George Floyd Protests (2020)

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      When the ‘Silent Majority’ Isn’t White

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      In her 1990 book “Fear of Falling,” Barbara Ehrenreich detailed how the widely broadcast violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to an immediate, dramatic paradigm shift in media coverage. In the month before the event, Mayor Richard Daley had denounced the various anti-Vietnam War protest groups who were planning to converge outside the city’s International Amphitheater. When those protesters arrived, Daley fought back with his police force who, on Aug. 28, attacked protesters in Grant Park.In scenes that would be echoed a half-century later during the George Floyd protests, the police beat, detained and intimidated everyone from the Yippies to the Young Lords to Dan Rather. In both 1968 and 2020, the press heightened its critique against the police and the mayor once they saw their own being attacked in the streets.Then came the reckoning. Ehrenreich writes:Polls taken immediately after the convention showed that the majority of Americans — 56 percent — sympathized with the police, not with the bloodied demonstrators or the press. Indeed, what one could see of the action on television did not resemble dignified protest but the anarchic breakdown of a great city (if only because, once the police began to rampage, dignity was out of the question). Overnight the press abandoned its protest. The collapse was abrupt and craven. As bumper stickers began to appear saying “We support Mayor Daley and his Chicago police,” the national media awoke to the disturbing possibility that they had grown estranged from a sizable segment of the public.Media leaders moved quickly to correct what they now came to see as their “bias.” They now felt they had been too sympathetic to militant minorities (a judgment the minorities might well have contested). Henceforth they would focus on the enigmatic — and in Richard Nixon’s famous phrase — silent majority.The following months would provide even more evidence that the media had misjudged the moment. A New York Times poll conducted a day after showed an “overwhelming” majority supported the police in Chicago. CBS reported that 10 times as many people had written to them disapproving of their coverage of the events as had written in approval.In response, the media class spent the next few years, in Ehrenreich’s words, examining “fearfully and almost reverently, that curious segment of America: the majority.” The problem, of course, was that the same people who had just believed the world ended at the Hudson were the same people who now would be tasked with discovering everything beyond its banks. As a result, the media’s coverage of “the silent majority” was abstract and almost mythic, which allowed it to be shaped into whatever was most convenient.There are a couple of obvious questions here: A year after the nationwide George Floyd protests, has mass media, which I’ll define here as the major news outlets and TV networks, undergone a similar paradigm shift? And if there is a new “silent majority” whose voices must be heard, who, exactly, is it?Are we seeing a media backlash to the summer of 2020?A quick caveat before we go much further into this: I am generally skeptical of the types of historical matching games that have become popular these days, especially on social media, where false symmetries can be expressed through heavily excerpted screenshots or video. Just because something looks vaguely like something that happened in the past doesn’t mean that the two events are actually analogous. More important, I do not see the need to take every current injustice by the hand and shop it around to a line of older suitors — if nothing else, the act of constant comparison can take away from the immediacy of today’s problem.But regardless of whether the comparison between 1968 and 2020 is apt, plenty of people made it. Most notably, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who, after what was seen as a disappointing result in a handful of House races, compared the slogan “defund the police” to “burn, baby, burn” from the 1965 Watts riots and said such talk was “cutting the throats of the party.” Omar Wasow’s work on voting patterns during the civil rights movement and how the public and media responded to different images of violence also became a central part of opinion discourse.As was true in 1968, we’ve also seen a shift in public opinion polls, perhaps confirming Wasow’s claim that while images of law enforcement committing violence against protesters will generate a significant upsurge in sympathy, images of looting and rioting will have the opposite effect. A Washington Post-Shar School poll conducted in early June of 2020 found that 74 percent of respondents supported the protests, including 53 percent of Republicans­­ — stunning results that suggested a radical shift in public opinion had taken place — and the media followed suit with an enormous amount of coverage.Writing in The Washington Post, Michael Heaney, a University of Glasgow lecturer, wrote, “Not since the Kent State killings, in which National Guard troops shot and killed four student protesters in May 1970, has there been so much media attention to protest.” Heaney also pointed out that the coverage had been “generally favorable.” But as of this summer, polling of white Americans on support for Black Lives Matter and policing reform had reverted to pre-2020 levels. Has media coverage followed suit?We might look at coverage of the recent New York City mayoral race as a kind of case study. The campaign of Eric Adams, a former N.Y.P.D. officer who largely positioned himself against his more progressive opponents on public safety and school issues, was cast as a referendum on last summer. The media attributed Adams’s victory in the Democratic primary almost entirely to his pro-police platform. In June, a Reuters headline read, “Defying ‘Defund Police’ Calls, Democrat Adams Leads NYC Mayor’s Race.” In