100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares99 Views

    What Kind of Mayor Might Eric Adams Be? No One Seems to Know.

    by

    Eric Adams could not resist the story.In a 2019 commencement address, Mr. Adams complained that a neighbor’s dog kept befouling his yard — no matter how polite he was to the owner, no matter his standing as Brooklyn’s borough president. Then a pastor gave him an idea. Mr. Adams slipped on a hoodie and Timberland boots, rang the neighbor’s doorbell and reintroduced himself a little less politely, he said. After that, the dog stayed away.“Let people know you are not the one to mess with,” he advised the predominantly Black graduating class at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. He closed with a prediction for those who said he would never be mayor: “I’m going to put my hoodie on, and I’m going to make it happen.”That electoral prophecy might well hold up. The story does not.It was the pastor, Robert Waterman, who actually had the neighbor with the dog and the confrontation at the door, both men said in interviews. Mr. Adams just liked how it sounded. “It was a great story I heard,” he told The New York Times recently. “I heard him preach, and I told him, ‘I’m going to tell that story.’”With Mr. Adams, 61, now poised to become New York City’s next mayor, the episode at once reflects his political superpower and greatest potential vulnerability: a comfort with public shape-shifting that would make him the biggest City Hall wild card in decades. He propagates and discards narratives about himself, rarely sweating the details.His highest principle can appear to be the perpetuation of the Eric Adams story, one that he hopes will deliver him from a streetwise childhood in Brooklyn and Queens to the seat of power in Lower Manhattan. He speaks with almost spiritual zeal about his personal evolution — he is a meditating, globe-trotting, vegan former police officer — but can slide into vague aphorisms on policy matters.“I am you,” he tells voters.That this slogan has rung true across multiple constituencies — police critics and police officers, service workers and real estate barons — speaks forcefully to Mr. Adams’s embrace of ostensible contradictions: He can be, and prefers to be, many things at once, presenting himself as living proof that they are not mutually exclusive.Primary voters responded to Mr. Adams’s message that police reform and public safety did not have to exist in tension. Jordan Gale for The New York TimesHe has alternately referred to himself as a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive.” He claims to take bubble baths with roses and has said he would carry a handgun in church. He is openly self-aggrandizing and self-critical, appraising himself as a transformative leader while insisting he ends each day with a self-flagellating diary entry: “How did you drop the ball today, Eric? How did you blow it?”He is, perhaps most bewildering of all to his primary opponents in the spring, a Democrat celebrated by the right-leaning New York Post. He dined in Manhattan earlier this year with Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp, the paper’s parent company, and others from the organization. “Good conversation,” Mr. Adams said. (His campaign noted that Mr. Adams has also met with the leaders of other major daily newspapers in the city, including The Times.)Such world-straddling dexterity has served Mr. Adams well as a candidate. Primary voters warmed to his core message that public safety and police reform could coexist. Benefactors as distinct as Mayor Bill de Blasio, a professed progressive, and Michael R. Bloomberg, his billionaire technocrat predecessor, have allowed themselves to see validation in his success.But the mayoralty is about choices: the priorities to pursue, the compromises to accept, the company to keep. By his own account, Mr. Adams — who is expected to win election next month — has been plotting a path to City Hall since at least the 1990s.It is far less clear how he might proceed once he gets there.While he has produced a raft of proposals, some more detailed than others, on subjects ranging from expanded child care to affordable housing, Mr. Adams has defaulted most often in public forums to a broad emphasis on keeping the streets safe, reversing government dysfunction and being business-friendly as the city emerges from the pandemic.Across 130 interviews with friends, aides, colleagues and other associates, the only consensus was that the range of possible outcomes in an Adams administration is vast. Relentless reformer or machine politician? Blunt truth-teller or unreliable narrator?“This should be a very interesting experience for us, having him as mayor,” said David Paterson, the former New York governor and a longtime friend.Even Mr. Adams can seem unsure precisely what to expect of himself. Speaking at the White House in July, as part of a national introduction that found him anointing himself the “face of the new Democratic Party,” Mr. Adams took a moment to dwell on his uncommon résumé.He was a former officer, he said before the assembled cameras. A former Republican. A former juvenile scofflaw assaulted by the police.He held for a beat.“I’m so many formers,” Mr. Adams said, smiling a little. “I’m trying to figure out the current.”The Mythmaker“His story won the election,” said Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate and 2001 Democratic mayoral nominee.James Estrin/The New York TimesEvery politician curates. But few can seem as dedicated to the craft as Mr. Adams.He has a deftly embroidered anecdote for every city occasion, as if his ups and downs were interwoven with New York’s: born in Brownsville, Brooklyn; raised in South Jamaica, Queens; the son of a single mother, Dorothy, a house cleaner and a cook — a union woman, he reminds union audiences.When Mr. Adams speaks about homelessness, he says he grew up on the verge of it himself, taking a bag of clothes to school in case of sudden eviction and caring for a pet rat named Mickey. When he pushes a plan for universal dyslexia screening, he describes his own long-undiagnosed learning disability and the teacher who smacked him so hard “it left a handprint on my face.” Weeks before the primary, Mr. Adams said that he had been a teenage squeegee man — and was thus best equipped to handle any resurgence in squeegee men.Many of these accounts are difficult to verify. They have also proved irresistible to voters: No candidate was as determined, or effective, in placing the personal at the center of the campaign. “I wanted to tell my narrative,” Mr. Adams said, sipping peppermint tea last month during a wide-ranging interview at a diner near Borough Hall. “People could say, ‘Hey, this guy is one of ours.’”In Mr. Adams’s telling, the signal event of his young life came at 15, when he and his older brother were arrested for trespassing and beaten in custody. Rather than embittering him, Mr. Adams has said, the trauma helped coax him to become a police officer and change the profession from within.His 22 years in law enforcement, until his retirement from the New York Police Department in 2006, ran parallel to a career as an activist and a burgeoning interest in politics.In 1995, Mr. Adams helped form an advocacy group, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, that pushed for racial justice and burnished his reputation as an irritant to police leadership. (Mr. Adams has suggested that he may have been targeted for his outspokenness — perhaps by another police officer — when, he said, an unknown assailant once shot at his car. The car had a shattered back window, but no other evidence corroborated his speculation about the shooter.)Around the same time, Mr. Adams began speaking with Bill Lynch, a top adviser to David N. Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, about what it might take to become the second.Mr. Adams said Mr. Lynch had four pieces of advice: get a bachelor’s degree (John Jay College, 1998); rise in management ranks in the department (he retired as a captain); work in Albany (he joined the State Senate in 2007); and become a borough president.“He wanted to be mayor as much as I wanted to be borough president,” said Marty Markowitz, his Borough Hall predecessor, who served three terms as an enthusiastic booster for Brooklyn.Mr. Adams, seen here in 2008, helped form 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, frequently speaking about racial issues.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York TimesFor Mr. Adams, the 2021 primary campaign amounted to the triumphant melding of meticulous planning and finely tuned biography. He likes to say that his opponents hoped voters would “hear” their message; he wanted them to “feel” his. He is now heavily favored next month against Curtis Sliwa, his Republican opponent.Yet like any worthy storyteller, Mr. Adams has made choices about what to emphasize and what to elide, carefully guarding certain pieces of himself and working to recast others.When his mother died earlier this year, he surprised friends by not publicly revealing it for months, even as he continued speaking about her on the campaign trail. He instructed siblings not to write about her on social media because it might create a “circus,” according to a comment on Facebook from one of his brothers.He speaks little of his first campaign: a congressional run in 1994, when he did not make the ballot, claiming his petition signatures had been stolen. Police said at the time that they had turned up no evidence of this. Mr. Adams also jumped to the Republican Party during the Giuliani administration and has strained to explain why, by turns calling the move a protest against failed Democratic leadership and saying he ultimately regretted the whole thing.Even his political origin story, his teenage arrest, has shifted over time. He had long said that he and his older brother entered the home of a prostitute to take money she owed them for running errands. “We went into this prostitute’s apartment,” Mr. Adams said in 2015.In his interview with The Times, the woman had been refashioned to “a go-go dancer who we were helping that broke her leg.” If she had been a prostitute, he added, “I don’t know about that.”Other amendments to, and exclusions from, Mr. Adams’s autobiography have ranged from the procedural to the absurd. His political runs have prompted inquiries from election authorities and assorted fines. For years, he did not register his rental property in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, with the city, as required. He also failed to report rental income to the federal government and blamed his accountant, whom Mr. Adams said last year he had had difficulty finding because the man was living in a homeless shelter.The last days of the primary were shadowed by questions of whether Mr. Adams even lived in New York: After a Politico article chronicled confusion about where he spent his nights, Mr. Adams invited cameras into the Brooklyn property, where he said he resided. The campaign hoped the tour would quell suspicions that Mr. Adams actually lived in Fort Lee, N.J., where he owns a co-op with his longtime companion, Tracey Collins. It did not. Reporters noted the Brooklyn space included non-vegan food and sneakers that appeared to belong to Mr. Adams’s adult son, Jordan Coleman.Mr. Adams took reporters on a tour of a Brooklyn apartment where he said he lived after questions emerged about his residency. Dave Sanders for The New York TimesOften enough, Mr. Adams has stayed in neither residence. He made a show of sleeping at the office in the early days of the pandemic last year, in a performance of total job commitment. But former aides say this image belied a more peculiar reality: Mr. Adams created a home of sorts at Borough Hall well before the pandemic, walking the grounds in his socks, stocking the fridge with pre-cut vegetables, working out on exercise machines, meditating to Middle Eastern music and sleeping on a couch in the office (he later put a mattress on the floor).In the interview, Mr. Adams said he might continue the practice at City Hall. “Probably have a little cot there,” he said, “getting up in the morning and just hopping right to work.”Mr. Adams’s sleeping arrangement is the most public expression of what people around New York politics have long said quietly: He is, plainly, an unusual man.He says his favorite concert was a 1990 Curtis Mayfield show in Brooklyn, where a stage collapse left Mr. Mayfield partially paralyzed before he ever sang a note.He unsettled a New York official in a conversation around 2015 by praising the physical prowess of Vladimir Putin while making small talk and claiming he had a Putin book at his bedside, according to a person present.He has appeared to suggest that holding office enhanced his romantic prospects.“As the state senator and borough president, I’ve had the opportunity to date some of the most attractive women in this city,” Mr. Adams said in a 2015 graduation speech, discussing the importance of presentation. “And I’m not taking you anywhere with me to a $500 dinner if you’ve got two tattoos on your neck saying, ‘Lick me.’” (A spokesman, Evan Thies, said that the candidate had misspoken in implying that he had dated widely as borough president, adding that Mr. Adams was in a “committed relationship” with Ms. Collins.)Some tend to conflate Mr. Adams’s eccentricities with his veganism — a disservice, healthy-eating advocates say, to the plant-based regimen that has come to define his worldview.His health journey began with a diabetes diagnosis in 2016, he has said, after he experienced vision issues and nerve damage. He has credited diet and exercise with erasing the diagnosis, sparing him possible blindness and amputation and ushering him, he has suggested, to an elevated psychological plane.