goes down. The entire state goes down.”

Little Town Blues Writ Large

In early August – with more than a hint of desperation – Adams explained that his city was at breaking point, saying, “As the number of asylum seekers in our care continues to grow by hundreds every day, stretching our system to its breaking point and beyond, it has become more and more of a Herculean effort to find enough beds every night.” With this tacit declaration of defeat, he announced the creation of a new tent city on Randalls Island.

The city that never sleeps once billed itself as a place that welcomed all comers – indeed, it is even written on a statue in the bay. However, the notion that unlimited immigration is sustainable has been proven wrong. Mayor Adams is late to the game in understanding that resources are finite, actions have consequences, and those in positions of higher power are not going to come to the rescue. Welcome to the rest of America, Mr. Mayor.

Read More From Mark Angelides

 

Sen. Kennedy: 'Don't Bother to Bring in the Clowns, They're Already Here'

By Susan Jones | July 1, 2022 

 

New York Mayor Eric Adams attended the vigil for a young mother gunned down on Wednesday while pushing a baby stroller. "We lost a 20 year old woman on the Upper East Side tonight," he tweeted. "More guns in our city means more lives lost..." (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - The execution of a young mother pushing a baby stroller on a Manhattan street this week is among the latest examples of surging crime in America's big, Democrat-run cities.

Police believe the 20-year-old woman was targeted in what's described as a domestic situation. But the shooting on Wednesday evening has further alarmed crime-weary New Yorkers.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told Fox News Wednesday night that what America's big-city mayor are doing -- or not doing -- "is not working."..........To Read More.....

City Where Shootings of Children Doubled Urges New Yorkers to Come Back From Florida Over Parental Rights Bill

By Daniel Greenfield

Come back to New York City. We'll not only shoot your children, we'll sexually groom them too.

New York City mayor Eric Adams has launched an ad campaign in five major Florida cities protesting the Parental Rights in Education bill recently codified into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in an attempt to lure New York City transplants back.

“This political showmanship of attempting to demonize a particular group or community is unacceptable and we are going to loudly show our support and say to those living in Florida, ‘Listen, we want you here in New York,'” Adams announced at a press conference Monday.

“Other folks want people to hide their color. We like to show our color and this rainbow is representative of this community,” Adams said. “I have a message for Florida’s LGBTQ+ community: come to a city where you can say and be whoever you want.”

I'm sure the folks in Miami Beach will be very relieved to escape the oppressive atmosphere where they're not allowed to be who they are.  While Florida may have banned teachers from pushing sexual topics to kindergarteners, New York City has doubled the shootings of children. ...........To Read More....

Posted on April 6, 2022 by John Hinderaker in Crime

• New Yorkers Say: Get Me Outta Here!  - The first duty of government, particularly local government, is to ensure public safety. A government that can’t keep its citizens reasonably safe is a failed regime. The central importance of public safety is highlighted by a survey reported in the New York Post:

Is Eric Adams New York’s Best Mayoral Hope?

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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