July, The Associated Press wrote that Adams’s win was part of a “surge for moderate Democrats” and said the centerpiece of his campaign was a rejection of activists’ calls to defund the police.This echoed the coverage of Clyburn’s declarations after the election and fell in with a spate of media coverage about the shift in opinions on policing. So, some regression of media sympathy toward the summer of 2020 does seem underway — although we shouldn’t believe the media underwent some fundamental change during the summer of 2020, or, for that matter, in the months leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Those moments should be seen, instead, as flare-ups that subsequently shamed the media into seeking out “the real America” or whatever.Who is the silent majority in 2021?In 1968, the turn in opinion came mostly at the expense of Black radicals and young protesters in favor of what was largely then assumed to be white working-class voters.Today’s silent majority certainly does include white voters, but this time, recent coverage suggests that the media is reproaching itself for a somewhat different failing: neglecting the perspective of more-moderate voters of color.The post-mortem of the 2020 election — in which more immigrants than anticipated, whether Latinos in Florida and Texas or Asian Americans in California, voted for Donald Trump — coincided with the need to make some sense of what had happened to public opinion after last summer. Connections were made. By the time Adams gave his victory speech, a narrative about the diverse silent majority had taken hold: People of color supported the police, hated rioting and wanted more funding for law enforcement. They did not agree with the radical demands of the Floyd protests — in fact, such talk turned them off.There’s a lot of truth to the concerns about how much the mass media actually knows about minority voters. When the Latino vote swings from Texas and Florida came to light on election night, Chuck Rocha, a political strategist who specializes in Latino engagement, went on a media tour and placed the blame on “woke white consultants” who believed that a broad message of antiracism would work for “people of color.” As I wrote in a guest essay, a similar pattern held in Asian American communities — it turns out that Vietnamese refugees who reside in Orange County, Calif., might have different opinions on Black Lives Matter, capitalism or abortion rights than, say, second-generation Indian Americans at elite universities.These mistakes came from a grouping error: Liberal white Americans in power, including members of the media, tended to think of immigrants as huddled masses who all shook under the xenophobic rhetoric of the Republican Party and prayed for any deliverance from Donald Trump. They did not see them as distinct populations who have their own set of political priorities, mostly because they took their votes for granted.So, if the media is actually overlooking an entire population and sometimes misrepresenting them, what’s the big deal if it’s now correcting for this?A few things can be true at once: Yes, the media overwhelmingly misconstrued the actual beliefs of minority voters, particularly in Latino and Asian American communities. Yes, those voters tend to have more moderate view on policing.The problem isn’t one of description, but rather of translation. The media took a normal regression in polling numbers, mixed it with some common sense about how minority populations actually vote and created a new, diverse “silent majority.” This is a powerful tool. These unheard, moderate minorities carry an almost unassailable authority in liberal politics because of the very simple fact that liberals tend to frame their policies in terms of race. If those same objects of your concern turn around and tell you to please stop what you’re doing, what you’ve created is perhaps the most powerful rebuttal in liberal politics. Over the next few years, I imagine we will see an increasing number of moderate politicians and pundits hitch their own hobbyhorses to this diverse silent majority. The nice thing about a vaguely defined, still mysterious group is that you can turn it into anything you want it to be.Some version of this opinion engineering, I believe, is happening with the police and public safety. There’s not a lot of evidence that Latino and Asian voters care all that much either way about systemic racism or funding or defunding the police. (Black voters, on the other hand, listed racism and policing as their top two priorities leading up to the 2020 election.) Polls of Asian American voters, for example, show that they prioritize health care, education and the economy. Latino voters listed the economy, health care and the pandemic as their top three priorities. (“Violent crime” ranked about as high as Supreme Court appointments.) If asked, a large number of people in both of these groups might respond that they support the police, but that’s very different from saying they base their political identity on the rejection of, say, police abolition. If they’re purposefully voting against the left wing of the Democratic Party, it’s more likely they are responding to economic or education policy rather than policing.And so it may be correct to say that within the new, diverse “silent majority,” attitudes about the police and protest might be much less uniform than what many in the mass media led you to believe in the summer of 2020. It may also be worth pointing out that reporters, pundits and television networks should probably adjust their coverage to accurately assess these dynamics, just as I’m sure there were legitimate concerns with media bubbles in 1968. But it also seems worth separating that assessment from the conclusion that the media should now see the summer of 2020 as political kryptonite and cast the millions of people who protested in the streets as confused revolutionaries who had no real support.After 1968, the mass media’s turn away from the counterculture of the ’60s and its indifference to the dismantling of Black