“That atom stuff and Newton stuff, that is so old news in comparison to what is real,” he said at a 2019 event about food and education, describing the underdeveloped “intellectual digestive system” of others. “I tap into that in my life, and people just can’t really get it.”The transformation has intimately informed his governance: Asked to cite accomplishments over his two terms, Mr. Adams was quickest to highlight a partnership with Bellevue Hospital to promote plant-based diets, before plugging a “Meatless Mondays” initiative in schools.But just as important politically, Mr. Adams and his allies have adopted the language of destiny to explain his health reversal and subsequent successes, suggesting that higher forces were steering his story.“The hand of God,” Laurie Cumbo, a Brooklyn councilwoman, said of his primary victory.“That’s a new lease on life,” Mr. Adams said of his recovery. “Everything becomes possible.”The OperatorMayor Bill de Blasio did not publicly endorse a candidate in the Democratic primary but spoke privately with labor leaders to boost Mr. Adams. Dieu-Nalio Chéry for The New York TimesMr. Adams has a talent for making friends with the politically friendless.During the primary, he was the only mayoral candidate to reach out privately to Scott Stringer, a competitor, after Mr. Stringer was accused of sexual harassment, people close to Mr. Stringer said.In Mr. de Blasio’s case, the bond was strengthened in tragedy. In late 2014, the murder of two police officers plunged the mayor into political crisis. He had campaigned on a pledge to remake the department. Now, rank-and-file officers were turning their backs to him in public. Union leaders said he had blood on his hands. City Hall aides struggled to find surrogates to defend him. Mr. Adams did not hesitate.“Blood is not on the hands of the mayor,” he said on “Meet the Press,” giving Mr. de Blasio a measure of cover from a former lawman.Seven years later, Mr. de Blasio’s choice of successor surprised few who knew the mayor well: While he did not endorse in the primary, he communicated privately with labor leaders to boost Mr. Adams and undercut his rivals, including former members of the de Blasio administration and those with whom the mayor appeared more ideologically aligned.“During the low moments,” Mr. Adams said in the interview, “people remember who was there.”To the extent that Mr. Adams has been underestimated, as he often says, this skill has been most overlooked: He is a canny builder and keeper of relationships, a long-game player in a short-attention-span business, rarely rushing to call in a chit but always mindful of the historical ledger. He has spent years cultivating bonds with power brokers — lawmakers, developers, religious leaders — who proved crucial to his primary victory.Public visibility at street festivals and block parties has been paramount in his borough presidency. Mr. Adams once asked staff for the names of every Turkish restaurant in South Brooklyn to help him build ties with that community, a former aide said.“You know who was ringing my phone saying, ‘You’ve got to endorse Eric’?” recalled Mr. Paterson, the former governor. “It wasn’t African Americans. It was people I knew in the Orthodox community in Brooklyn.”Yet there is a flip side to such savviness, friends say. Mr. Adams has been known to keep politically unsavory company: the scandal-tarred, the lobbyist class, the donor with business before his office. He says he makes his own determinations about people, never judging others by their lowest moments, even when colleagues think he probably should.Mr. Adams’s first exposure to elected power — his seven years in Albany — is perhaps the most telling barometer of how he might operate in higher office, a testing ground for the kinds of alliances and ethical temptations likely to surround him at City Hall.Mustachioed and burly back then, shuttling to the capital in a BMW convertible, Mr. Adams could be known more often for his forcefulness at a news conference than his follow-through on a policy.He pushed for legislative pay raises as a freshman in 2007 (“Show me the money!” he thundered from the Senate floor), lamented the low-slung pants of Brooklyn’s male youth (“Stop the Sag!” read his neighborhood billboards, placing Mr. Adams’s headshot beside the backsides of the belt-averse) and filmed an instructional video showing parents how to uncover contraband in their own homes.“Behind a picture frame, you can find bullets,” Mr. Adams said, finding bullets behind a picture frame in what appeared to be his own home.Mr. Adams, then a Democratic state senator, during a contentious argument on the floor of the State Senate in 2011.Nathaniel Brooks for The New York TimesBut such stunt work and media baiting could obscure his growing clout. When two Democratic senators imperiled the fragile majority the party had won in 2008 by aligning with Republicans, Mr. Adams helped negotiate an end to the standoff and worked to install a new leader, John Sampson.Mr. Adams became chairman of the Senate’s committee on racing, gaming and wagering, where he raised money prodigiously from the industry. Lawmakers and lobbyists praised him as curious and engaged, willing to spend hours on the road visiting racetracks and conveying deep interest in his audience. “I was really impressed with how smart and inquisitive he was,” said Rory Whelan, a Republican lobbyist who hosted fund-raisers for him. “Then I realized, ‘OK, of course, he’s a former police officer. He asks a lot of questions.’”Mr. Adams sponsored some 20 bills that became law. These included expanding affordable housing access for veterans and requiring greater disclosure of refund policies at stores.His most enduring contribution while in the Legislature did not involve legislation: As the police tactic of stop-and-frisk proliferated under Mr. Bloomberg, with stops overwhelmingly ensnaring Black and Latino men, Mr. Adams supplied key testimony against the department. The judge cited him favorably in her 2013 ruling that police had targeted such New Yorkers unconstitutionally.Mr. Adams also focused on matters of race more particular to the capital. He pushed people with interests before his committee to hire Black lobbyists, people who worked with him said. And he demonstrated unfailing loyalty when allies succumbed to scandal, telling fellow Democrats that some charges against legislators of color were a racially motivated plot, according to people present.When one friend, Hiram Monserrate, a former police officer, was expelled from the Senate in a lopsided vote after being convicted of misdemeanor assault for dragging his girlfriend down a hallway, Mr. Adams opposed the measure.When Democrats moved to replace Mr. Sampson, who was later convicted of trying to thwart a federal investigation, over questions of ethics and ineffectiveness, Mr. Adams tried in vain to keep him in charge.Mr. Adams’s own conduct in Albany often troubled watchdogs and good-government groups.He was criticized in a 2010 inspector general’s report for fund-raising from and fraternizing with bidders for a casino contract. Mr. Adams told investigators that staff memos on the bids were “just too wordy,” and he educated himself by talking to lobbyists and looking at a summary document. The matter was referred to federal prosecutors, but no action was taken.Mr. Adams