Does a former cop as mayor make scavenging New York safer?

Also read this report from New York: Who will stop the bloodshed?

However, Adams is more moderate than the local Democratic party branch in New York, which produced a progressive star politician like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a pretty left-wing city council. During his long career in the police force and in local politics, the city has come to know Adams as a man who knows how to move with the changing zeitgeist. A pragmatic and practical manager, according to supporters. A power opportunist, according to critics.

Increasing violence

This flexibility is shown above all in his views on safety. New York is struggling with increasing street and gang violence, a development that has been going on for some time and that got worse during pandemic year 2020. The number of murders (447) was not nearly as high last year as in peak year 1990 (more than 2,600), but is rising. As well as the number of shooting and stabbing incidents, which are mainly attributed to violence between gangs. The unpopularity of outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio is largely due to his faltering security and policing policies.

As mayor, Adams will not only lead a metropolis of nearly 9 million residents, but will also — and last but not least — reform the NYPD Police Department. After the murder of black detainee George Floyd in May in Minneapolis by a white cop, more attention has been paid in the US to police brutality and racism within the forces. Adams presents himself in this debate as an ex-cop who knows the organization inside and out, and who has spoken out about the police throughout his career.

That’s how the collided rebel cop in the early 1990s with then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, who launched a plan to cut back on police officers. The newly appointed Giuliani wanted to focus on a repressive approach to street crime. On the sidewalk of City Hall, then 33-year-old traffic cop Adams called a press conference to criticize the plan, saying it would primarily affect minorities, such as Latinos and black Americans. “The days when we just pick up people and tackle them are really behind us.”

New York battles pandemic with increasing street and gang violence

Nearly three decades later, Adams presents himself as “right-wing crime-fighting”. This is best illustrated by his position on the controversial practice of stop-and-fresh, whereby officers were allowed to search citizens as a preventive measure. It led to large-scale ethnic profiling. The judge ended it in 2013 during the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg. As a senator, Adams testified that the NYPD would covertly continue the method.

In the mayoral race, however, Adams defended stop-and-frisk, under certain conditions. At the beginning of this century things went wrong, he stated in a debate: “We didn’t even search. We threw people against the wall, made them empty their pockets. That was illegal.” But this should not be allowed to bind agents years later, he believes. “If you have a force that is not allowed to stop and interrogate, it cannot do policing responsibly.”

Crazy in the subway

In the Democratic primary race, Adams stayed far away from the activist slogan Defund the Police. The call to cut corps took off in the wake of the Floyd murder. Many Democrats have already come back from that: Republicans managed to dismiss them as aliens in election year 2020 softies who think that a violent country like the US can do without police. In fact, the Defund slogan is more nuanced: less money for the police, in favor of community work and psychiatric care.

Adams has to find a balance between the progressive part of his party that advocates a more humane police and, on the other hand, the broad call for safety on the street. A middle position between the ‘weak’ De Blasio and the strict Giuliani, who also supported his candidacy. In an interview he built his well-known soundbite Speaking of the shot toddler in Times Square: “Nobody is going to take our subway, open a business, if we have mentally ill people pushing other people onto the tracks or attacking them with knives.”