New York has not seen the kind of uptick in crime that many other cities across America have — despite some high-profile tragedies in the headlines, like the killings of two police officers in January, the city is by some measures at least as safe as when former Mayor Michael Bloomberg deemed it “the safest big city in America” a decade ago. So why did President Joe Biden head there to talk about crime Thursday?
Two words: Eric Adams.
Adams is an NYPD veteran who won the mayorship of New York last year in no small part because of his promise to serve as a bulwark against demands for sweeping criminal justice reform. And as dealing with crime aggressively has swiftly become his main focus, he’s generating more attention in Democratic circles as a model for how the party might try to disassociate itself with being weak on crime while maintaining a veneer of reform-mindedness.
Adams’ record so far suggests the Democrats are not just retreating from already-inadequate reform efforts but in fact tacking to the right.
By spending a day with Adams chatting about crime and outlining his strategy to crack down firmly on gun violence with increased funding for law enforcement, Biden telegraphed to the country that he thinks Adams is on the right track. For anyone who cares about the fulfillment of police reform efforts that lost steam after a spike in the national homicide rate in 2020, that should be concerning — Adams’ record so far suggests the Democrats are not just retreating from already inadequate reform efforts but in fact tacking to the right.
Adams does not fit neatly into any ideological box, but to many New Yorkers he has coded as a moderate on a variety of issues, including police reform. Adams, who is Black, was beaten by cops as a teenager but then went on to join the NYPD, where he worked for many years and ascended to the rank of captain. During his tenure he spoke out against police brutality while putting on workshops coaching citizens on how to engage with the police, which critics like the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, said encouraged overpoliced residents to “live under oppression.” During his mayoral race, Adams walked a tightrope, acknowledging the need for the police to reform while defending the reputation of the institution. But overall he hammered home the importance of public safety and his identity as a man of the law. At a time when crime was rising and the “defund the police” movement was fueling some backlash, Adams presented what appeared to some to be a middle path.
But in practice Adams is not a moderate reformer so far. On a symbolic level, he appears to be militarizing a civilian leadership position by wearing an NYPD jacket regularly, conspicuously calling in crimes to 911 himself, and likening himself to a “general.”
“I have too many police officers that are doing clerical duties,” Adams said in a recent interview with MSNBC, as if the police report to him directly. “If you’re inside, I need to know why you’re inside, and if you’re not, I need you to put on the bulletproof vest and do the job that New Yorkers hired you for.”
Those cultural gestures wouldn’t be as worrying if they weren’t accompanied by a reactionary policy agenda. In the wake of some high-profile killings in the city in recent weeks, Adams is reviving policies that were discarded during an era of police reform in the wake of Bloomberg’s tough-on-crime mayorship, like the NYPD’s plainclothes unit, which, according to Politico, “was disbanded … after the division was implicated in multiple police-involved shootings and the 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner.” Adams has also criticized bail reform and signaled he may appoint judges who are less lenient with bail even though there is no clear evidence that links bail reform has led to a rise in violent crime.
A group of public defenders in New York said in a joint statement recently that Adams’ recently released program to combat gun violence centers on “discredited punitive and surveillance-based strategies” and decried, among other things, his plans to try some teenagers as adults for gun possession and an increase in the use of facial recognition. Adams has also toyed with bringing back a revised version of stop-and-frisk — the notorious search policy that was struck down as unconstitutional in 2013 because it systematized racial profiling — despite no evidence of its efficacy and the possibility that floating the idea vaguely could encourage police offers to revert to racial profiling. (An exception to this trend has been Adams’ support for violence interruption programs, which progressive reformers support.) Returning to ideas from the era of mass incarceration out of political expediency would be shameful. Adams is potent for Democrats because he can talk credibly as an insider about the shortcomings of the police and the importance of police reform — but also turn the clock back on reforms in the same breath. Biden’s decision to shine a light on Adams raises the possibility that the party is not only backing away from reform but in fact swinging in the opposite direction. In fairness to Biden and congressional Democrats, their efforts to pass even incredibly incremental reform last year were blocked by Republican senators so resistant to negotiation that even police organizations were frustrated. But the Biden administration, which has always stridently rejected defund the police proposals and did so again on Thursday, has strived in recent months to develop an even warmer relationship with police, and may be to be backing off of an executive order guidance that would raise use-of-force standards that police are pushing back against. Rising crime rates warrant a serious policy response from the Democrats. But seriousness should not be conflated with the spectacle of toughness or domination. Much of Adams’ and Biden’s behavior is fueled by fear of looking weak or getting on the wrong side of the police — a group that fiercely objects to any constraints on its power and will inevitably side with Republicans or any figure that promises them less accountability when possible. Returning to ideas from the era of mass incarceration out of political expediency would be shameful, and the real act of weakness.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