also drew unwelcome attention for traveling to South Korea in 2011 with Ms. Collins, Mr. Sampson and an Albany lobbyist, among others, nominally to learn about renewable energy. Mr. Adams would say little when questioned about the trip, which was paid for in part by campaign funds and described by people familiar with it as a junket.Mr. Adams, right, is known for sticking by his allies, including former State Senator Hiram Monserrate, left, who was eventually expelled from the Legislature. Here, the men walk together at the State Capitol in 2009.Nathaniel Brooks for The New York TimesHe has continued to travel widely as borough president, taking several official trips that extended well beyond the typical purview of a local politician. He has made at least seven foreign trips under the banner of his office, some of which were paid for in part by foreign governments or nonprofits, to destinations that included Senegal, Turkey and Cuba. Presenting himself as a global wheeler-dealer to voters in his multicultural borough, Mr. Adams signed at least five sister city agreements on Brooklyn’s behalf in countries he visited, including two in China.A proposed “friendship archway” partnership with the Chinese government, planned under his predecessor, became a major governing priority: Mr. Adams allocated millions of dollars toward a plan to build a 40-foot structure in the heavily Chinese neighborhood of Sunset Park, flummoxing some city officials who wondered why he had invested so much time and travel in the venture.Other locations were likewise dear to him. Mr. Adams has said he would like to retire in Israel someday. Also Lebanon. And Azerbaijan.“When I retire from government, I’m going to live in Baku,” he said in 2018 at the Baku Palace restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.Mr. Adams also made personal trips in recent years to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, according to his campaign and people familiar with his travel.Mr. Adams can vacillate between secretive and swaggering when discussing his travel, refusing to tell reporters where he vacationed recently (it was Monaco) but often maintaining that his air miles serve an official purpose.“I’ve been back and forth to China seven times, back and forth to Turkey eight times,” he said in a 2019 speech. “I’m not a domesticated leader. I’m a global leader.”But global leadership has its limits: The Chinese friendship archway was never built.The CandidateMr. Adams is widely expected to defeat his Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Adams would enter City Hall with an unusually strong hand. Almost no one — including, it can seem, Mr. Adams — knows how he might play it.Unlike most mayors, who suffer from a little-sibling power deficit with state government, Mr. Adams can expect considerable deference from Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is running for a full term next year. Her success in a statewide primary will depend largely on her performance with Mr. Adams’s coalition of nonwhite voters in the city, boosting his leverage in any negotiation.“He’s finally gotten to the point in his life where he has some juice,” said Norman Siegel, the former leader of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a longtime supporter. “Now that you have the power, are you going to use it?”He most certainly will, allies say. They are just not sure to what end.“People will make a mistake if they think they know what he will do,” said Bertha Lewis, a veteran activist who has known Mr. Adams for decades. “But I believe he will actually do something about this tale of two cities.”Early evidence is mixed. Since the primary, Mr. Adams has readily embraced the wealthy and powerful New Yorkers hoping to woo the presumptive next mayor, suggesting a tension between a campaign that stresses his blue-collar bearing and a candidate, associates say, who can relish the perks of his position.He has collected fund-raising checks in the Hamptons, on Martha’s Vineyard and at exclusive addresses across the city, enough that he recently chose to forgo public matching funds. He has been a nightlife regular at a private club in NoHo, gabbing merrily with Ronn Torossian, a publicist with past ties to former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Adams also caused a minor social media sensation this summer after dining at Rao’s, East Harlem’s gleefully decadent purveyor of red sauce and Mafia stories, with Bo Dietl, a roguish former police detective, and John Catsimatidis, a billionaire friend of Mr. Trump’s.“I’m concerned people could use him,” Mr. Siegel said of Mr. Adams. “He needs to have people around him that are guardrails.”“I believe he will actually do something about this tale of two cities,” Bertha Lewis, a longtime activist in New York, said of Mr. Adams. Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesThe Rao’s outing, at least, prompted a scolding from an old friend. “You’re going to be mayor now,” the Rev. Al Sharpton recalled telling him: Appearances matter.“He says, ‘Well, I hear you,” Mr. Sharpton said, laughing. “‘But you know me. I’m going to do me.’”Some supporters suggest that Mr. Adams has grown more serious through the years, especially since his time in Albany.For the past two years, he has been putting himself through what he calls “mayor school,” a series of study sessions with civic leaders and municipal experts. His campaign has been generally disciplined despite Mr. Adams’s freewheeling reputation, allowing him to edge out his primary rivals in what was effectively the first competitive race of his life.Mr. Sharpton said Mr. Adams has occasionally asked to be reminded of an axiom from James Brown, the famed soulster who was Mr. Sharpton’s mentor. In the story, Mr. Brown points at a ladder. “He said, ‘The higher you go, the more you better watch a misstep,’” Mr. Sharpton remembered. “And Eric has asked me at least 10 times, ‘What’s that misstep thing?’ And I think he understands: You’re at the top of the ladder now.”Mr. Adams amended the analogy. “The higher you rise,” he said in the interview, “the more people can shoot at your butt.”But his fund-raising has again invited ethical concerns. The campaign sometimes failed to disclose the identities of people who raised money for him or to list fund-raisers thrown for him as in-kind contributions, in apparent violation of city campaign finance law.Asked whether a pattern of missteps in his own dealings with the government should give voters pause, Mr. Adams said he would not “apologize for being a human.”“It’s going to be a joy knowing I don’t have to manage the $98 billion budget — I have an O.M.B. director,” he said. “I don’t have to manage the Police Department. I have a commissioner.”Mr. Adams has been a prolific fundraiser since winning the primary. