Eric Adams will be will be sworn in as New York City's 110th mayor on January 1. Photo / Dave Sanders, The New York Times
The new mayor will take office at a time when doubts about the future of the Big Apple are spiralling.
Some political investments take years to come good. Then there is the commitment the Reverend Herbert Daughtry made to a teenager named Eric Adams who joined his Brooklyn flock in the 1970s.
At the time, Daughtry, a fiery preacher who had undergone a prison conversion, was making the upstart House of the Lord church into a centre of the era's black activism. New York City was inflamed by the police murders of black men and boys, like 10-year-old Clifford Glover, who was shot in the back in 1973 while being chased down a street.
Even then, Daughtry recalls, the precocious Adams stood out. "You had a goodly number that would show up for the rallies. And you got another crowd that would hang around just to be hanging around. But then you had a smaller group who showed an interest — more attentive, more interested — who were around when the excitement had died down," he says.
The reverend had an unusual — and not wildly popular — plan for Adams: to become a police officer. If the city was ever going to change, Daughtry believed, then it needed activists not only making a ruckus in the streets but also working from the inside.
Adams, himself a victim of police violence, did just that, rising to the rank of captain during a 22-year career on the force, before retiring and entering politics. On January 1, he will be sworn in as New York City's 110th mayor, repaying Daughtry's faith many times over and assuming the hopes of a metropolis desperate for a saviour.
"Ecstatic," is how Daughtry, now aged 90, his flame-thrower voice reduced to embers, describes his reaction to his former pupil's elevation. "If anybody has a chance of bringing about better policing in the community, and a better relationship with police in the community, I think Eric has," he says, noting his unique ability to bridge divides from the police to the city's executive class to the forgotten denizens of its impoverished neighbourhoods. Or, as Daughtry puts it: "From the streets to the suites."
It is hard to overstate the expectations hanging on Adams, 61, who will be the city's second black mayor. David Dinkins, its first, served a single, unsatisfying term before being displaced by Rudolph Giuliani, a federal prosecutor who promised law and order. Adams has a chance to rectify Dinkins' perceived failings. As Hank Sheinkopf, the political strategist, sees it, he will be New York's "first truly blue-collar mayor" — a beacon for the outer-borough strivers just like him — "the people who drive the buses, run the subway trains, police the city".
Adams will take office at one of those rare, doom-laden moments when many New Yorkers seem to have misplaced their usual excessive confidence and begun to entertain doubts about the future of their city and whether it is worth the trouble.
The coronavirus pandemic and resulting recession wiped out 960,000 private sector jobs in the city, according to the non-partisan Citizens Budget Commission, fewer than half of which have since been restored. The slow recovery may become even more sluggish with the arrival of the new Omicron variant. Having had an extended taste of low-tax Florida, many hedge funds and financial services companies have relocated permanently. At the same time, the rise of flexible working, accelerated by the pandemic, has cast a cloud over the commercial office market that is one of the city's biggest sources of tax revenue.
In a recent interview, David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, captured the city's sudden fallibility when he observed that New York City was "not going away" but warned that "it's also not guaranteed for any urban centre that you have a permanent place in the world".
Then there is crime. A decades-long decline, beginning in the 1990s, allowed New York City to boast that it was America's safest big city. But shootings and homicides are now surging. After increasing 45 per cent in 2020, murders have remained slightly above that elevated level this year. Shootings are also on pace to tick up after a 97 per cent jump last year.
What the statistics do not convey is a growing sense of menace familiar to those who lived in the city in the dark days of the 1980s. It has been whipped up by all-too-frequent reports of residents being shoved on to subway tracks — seemingly at random — or the recent murder by stabbing of an Italian graduate student in Central Park by a known gang member for no apparent reason.
Even before taking office, Adams is making history by last week appointing the first woman to lead the nation's largest police department: Keechant Sewell, the chief of detectives for Nassau County on Long Island.
Part of the eagerness for Adams stems from the disenchantment with — for some, it is outright loathing of — the outgoing mayor, Bill de Blasio. The able progressive campaigner demonstrated limited aptitude for the hands-on work of governing the nation's largest city during his two terms in office.
Under de Blasio, the city's budget has grown by half to US$98.7 billion while problems like homelessness and public housing seemingly worsened, even before the pandemic. He also managed to alienate both the business community and the police.
"I just think when someone comes in and makes statements like: 'It's a tale of two cities and the business community is not the part of the city I care about.' Or makes statements like: 'If people are leaving New York, I don't want them back.' That's not helpful," says Scott Rechler, the chief executive of RXR Realty, one of the city's largest property developers.
By contrast, says Rechler, "there is an air of excitement about Eric Adams' mayoral term, which we haven't really seen since the Bloomberg administration [between 2002 and 2013]".
Adams diligently courted the developers years before he launched his campaign. As one city lobbyist put it: "They like Adams because he talked to them. He went to their events." It will bear watching how a politician known for his comfort at cutting deals with lobbyists repays their faith — and campaign contributions. In the meantime, Rechler and his ilk delight when the mayor-elect repeats the mantra that "public safety is the prerequisite to prosperity".
They are also heartened by the zest for the city that Adams has shown and which de Blasio could never seem to muster. On a typical day since the election, he graces nightclubs, restaurants, sporting events, the lighting of the world's largest Hanukkah menorah, and more, from the early morning until the wee hours. He is a kind of whirling, selfie-posing, marketing campaign for a city desperate to remind tourists of its abundance.
