The tension between rising crime and the campaign against policing is at the center of American politics today, including in New York City’s mayoral race. Other issues are discussed, but the specter of a building crime wave is overshadowing everything else. In this context, one candidate has a special opportunity, if he seizes it.
As a former police officer whose campaign ads recount what he says was his own mistreatment by police as a teenager, Adams, should he win, could immediately become the national voice we need — asserting that minority communities especially need the presence of police to beat back the crime that brings fear and tragedy to daily life. What’s more, his bona fides as an ex-cop will put him in a class by himself.
Adams has been, to date, more willing than any other candidate to speak in fundamentally positive ways about the NYPD.
“If we are for safety, we need the NYPD” is how he bluntly puts it on his campaign Web site. At a George Floyd-related rally last summer, when confronted by a group of “defund” protesters, he urged one of their number, who was black, to “go back to your community, where there is real violence, and tell me you still want to defund the police.”
In this, he gets to the heart of the matter: disproportionate crime claiming a disproportionate number of victims in Brownsville, East Harlem, Mott Haven and even gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Adams lives.
Crime in these neighborhoods isn’t a product of unemployment; it leads to unemployment, by suppressing commerce. As an instant national figure, Adams would have the microphone to make that point, even as he would, inevitably, have to denounce unjustified police shootings and rightly insist on police accountability.
Adams — a Queens-born son of a house cleaner — can channel the eloquent observations of City University of New York’s Michael Fortner, himself raised in Brownsville and author of “The Black Silent Majority,” a brilliant historical analysis of why New York African Americans supported the harsh “Rockefeller “drug laws.
“All New Yorkers grow accustomed to the din of sirens, but you never really make peace with the clatter of gunshots,” says Fortner. “You never get used to violence and insecurity. Criminal acts that show up only once in data sets — if they show up at all — can have lasting impacts.”
Here is where our national concern should center — on those who, in Bill Clinton’s words, work hard, play by the rules and should not have to worry that their children will be killed in the crossfire of deadly gunplay, killed by bullets that might never have been fired had those guns been taken off the street by the now-disbanded NYPD plainclothes anti-crime unit that specifically targeted violent crime. And that Adams has pledged to restore.
If he chooses to use his potential national stage to give voice to the sentiments of Fortner’s Black Silent Majority, Adams would join — and immediately lead — a small cohort of black mayors making that point.
Houston’s Mayor Sylvester Turner has backed increases in that city’s police budget, despite “defund” pressure. Yet Turner, up from poverty himself in that city’s Acres section, is a Harvard-educated lawyer, not an ex-police captain.
In Birmingham, Ala., Mayor Randall Woodfin has also resisted demonizing cops: “I’ve heard [“defund”] from some people . . . but that is not at the same volume as our citizens saying, ‘We want more police presence, we want more police.’” Woodfin, too, is a lawyer and career politician.
If Turner or Woodfin were to make the point that the black lives taken by gangs and stray bullets matter as much as that of George Floyd, they might not get much national airtime. But it’s harder to ignore the mayor of the nation’s largest city.
Of course, we can’t be sure Adams will be the best public manager for a recovering New York. But should he win, Eric Adams would have the bully pulpit to change the national conversation on race and policing — in a welcome, positive direction.
Howard Husock is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