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesStill, former aides questioned Mr. Adams’s willingness to delegate, especially on policing.While he has said he surrounds himself with people who are “brutally honest,” some employees say he does not always appreciate dissent. “This is my ship,” he would say when challenged, according to one of them. “I am the captain of the ship.”Mr. Adams has long argued that Black leaders are held to a different standard, and former colleagues expect he will do the same at City Hall.Confronted at a community meeting in 2019 about employees parking illegally around Borough Hall, Mr. Adams said that if other officials were abusing their placards, he would not chastise his own team. “I fought my entire life to make sure men that look like me don’t have different rules than everyone else,” he said. “It’s not going to be a rule just for Eric Adams.”While he calls himself thick-skinned, Mr. Adams retains a mental archive of slights and grievances, describing in one breath those who were “mean” to him during the primary and insisting in the next that he holds no grudges.For a man who seems to appreciate his own idiosyncrasies, often speaking about himself in the third person as if admiring his story at a remove, Mr. Adams can at times reduce the world around him to binary categories: winners and losers, lions and sheep, doers and haters.“Turn your haters into your waiters,” he has told audiences, “and give them a 15 percent tip.”At one point in the interview, Mr. Adams was asked why some doubt his capacity to surround himself with good people, to rise to the job he is likely to claim.He laughed. He smiled. He stared straight ahead.He had his own question.“Why do I keep winning?”“I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” Mr. Adams said when he was leading in the primary. “I’m going to show America how to run a city.”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesSusan C. Beachy contributed reporting. More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Keep an Eye on This Guy’: Inside Eric Adams’s Complicated Police Career

      by

      Mr. Adams’s police credentials have helped him rise to the top of this year’s mayoral field. But his relationship with the department is complex.As Eric Adams lined up for graduation at the New York City Police Academy in 1984, he congratulated the cadet who had beaten him out for valedictorian, only to learn that the other recruit’s average was a point lower than his own. Mr. Adams complained to his commander about the slight.“Welcome to the Police Department,” Mr. Adams recalled the senior officer telling him. “Don’t make waves.”“Man, little do you know,” Mr. Adams remembered thinking. “I’m going to make oceans.”Over the course of the two-decade Police Department career that followed, Mr. Adams troubled the water often. He was a fierce advocate for Black officers, infuriating his superiors with news conferences and public demands. As he rose through the ranks to captain, he spoke out against police brutality, and, later, the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics.His uncommon willingness to criticize the police openly may have stalled his ascent. But many who knew him then said Mr. Adams had already set his sights on a grander goal anyway: public office.Mr. Adams’s outspokenness inspired admiration among many of the Black officers he championed. But his penchant for self-promotion and his blunt-force ambition — he ran for Congress at 33, only a decade into his police career — rankled others in law enforcement, who thought he was using the Police Department as a steppingstone.Today, Mr. Adams, now 60 and the borough president of Brooklyn, is the Democratic front-runner in the New York City mayor’s race, mounting a campaign that leans hard on his time as an officer. But interviews with friends, mentors, former colleagues and political rivals show that his relationship to the police has always been complicated.A year after protests against police brutality and racism shook the city, Mr. Adams has sought to appeal to voters as a reformer who spent 22 years trying to fix what he says was a broken department before retiring to run for State Senate in 2006. But during his bid for mayor he has also positioned himself as the candidate whose law enforcement experience makes him the best choice for ensuring the safety of a fearful electorate as violent crime rises in the city.Mr. Adams’s attempt to manage that precarious balance has drawn attacks from rivals. He has been criticized from the left over his qualified support of the stop-and-frisk strategy, which he fought as an officer but calls a useful tool that previous mayoral administrations abused. And he has struggled to explain how the one-time internal critic of the department is now running as the tough-on-crime ex-cop.“I don’t hate police departments — I hate abusive policing, and that’s what people mix up,” Mr. Adams said in an interview with The New York Times. “When you love something, you’re going to critique it and make it what it ought to be, and not just go along and allow it to continue to be disruptive.”But the apparent tension between Mr. Adams’s past and present public lives can be difficult to reconcile. He has spoken of wearing a bulletproof vest, defended carrying a gun and argued against the movement to defund the police. Yet for most of his life he has harbored deep ambivalence about policing, and his time in the department was more notable for high-profile, often provocative advocacy than it was for making arrests or patrolling a beat.His broadsides sometimes overreached, his critics said, while some of his actions and associations landed him under departmental investigation. Wilbur Chapman, who is also Black and was the Police Department’s chief of patrol during Mr. Adams’s time on the force, said Mr. Adams’s critiques lacked substance and impact.“There was nothing credible that came out of them,” Mr. Chapman said. “Eric had used the Police Department for political gain. He wasn’t interested in improving the Police Department.”A Marked ManMr. Adams as a police lieutenant at age 32. He was outspoken from his earliest days in the department.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesThe seed of Mr. Adams’s law enforcement career took root when he was 16. Randolph Evans, a Black teenager, had been shot and killed by the police in Brooklyn’s East New York section on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. The officer responsible was found not guilty by reason of insanity.A spate of police killings of Black youth in New York spawned an activist movement led by the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, who founded the National Black United Front. Mr. Adams, who had his own share of run-ins with the police while growing up in Brooklyn and Queens, became one of the movement’s young stewards.As a teenager, he said, he realized that the police viewed him and other young Black males as threats to public order. According to a story he has often told, Mr. Adams and his brother were beaten in the 103rd Precinct station house in Queens when he was just 15.Amid the police killings, Mr. Daughtry urged a group that included Mr. Adams to join the Police Department. Mr. Daughtry, in an interview, said that pushing Black men to enlist in what was effectively a hostile army was anathema to some. But he envisioned a two-pronged approach.