Mayor Adams’s Damage to New York Began With the Police
By Mara Gay
Ms. Gay is a member of the editorial board.
"As a stunned New York City comes to terms with the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams, it’s worth examining the idea, deeply embedded in the city’s psyche, that helped lead to his election: Keeping the city safe means allowing the Police Department to do whatever it wishes.
Over three decades and nearly half a dozen mayors, New York has given its Police Department freer rein while demanding little accountability in return. Then the pandemic hit, and crime rose in New York, as it did in most American cities. Along came Mr. Adams, a former police captain, promising to restore order.
That Mr. Adams seemed more concerned with swagger than accountability was seen by many in New York as a minor detail, perhaps more of a bug than a feature. The assumption seemed to be that in its desire for greater security, the public would overlook excessive force, would overlook harassment of residents and unconstitutional stops, would overlook the gushing tide of taxpayer money pouring into police overtime.
Mr. Adams brought the Police Department’s culture of impunity into City Hall.
The mayor’s political career was born in the Police Department, and his election symbolized the dysfunctional, toxic relationship the city has with the force. In time, his term in office may come to represent the pinnacle of power for an organization the city had vested with enormous power and allowed to operate without serious oversight for as long as living memory serves.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani launched his campaign for mayor by supporting a police riot at City Hall to protest the decision to make the Civilian Complaint Review Board more independent. (The police union later turned on him for not knuckling under to its contract demands.) The political juice of the Police Department grew still more in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the department as it conducted five million pedestrian stops in his three terms in office, a campaign that traumatized Black and Latino New Yorkers and destroyed Mr. Bloomberg’s political ambitions and tarnished his legacy.
Mayor Bill de Blasio came to office promising to rein in the department. Chastened early on by police unions, he enlarged the force instead, hiring 1,300 officers while asking little in return. “We have given this Police Department, and not just its commissioner, status as heroes. This is a very, very bad habit,” Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, told me.
Given Mr. Adams’s history as a former police officer, it’s not surprising that a key focus of federal investigators has been senior department officials, including the former commissioner Edward Caban. Impunity isn’t just about individual officers getting away with misconduct; it’s also about the attitude of the department’s leadership and the cues those leaders take from their bosses at City Hall.
Political corruption is contagious, and having set the tone for the conduct of city government, Mr. Adams should be prosecuted by federal officials to the fullest extent of the law. But the focus on him shouldn’t mean less scrutiny or oversight for the nation’s largest Police Department. The organization needs both, in abundance.
Murders and shootings overall are down since Mr. Adams took office, following national trends. So too are gang-related incidents. But for all Mr. Adams’s promises that a return to a tough-on-crime approach would serve the city, progress on other serious crimes is less compelling since fiscal year 2021, the last full year his predecessor, Mr. de Blasio, was in office, according to the Mayor’s Management Report.
The number of burglaries has decreased, but not by much. The number of reported rapes has slightly increased. The number of robberies, felonious assaults and crimes involving grand larceny have all risen in New York City. So have the number of crimes reported in the transit system. The mixed picture reflects a genuinely frustrating reality, which is that the causes of crime are complex and not fully understood. Policing is only one important piece of the alchemy that makes up public safety.
What is far clearer is that the Police Department seems to be drifting from its core mission of keeping all of the public safe and is operating with an emboldened sense of the free license it has enjoyed for decades.
Department commissioners only rarely punish officers who conduct unconstitutional pedestrian stops, according to an independent report this year ordered by a federal judge. Mr. Caban, appointed by Mr. Adams, used his broad powers to delay or dismiss even more serious cases of police misconduct involving chokeholds and the abuse of protesters.
A joint investigation by The New York Times and ProPublica this year found that some of the cases involved conduct by officers that probably broke the law, not only department rules. The investigation also found Mr. Caban had dismissed cases against officers even before the disciplinary process had finished. Mr. Caban resigned on Sept. 12 after federal investigators seized his phone.
Mr. Adams had personally asked Mr. Caban’s predecessor, Keechant Sewell, not to discipline a senior department official for interfering with the arrest of a retired officer, according to a report in The City. The officer had brandished his gun while chasing three boys, ages 12, 13 and 14 at the time. Ms. Sewell, the first woman to serve as commissioner, disciplined the official anyway, then resigned.
“You don’t make generals president,” Mr. Moss said. “The mayor should not be the police commissioner.”
In September, Shamel Kelly, a Brooklyn man and former bar owner, reported being the victim of a shakedown by two men: one who said he represented City Hall and another who turned out to be a former New York Police Department officer and Mr. Caban’s brother. Mr. Kelly has said he was forced to shutter his business after the police harassment. I think of Mr. Kelly, a Black man, each time the mayor appears with Black church leaders, casting himself as their champion.
One recent incident involving the department was terrifying. On Sept. 15, police officers opened fire on a subway platform, shooting a suspect armed with a knife but also two other subway riders and a fellow police officer. Gregory Delpeche, an innocent bystander on his way to work at Woodhull Hospital, was shot in the head. Mr. Adams said the officers “should be commended for how they really showed a great level of restraint.” He seems to consider the brain injury suffered by Mr. Delpeche little more than collateral damage of a Police Department that is rarely if ever in the wrong.
That kind of wantonness is perilous for the public, which is being policed by 34,000 armed officers. Damaging the public’s trust in the department also endangers these very officers, who put their lives on the line every day.
At the same time, the average response time of police officers to serious crimes, a key measure of performance, has risen to 13 and a half minutes. That’s a nearly three-minute increase from fiscal year 2021, the last full fiscal year Mayor de Blasio served in office.
And since the city has elected a police captain mayor, the Police Department’s overtime spending has risen to nearly $1 billion, more than double what it was in fiscal year 2021. All the while, prekindergarten programs and libraries under Mr. Adams have seen crippling cuts. The City Council successfully pushed to restore some but not all of the funding.
All of this has unfolded as Gov. Kathy Hochul, M.T.A. officials and Mr. Adams have put pressure on the Police Department to crack down on fare evasion and other smaller, quality-of-life crimes. Despite the enormous powers entrusted to the nation’s largest Police Department, New York’s leaders have never shown much interest in exercising serious oversight of how the job is done.
It is in this kind of political environment that Mr. Adams’s candidacy had broad appeal. Many in the business community backed him. So did powerful unions. Many voters of all races did, too. In New York, it seemed like such an elegant choice, and now its consequences are becoming clear."
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