radical groups narrowed the scope of political action. This constriction would be aided over the next decade by lurid, violent events that all got thrown at the feet of anyone who looked like a radical. When Joan Didion wrote of the Manson murders, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled,” she was saying that all the fears of the so-called silent majority had come to pass.We are living through some version of that today. But what seems particularly telling about this moment is that the retreat no longer requires Charles Manson, the fearmongering over Watts or the police riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Those images hover above the public’s consciousness as evergreen cautionary tales; the paranoia they fulfilled will do just fine.The question at the outset of this post, then, has a split answer: Yes, we seem to be reliving a moment of media revanchism in the name of the (diverse) silent majority, but it is also a replay of a replay, akin to filming a television screen with your phone’s camera, with all of its inherent losses in resolution, clarity and immediacy.What I’m Reading and Watching“Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” by Rivka GalchenA beautifully written, hilarious novel set during a witch hunt in 17th-century Germany. The sentences, as in all of Galchen’s work, go beyond the sometimes dull, narcissistic boundaries of modern fiction and still manage to feel extremely relevant.“Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism” by Thomas BrothersThe second of Brothers’s big books on Louis Armstrong and the early years of jazz. Like the first book, “Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans,” this isn’t so much a blow-by-blow retelling of Armstrong’s life, but an ethnography of how his music came to be.Have feedback? Send a note to kang-newsletter@nytimes.com.Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang) writes for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Loneliest Americans.” More

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      Conservative Group, Seizing on Crime as an Issue, Seeks Recall of Prosecutors

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      A group backed by undisclosed donors is targeting three Democratic prosecutors in Northern Virginia for recall campaigns in a test of what could be a national strategy in 2022.WASHINGTON — A Republican-linked group said on Monday that it was beginning a recall campaign backed by undisclosed donors to brand Democrats and their allies as soft on crime by targeting progressive prosecutors.The initial focus is three prosecutors who were elected in the affluent Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington in 2019 amid a national wave of pledges by Democrats to make law enforcement fairer and more humane.The group, Virginians for Safe Communities, said the targets of the recall effort were Buta Biberaj of Loudoun County, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti of Arlington County and Steve Descano of Fairfax County, all of whom hold the position of commonwealth’s attorney.The campaign faces uncertain prospects, starting with clearing signature-gathering requirements and legal hurdles.But the organizers described it as part of a broader national push to harness voters’ concerns about rising crime rates in cities and a backlash to anti-police sentiment.“All things in politics have their time, and now is the moment that people who are for law enforcement have woken up,” said Sean D. Kennedy, a Republican operative who is the president of Virginians for Safe Communities. He called the recall efforts in Northern Virginia a “test case to launch nationwide.”He said the group had raised more than $250,000, and had received pledges of nearly another $500,000. He would not reveal the identities of donors to the group, which is registered under a section of the tax code that allows nonprofit groups to shield their donors from public disclosure.Mr. Kennedy, who has worked for Republican campaigns and committees, is an official at the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, but he said the new group was independent from that one. Others involved in the new group include the former F.B.I. official Steven L. Pomerantz and Ian D. Prior, who was an appointee at the Justice Department during the Trump administration and before that worked for well-funded Republican political committees.Mr. Kennedy cast Virginians for Safe Communities as something of an antidote to a political committee funded by the billionaire investor George Soros, a leading donor to Democratic causes. His group, Justice and Public Safety PAC, has spent millions of dollars in recent years backing candidates in local district attorney elections who supported decriminalizing marijuana, loosening bail rules and other changes favored by progressives.The spending upended many of the races, which had previously attracted relatively little funding and attention from major national interests.Mr. Soros’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment.His PAC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each supporting the campaigns of Ms. Dehghani-Tafti, Mr. Descano and Ms. Biberaj in 2019, when they swept into office promising a new approach to criminal justice.Their victories came at a time when politicians from both parties were re-examining tough-on-crime policies that enacted harsh sentences for drug crimes and laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black communities. In late 2018, President Donald J. Trump signed into law the most consequential reduction of sentencing laws in a generation. The next month, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then preparing to run against Mr. Trump, apologized for portions of the anti-crime legislation he championed as a senator in the 1990s.The skepticism of law enforcement and the criminal justice system was further catalyzed by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, after which calls to “defund” law enforcement echoed from racial justice marches