“Some of us needed to work outside of the system, and some inside the system,” Mr. Daughtry said. “To model what policemen should be about and to find out what’s going on. Why were we having all these killings?”For Mr. Adams, becoming a policeman was an act of subversion. Still angry over the beating, he saw “an opportunity to go in and just aggravate people,” he told Liz H. Strong, an oral historian at Columbia University, in a 2015 interview for a collection of reminiscences of retired members of the Guardians Association, a fraternal organization of Black police officers.He wasted no time. In October 1984, a police sergeant fatally shot Eleanor Bumpurs, a disabled, mentally ill Black woman, in the chest. When a chief tried to explain why the shooting was justified, Mr. Adams, who was still in the academy, disagreed forcefully, saying a white woman would not have been killed that way. Higher-ups took note of his attitude.“There was a signal that went out: ‘Keep an eye on this guy,’” said David C. Banks, a friend of Mr. Adams’s whose father and brother were influential figures in the Police Department. “He did it before he was officially on the job, so he was already a marked man.”‘A Driven, Motivated Cat’Mr. Adams, right, was a fixture at press events as a leader of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. James Estrin/The New York TimesMr. Adams began as a transit police officer, patrolling the subway or in a radio car, later using his associate degree in data processing to work on the department’s computer programs that tracked crime. In 1995, he became a member of the Police Department after the transit police was absorbed by the bigger agency.On the force, he was not known as a dynamic, run-and-gun street cop.“I wouldn’t say Eric was an aggressive cop, but he was competent,” said David Tarquini, who worked in the same command.Randolph Blenman, who patrolled with Mr. Adams when both were transit officers, called him “a thinking man’s officer,” whether they were arresting someone or helping them. “He always did his best to get his point across without losing his composure,” Mr. Blenman said.Mr. Adams moved up the ranks by taking tests, rising first to sergeant, then to lieutenant, and eventually to captain. But any further promotions would have been discretionary, and perhaps unavailable to Mr. Adams because of his outspokenness.Instead, Mr. Adams quickly became well-known for his activism. He signed up with the Guardians upon joining the force, and ultimately became its leader.Another officer, Caudieu Cook, recalled Mr. Adams working out with him and other young Black officers at a Brooklyn gym in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Mr. Cook said he was focused on getting in shape, while Mr. Adams spoke of his vision for the department and the city. His story of being beaten by the police as a child resonated with the others. Unlike him, they feared retaliation if they spoke out.“You have to be very careful when you speak out against injustices because you could get ostracized,” Mr. Cook said. Mr. Adams, he said, “was just a driven, motivated cat.”Mr. Adams focused on discrimination in policing, and within the department itself. He warned in the 1990s that rising arrests of teenagers for low-level offenses would backfire in the long run, and he said Black and Hispanic New Yorkers would bear the brunt of ticket quotas.He also spoke out often against the racism that Black officers encountered, including the fear many of them felt of being mistaken for criminals when not in uniform.A decade after entering the department, Mr. Adams made his first attempt to leave it, waging a congressional primary race against Representative Major Owens, a Democrat, in 1994. His campaign did not gain traction, and he remained an officer..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In 1995, Mr. Adams and others formed 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. They felt that without the departmental recognition that the Guardians had, they could better pursue their own agenda: advocating internally for racial justice while providing community grants and advice to the public.Four years later, officers from the department’s Street Crimes Unit killed a man named Amadou Diallo in a hail of bullets in the Bronx. Mr. Adams began to highlight the unit’s excessive use of stop-and-frisk, a crime-control tactic that a federal judge would find had devolved into racial profiling.Mr. Adams conceived of a plan to use Yvette Walton, a Black officer who had served in the unit, to make the case. Soon after the shooting, Mr. Adams appeared at a news conference with Ms. Walton, who was disguised because she was not allowed to speak publicly about police issues.He also appeared with Ms. Walton, again in disguise, at a City Council hearing. Within an hour of the hearing, Ms. Walton was identified and fired, supposedly for abusing the department’s sick leave policies.‘Just fighting’In 1999, Mr. Adams, second from right, appeared with a disguised officer from the Street Crimes Unit, helping to shed a light on the department’s racially biased stop-and-frisk tactics. Librado Romero/The New York TimesThe disguising of Ms. Walton was only one of Mr. Adams’s media-enticing innovations. Another was a report card that graded the department on issues of racial equality.Paul Browne, the spokesman for Ray Kelly, the police commissioner at the time, said Mr. Adams approached him around 2002 to let him know that Mr. Kelly’s administration could get high marks if it promoted candidates that Mr. Adams recommended.“If we played ball with his requests, the report cards would reflect it,” Mr. Browne said. But the department’s leaders remained overwhelmingly white, and the report card grades were poor.The perception among higher-ups that Mr. Adams’s tactics were more self-serving than authentic began early on. Mr. Chapman, the former chief of patrol, said that he asked Mr. Adams in 1993 whether the Guardians would participate in a minority recruitment drive. Mr. Chapman said Mr. Adams declined.“It’s easy to be angry,” Mr. Chapman said. “But anger doesn’t translate into constructive change, and that’s what I was looking for.”Mr. Adams said in the interview with The Times that the criticisms from Mr. Browne and Mr. Chapman were “not rooted in facts.” He said that his groups were major recruiters of Black officers, and that it would be silly to attack one’s superiors for personal gain.“Who in their right mind for self-promotion would go into an agency where people carry guns, determine your salary, your livelihood, and just critique them?” Mr. Adams said. “Unless you really believe in what you are doing.”As he skewered the Police Department, Mr. Adams was also investigated four times by it.Investigators examined his relationships with the boxer Mike Tyson, who was convicted of rape in 1992, and Omowale Clay, a Black activist who had been convicted of federal firearms violations. Police officers are forbidden from knowingly associating with people involved in crime.The department also investigated a Black police officer’s report that Mr. Adams and others in 100 Blacks had harassed him. Investigators could not prove Mr. Adams violated department rules.Mr. Adams and the group sued the department, accusing it of violating their civil rights by using wiretaps during the Clay and the harassment investigations. The suit was dismissed by a judge who called the wiretapping accusations “baseless.” (The department had obtained telephone records.)