Adams did not enjoy much of that abundance growing up. He was born in Brownsville, one of Brooklyn's poorest neighbourhoods, and raised by a mother who was a house cleaner. There are two pillars to his origin story. The first is the time he and his brother, then teenagers, were beaten by police in a local precinct basement after being wrongly arrested for allegedly stealing from a local woman. That event, Adams has repeatedly said, fired his determination to reform the police.
After joining the force, he became a persistent critic — even to the annoyance of some black colleagues. He was one of the founders of the group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. "Ain't that something?" Daughtry remarked. "The very name that they applied to themselves was a criticism of the rest of the Police Department."
The second is his conversion to veganism, which he undertook five years ago after being diagnosed with diabetes. Adams has credited his strict, plant-based diet with restoring his eyesight, among other health benefits. Politically, it has become an advertisement for his personal discipline and the possibility of changing the status quo.
"My experience with Eric is that he's open to new, creative ideas. He doesn't [do] knee-jerk," says Norman Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who has known Adams for years and worked with him to draft a 2015 report on how to improve police-community relations.
Siegel, a civil rights lawyer, is more inclined to sue police than endorse them for mayor. When he publicly backed Adams in May, some progressive friends were aghast, he says: "People kept saying, 'But Norm, he's a cop!' As far as I'm concerned, Eric Adams is much more than a former cop."
He is regarded as a potent threat by other progressives at a time when the Democratic party is being riven by competing wings with different ideas about policing and how to treat the rich, among other things. When she endorsed Maya Wiley for mayor in June, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx representative who is a progressive star, seemed to offer an implicit criticism of the business-friendly Adams.
"If we don't come together as a movement, we will get a New York City built by and for billionaires," Ocasio-Cortez said. "[What] we need is a city for and by working people."
Adams, in turn, has portrayed himself as an enemy of the Democratic Socialists of America, the group in which Ocasio-Cortez is one of the leading members. "All across the country, the DSA socialists are mobilising to stop Eric Adams," he said at a November fundraiser, according to a video obtained by the New York Post. "They realise that if I'm successful, we're going to start the process of regaining control of our cities."
As ever, New York City's shaky finances will constrain the new mayor. Billions of dollars in aid from the Biden administration's US$1.9 trillion Covid relief package have plugged gaps. But those temporary funds will be exhausted, leaving the city with projected deficits of US$3.6 billion for 2023, US$3.5 billion for 2024 and US$2.9 billion for 2025, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a non-profit group.
Adams spoke at length on the campaign trail about getting more value for the city's money. The challenge will be narrowing that budget gap without again raising taxes on the wealthy, or further eroding the services that make the city liveable.
Yet all that may pale beside the urgent need to restore public safety, as Adams himself has acknowledged. Without it, there is the risk that business and residents will go elsewhere, as Goldman's Solomon warned, further denting tax revenues. Between 1970 and 1980, for example, the city's population fell by about 10 per cent.
De Blasio, whose first campaign was defined by a promise to end the stop-and-frisk policing that disproportionately targeted black and Hispanic neighbourhoods, entered office with hopes of reforming the department. He curbed stop-and-frisk but failed to make other changes — and alienated the police along the way, many of whom felt he did not support them.
After two policemen were shot in 2014, fellow officers showed their contempt for the mayor by turning their backs to him when he visited the hospital. The relationship worsened following protests prompted by the police murder in Minnesota of George Floyd in May 2020. Siegel faults the outgoing mayor for both antagonising the police and then bending over backwards to assuage them.
Adams is betting that his unique background — as a black man, an activist and a retired police officer — will afford him more leeway than his predecessor. During the campaign, he refused to disavow stop-and-frisk, insisting it had its proper use. Broadly speaking, he wants aggressive but more precise policing, particularly to remove a flood of illegal guns from the streets. He has also called for better training, among other reforms.
Underlying Adams' approach is a confidence that he has a better grasp of what a silent majority of the city's black and Hispanic working class wants than does a vocal group of the party's progressives. Siegel believes he glimpsed this when he and Adams, then the Brooklyn borough president, canvassed citizens to prepare the 2015 police reform report.
"What people said over and over again is that they wanted more cops. They weren't anti-cop, they were anti-bad cop. I think Eric understands that," explains Siegel. Adams, he says, had the standing within the force to make a bargain with demoralised rank-and-file cops that de Blasio did not: I have your back, so long as you do the job properly.
At a moment when the city and the nation are convulsed by issues of race and justice, it is far from clear that Adams will succeed, and certainly not without friction.
In a preview of what may await, Hank Newsome, a Black Lives Matter leader, in November threatened riots after meeting with the mayor-elect in Brooklyn. "If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we're going to take to the streets again,"
Newsome told the Daily News, referring to Adams' plan to restore plain-clothes anti-crime units with a record of aggressive behaviour. "There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed."
It was the kind of language Daughtry might have used in his younger days. "It's hard to relate to that 'defund the police' because I'm not sure I really understand, fully, what they meant," he says. "The communities I know, the people around us, what they want is good policemen. It's pretty simple: just be what law enforcement is supposed to be."
Written by: Joshua Chaffin
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