One morning this week, Eric Adams sat down at a sidewalk table outside the Washington Square Diner, in the West Village. Two decades ago, at the end o

Eric Adams Wants to CompStat New York City

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2021-05-22 13:30:08

One morning this week, Eric Adams sat down at a sidewalk table outside the Washington Square Diner, in the West Village. Two decades ago, at the end of his career in the N.Y.P.D., Adams had worked nearby, in the Sixth Precinct. “This was my post,” he said. A waiter plopped a stack of thick menus on the table. Adams, who wore a crisp white dress shirt, with cufflinks, credits a strict vegan diet and exercise regimen with reversing a diabetes diagnosis. He ordered a peppermint tea.

Over the years, Adams, who is running for mayor, has cultivated a reputation as someone difficult to pin down politically, particularly on issues of law enforcement. “They can’t put me in a category,” he told me, deploying a favorite line with a smile. “I’m a New Yorker. We’re complex.” Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, by a single mother, Adams was beaten by N.Y.P.D. officers in the basement of a South Jamaica precinct house when he was fifteen years old. A few years later, heeding the advice of a mentor, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, Adams joined the city’s police ranks, hoping to fight racism and abuse from inside the system. In the nineteen-nineties, he came to public prominence as a co-founder of a police reform group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. The group denounced police killings and abuse, and did community outreach, holding seminars for young Black men on, for instance, how to behave during a stop-and-frisk. “Reaching while black shouldn’t be punishable by death,” Adams told the Times, in 1999. “But I can’t teach kids on the way it ought to be. I have to teach them on the way it is.” In the two-thousands, after retiring from the N.Y.P.D., as a captain, he was elected to office in Brooklyn, first to the New York State Senate and most recently to the post of borough president. Along the way, he made little secret that City Hall was his ultimate goal.

Adams stands between the city and its police department. Once an inside dissenter, he is now an outside advocate. He believes deeply that policing can be a noble profession, and that it is a societal necessity. “That uniform is a symbol of public safety,” he said. He rejects the arguments of police abolitionists, and waves away calls to defund the police. In his campaign for mayor, he has pledged to help the city’s thirty-six thousand police officers do their jobs while betting that he can still attract widespread support among the city’s Black voters—and that bet has paid out, according to the polls, some of which have started showing Adams leading the crowded Democratic Party primary field, with just a month to go in the race. Many voters have also started to tell the pollsters that crime is a top issue for them. That has surprised some, given that New York has spent years enjoying historically low crime rates. But Adams said that it came as no surprise to him. “I don’t care if you live on West Fourth Street or if you live in Brownsville,” he said. “You want to be safe. That is the prerequisite to prosperity.”