“You do an analysis of my Internal Affairs Bureau investigations, you’ll see they all come out with the same thing,” Mr. Adams said. “Eric did nothing wrong.”In October 2005, Mr. Adams gave a television interview in which he accused the department of timing an announcement about a terrorist threat to give Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg an excuse to skip an election debate. Speaking to The Times, Mr. Adams said the department had not deployed officers to deal with the threat as officials claimed.He was brought up on disciplinary charges, and a Police Department tribunal found him guilty of speaking for the department without authorization. Mr. Kelly docked Mr. Adams 15 days of vacation pay. Mr. Adams retired, ran for State Senate and won.“When I put in to retire, they all of a sudden served me with department charges,” Mr. Adams said in his oral history interview. “It was a good way to leave the department. Leaving it the way I came in: Just fighting.”J. David Goodman More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Why These 2 N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Are on a Collision Course

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }N.Y.C. Mayoral RaceWho’s Running?11 Candidates’ N.Y.C. MomentsAn Overview of the Race5 TakeawaysAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy These 2 N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Are on a Collision CourseEric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Ray McGuire, a former Citi executive, have become fast rivals in the New York City mayoral race.Ever since Ray McGuire, right, entered New York’s mayoral race, he has vied with Eric Adams, left, to capture Black political influencers and voters.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesMarch 2, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETJust a few days after Raymond J. McGuire officially joined the New York City mayor’s race in December, a courtesy call came in from one of his Democratic rivals, Eric Adams.Mr. Adams, who, like Mr. McGuire, is Black, offered some provocative words of wisdom.“Being in politics is just like being in a prison yard,” Mr. Adams said, according to several people familiar with the video call. “You need to put a wall around your family because you might get shanked.”Mr. Adams’s campaign described the sentiment as “friendly advice.” Several people in Mr. McGuire’s campaign saw it differently, characterizing it as a “veiled threat” from a front-runner trying to intimidate a new challenger.For two years, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, had been regarded as one of the favorites in the 2021 mayor’s race.He was a former police officer who had nuanced views of how social justice demands could coexist with policing needs. He had broad support in Brooklyn, and had raised more than $8 million to fuel his campaign — more than anyone else in the field.In a field of progressive rivals, he had appeared to be the leading Black moderate, representing a key city constituency. But now his stature in the race is suddenly being challenged.Mr. McGuire, a former global head of corporate and investment banking at Citi, quickly began making inroads among political power brokers in the Black community. He hired Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the State Democratic Party, to be his campaign manager; other Black political operatives who have strong connections to Representative Gregory W. Meeks, chairman of the Queens Democratic Party, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, also signed on.The filmmaker Spike Lee, whose brand is the borough of Brooklyn, narrated Mr. McGuire’s campaign announcement. Mr. McGuire raised $5 million in just three months, and landed the endorsement of Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man whose death in 2014 after being placed in a police chokehold became a flash point for the Black Lives Matter movement.“Eric came into this race believing that he would run a race of inevitability, not just as the borough president of Brooklyn, but the senior Black candidate in the race,” Mr. Smikle said. “Now, that’s not the case.”Mr. McGuire, talking with Councilman Rafael Salamanca in the Bronx, has raised $5 million in three months.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesMr. McGuire and Mr. Adams have quickly become rivals, and their interactions as well as several interviews with people familiar with their relationship reveal a complicated story born at the intersection of race and class.It’s a natural rivalry between two successful Black men from humble beginnings who took different paths — Mr. McGuire through the Ivy League and the upper echelons of Wall Street, Mr. Adams through night school and the upper ranks of the New York Police Department — to become candidates for mayor.For Mr. Adams, the comparison is slightly irksome, adding to a perception that he might lack the polish to lead the city. He does not have the white-shoe law firm experience of Mr. Jeffries, the power broker and No. 5 House Democrat who The Washington Post once suggested was “Brooklyn’s Barack Obama,” or Mr. McGuire’s experience managing multibillion-dollar transactions.“Coming where I come from, I think people didn’t think I’d put it together, but now I have more money to spend on a campaign than any Black person running for office in New York City’s history,” Mr. Adams said.Four Black and Afro-Latino candidates sit among the Democratic mayoral primary’s top echelon, the most in recent memory. All talk extensively about how being Black and brown in America has affected their lives and will affect how they govern.Initial polls suggest that Mr. Adams is running second to Andrew Yang, the former 2020 presidential candidate; Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer who served as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s legal counsel, is roughly in fourth place; Mr. McGuire trails behind, along with Dianne Morales, an Afro-Latina who led a nonprofit in the Bronx dedicated to eradicating poverty.Ms. Wiley and Ms. Morales are also further behind in fund-raising; neither has yet qualified for the city’s generous matching-funds program. But while the two are competing for the progressive vote, they have largely stayed out of each other’s way, even naming the other as their second choice for mayor.Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire, on the other hand, seem destined for a collision course.