13 Law Enforcement Unions Endorse Eric Adams in N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race

Four years ago, Eric Adams used a law-and-order campaign message to help propel himself into City Hall. On Thursday, many of those responsible for law and order in New York City came together to try to keep him there.

Thirteen law enforcement unions endorsed Mayor Adams’s third-party bid for re-election, filling the steps of City Hall in a show of support. The participants were not in uniform, but held aloft signs displaying the seals or badges of their unions. Others waved American flags. One person held a handwritten sign: “Make Adams Great Again.”

The show of support helped mask some of the turbulence surrounding Mr. Adams’s leadership of the Police Department.

He cycled through three police commissioners before Jessica Tisch’s appointment in November, the first mayor to have that many in a single term since the 1930s. On Wednesday, one of those former commissioners filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Adams and top police officials of running the Police Department like a criminal enterprise.

The mayor, however, has tried to focus attention on the city’s receding crime numbers as a rallying point to bolster his bid for a second term, and as an argument against the candidacy of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and a democratic socialist. Mr. Adams argued that Mr. Mamdani’s progressive policies will hurt businesses and make the city less safe.

Mr. Mamdani, for example, supports a plan to reduce the number of people held in the Rikers Island jail complex and replace it with borough-based jails. He also in 2020 questioned whether the city should use police officers to respond to domestic violence calls.