![]() “We make a mistake when we hear people say they don’t want police to be abusive,” Adams told me. And yet a retired Black cop has built a campaign around a law-and-order message, and won with the support of Black and brown Democrats. They are often viewed with scorn by liberal activists, and with suspicion by their white peers. Black police officers straddle the dangerous intersection of white fear of Black crime and Black fear of white cops. Adams inherited a good heart from a loving mom, and developed great drive, because he had to rely on himself.Īdams and his message are attracting national attention from a Democratic Party stung by the charge that it wants to defund the police. 241 made it up in the world the same way. He’s not an Ivy League grad but a kid who beat the odds by getting into New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Few of our white neighbors then were capable of imagining a Black boy as a future mayor. I grew up in Brooklyn, a working-class Black kid like Adams. If Adams tends to put himself at center stage, perhaps it’s because no one else was going to do that. To judge by the votes they cast, a lot of white liberals find him off-putting. I am just a straight New Yorker.”Īs Eric Adams discusses Eric Adams, he tends to lapse into the third person, as if stepping outside himself and seeing Eric Adams as a player on the big stage. Those are insiders caught up in that left-and-right stuff. They want their children educated they want … They could care less if you call them left or right. “People are saying, ‘We don’t know who he is.’ Listen, I know New Yorkers. “Everybody is trying to figure me out because I refuse to fit into this neat little package,” he said. Since we last spoke, he had passed the exam to become a captain, retired from the police force after 22 years, won a seat in the state Senate, and then become the Brooklyn borough president.īut when we met up again in late July, sitting in a Brooklyn coffee shop, we quickly picked up the conversation that we had begun more than 20 years ago about improving policing to bridge distrust among the city’s racial tribes. So imagine my surprise when the intense 38-year-old lieutenant from 1999, now a Democrat, told New York voters that he is the man to deal with a spike in violent crime in 2021-and enough people listened to make a retired Black cop the likely next mayor of the nation’s biggest city. Read: With Rudy Giuliani, what you see is what you get He’d said he was risking career “suicide” by testifying. He’d accused them of twisting statistics to hide the racial profiling brought about by the “stop and frisk” tactics used by New York police, who were hassling Black and Latino boys. He’d said that his boss, the police chief, and then-Mayor Giuliani, a fellow Republican, were masters of trickery. In 1999, not long before we spoke, this New York cop had dared to testify about racism in the police department in front of the U.S. This was Rudy Giuliani’s New York, where a white New York cop sodomized a suspect with his baton and police killed an unarmed Black immigrant in a blizzard of gunfire. He had a weightlifter’s powerful hands, a quick-trigger tongue, and a scar on the back of his shaved head from his days in a youth gang.Īt the time, the relationship between police officers and Black residents was raw. M ore than 20 years ago, I sat down to talk with a Black cop from New York City. ![]()
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