“I can’t remember a time where you had this many strong African-American candidates, because what normally occurs is one will emerge out of a group of several with everybody else standing down,” said Mr. Jeffries, who has not decided if he will endorse anyone in the race. “There’s no expectation that will happen in this particular instance.”Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, described the prison yard remarks during the video call as “nothing more than friendly advice about the intense world of city politics.”“To infer otherwise,” he continued, “is an example of the kind of bias that Eric has been fighting his entire life.”But Mr. Adams’s video call in December was not the only time he had directed criticism at Mr. McGuire. At a forum in January, Mr. Adams said that he “didn’t go to the Hamptons” when the pandemic struck New York City — an apparent jab at Mr. McGuire, who said he had spent a total of three weeks in the Hamptons with his family last summer.The remarks were similar to ones Mr. Adams made at a virtual meeting with the Fred Wilson Democratic Club in Queens in December, when he said that he didn’t attend Harvard and didn’t need to introduce himself to voters.Mr. McGuire, who left his job at Citigroupto run for mayor, has also sought to draw a contrast with his rivals, often saying that he has not been “termed out” and isn’t “looking for a promotion” — a likely reference to Mr. Adams and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, who are both barred by city law from running for third consecutive terms.As moderate Democrats, Mr. Adams and McGuire share several policy positions. Both are in favor of revamping Police Department protocols, but have not called for defunding the police. Mr. Adams was originally in favor of a plan from Mr. de Blasio to scrap the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, but changed his position and now believes — as Mr. McGuire does — that the test should not be the only criteria for admission.One area where they differ is on taxing the wealthy. Mr. Adams wants to increase taxes on those who earn more than $5 million per year for two years, and use the money to help the city recover from the pandemic. Mr. McGuire, who has business community support, has said that wealthy New Yorkers such as himself should pay their fair share but also believes that the city has to grow itself out of its financial deficit.Mr. Adams has tried to accentuate his working-class background, telling voters that he washed dishes before becoming a police officer.Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe Black electorate in New York City is diverse, made up of Caribbean-Americans and African-Americans; of native New Yorkers, immigrants and transplants from other states. In the 2013 mayoral race, Mr. de Blasio won partly because of his enormous popularity among Black voters: Ninety-six percent of Black New Yorkers voted for him, according to exit polls, a higher percentage than David N. Dinkins captured in 1989 when he was elected as the city’s first Black mayor.In the 2013 Democratic primary, Mr. de Blasio garnered 18,000 more votes in predominantly African-American neighborhoods than a Black rival, the former city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., largely based on how they proposed handling the policing tactic of stop and frisk.Given the financial difficulty wrought by the pandemic, Mr. McGuire’s financial pedigree may help with voters in places like central Brooklyn and southeast Queens, said Anthony D. Andrews Jr., the leader of the Fred Wilson Democratic Club in Southeast Queens. He said that residents there are concerned about the city’s unequal property tax system and whether government jobs will be eliminated.“Some people will say the complexity of the city requires someone with a certain kind of education to be able to manage a $100 billion enterprise,” said Marc H. Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans and current president of the National Urban League, who knows both men. “But there may be other people who say, ‘Is that guy in touch with me? Does he know my pain?’”Mr. McGuire, who was urged by business leaders to run for mayor, has tried to accentuate his rise from a modest upbringing in his stump speeches. He was so poor growing up, he has said, that he washed and reused aluminum foil, and pressed scraps of soap together until they formed a bar.Having never met his father, Mr. McGuire was raised by his mother and his grandparents in a house full of foster siblings on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Dayton, Ohio. He found his way to a prestigious private school, went on to earn three degrees at Harvard, and became one of the highest-ranking Black executives on Wall Street, a mentor to young people of color and a behind-the-scenes patron of Black causes.“A Black man who grew up the way I grew up, I know exactly what they are going through,” Mr. McGuire said. “I know about the struggle.”Mr. Adams has touched on similar hardships of his youth, recalling at mayoral forums that neighbors used to leave food and clothes outside his family’s home. He said he first took an interest in becoming an officer after he was beaten by the police as a teenager.Mr. Adams worked his way up the ranks of the Police Department and founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group to confront institutional racism in the profession. He attended night school to attain a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and has taken to saying that he will be a “blue-collar” mayor.“I’m not fancy,” Mr. Adams said at a recent Queens County Democratic Party forum. “I was a dishwasher. I worked in a mailroom.”“Acknowledging the problems Black people face,” Mr. Adams said, “is different from understanding the problems.”Mr. Adams was recently endorsed by four wrongfully convicted men, dozens of ministers and leaders from the city’s African community. Four Black City Council members, including I. Daneek Miller, co-chairman of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, have also endorsed Mr. Adams.Of Mr. Adams’s supporters on the Council, another caucus member, Laurie A. Cumbo, the majority leader, has been among the most forceful in her criticism of Mr. McGuire.At a mayoral forum, Ms. Cumbo, who represents a Brooklyn district, questioned whether Mr. McGuire had made a “visible commitment to the community” before deciding to run for mayor. She criticized his charitable work in the art world as too “highbrow,” and said that he should make sure that his campaign was “more in alignment with the people.”Not long after, Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire appeared at a Martin Luther King’s Birthday celebration in Harlem. Hoping to keep the peace, Mr. Adams pulled Mr. McGuire aside and told him that Ms. Cumbo’s comments were not coordinated with his campaign.Ms. Cumbo was not interested in peacemaking.“Ray McGuire is running a ‘Hello, my name is Ray McGuire’ kind of campaign,” she said. “Eric is running a ‘Hey sis, I just saw your mom yesterday getting the vaccine’ kind of campaign.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More