to the halls of Congress. Many Democrats, including President Biden, have rejected the “defund the police” movement.But, a year and a half after Mr. Floyd’s death, American cities are facing a surge in gun violence and homicides that began during the throes of the pandemic and has continued into this year.Republicans have sought to pin the blame on Democrats and their allies, and have tried to reclaim the law-and-order mantle that politicians of both parties had embraced in the 1980s and 1990s, but later downplayed amid concern about police misconduct and disparities in the criminal justice system.Conservatives “have basically sat on the sidelines of this issue,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It has been dominated by one side, and our side had basically unilaterally disarmed.”He accused the three Northern Virginia prosecutors of enacting “dangerous policies” that are “undermining the public’s faith in our justice system.” He cited an increase in the homicide rate between the end of last month and the same time last year in Fairfax County.Ms. Dehghani-Tafti, the head prosecutor for Arlington County and the City of Falls Church, said in an email that she was “doing exactly what I promised my community I would do — what I was elected to do — and doing it well: making the system more fair, more responsive and more rehabilitative, while keeping us safe.”Some of the more progressive planks in her campaign platform and those of Ms. Biberaj and Mr. Descano — ending prosecutions for marijuana possession and not seeking the death penalty — were at least partially codified statewide this year. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia signed legislation abolishing the death penalty and legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana.Ms. Dehghani-Tafti accused Mr. Kennedy’s group of using undisclosed “dark money” and “relying on misinformation” to “overturn a valid election through a nondemocratic recall.”Recalls are rare in Virginia, requiring the collection of signatures from a group of voters equal to 10 percent of the number who voted in the last election for the office in question, followed by a court trial in which it must be proved that the official acted in a way that constitutes incompetence, negligence or abuse of office. In the case of the prosecutors, the signature requirement would range from about 5,500 in Arlington to 29,000 in Fairfax.Mr. Kennedy said his group intended to pay people to gather signatures starting as soon as this week, with the goal of reaching the thresholds by Labor Day.Recent efforts to defeat or recall progressive prosecutors have so far not been successful in other jurisdictions, including Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and a pending grass-roots effort to recall the three Virginia prosecutors has not gained much apparent traction. More

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      Eric Adams, Maya Wiley and Two Approaches to Policing N.Y.C.

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      An urgent debate is playing out right now in the Democratic Party about policing as cities see sharp rises in violent crime. The fight to control that disorder is also a battle for the direction of the party — do police departments need more resources to fight crime? Do they need to be restrained, given a long record of abuses and controversial policies like stop-and-frisk? How do the police earn more trust from Black and brown residents? Which tactics are right, and which tactics violate our rights?Nowhere are these questions more fully joined than in New York City, where two leading Democratic candidates for mayor, Eric Adams and Maya Wiley, have had a running war of words over race, policing and civil rights. Their clashes reflect an important debate within Black communities that stretches back decades. And if Mr. Adams or Ms. Wiley wins in Tuesday’s primary, he or she would become a national voice on crime; their arguments are revealing about the trade-offs facing Democrats and the urban voters who help make up the party’s base.“Eric thinks the solution to every problem is a badge and a gun,” Ms. Wiley said this month. “Sometimes armed police are the solution, but some problems we actually make worse when we bring in a cop who isn’t trained for the situation rather than a mental health specialist who can actually keep everyone safe.”For his part, Mr. Adams has slammed Ms. Wiley repeatedly, saying she wants “to slash the police department budget and shrink the police force at a time when Black and brown babies are being shot in our streets, hate crimes are terrorizing Asian and Jewish communities, and innocent New Yorkers are being stabbed and shot on their way to work.”The debate reflects a cruel, decades-old dilemma: Black neighborhoods are often over-policed and under-policed at the same time. The Kerner Commission study of inner-city riots in 1960s found a widespread belief in Black communities that “the police maintain a much less rigorous standard of law enforcement in the ghetto, tolerating illegal activities like drug addiction, prostitution, and street violence that they would not tolerate elsewhere.”When aggressive profiling and brutal use of force exist side-by-side with a lenient acceptance of low-level criminal behavior, a toxic downward spiral follows, as criminologist David Kennedy has noted: “Being overpoliced for the small stuff, and underpoliced for the important stuff, alienates the community, undercuts cooperation and fuels private violence: which itself often then drives even more intrusive policing, more alienation, lower clearance rates and still more violence.”Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley are proposing two distinct paths.Mr. Adams, a 22-year veteran of the N.Y.P.D., has a public safety plan centered on hiring, training and deploying police differently. He wants to create a new version of the department’s plainclothes unit to target illegal guns, surge officers into high-crime neighborhoods, and reassign 500 cops who currently do work that could be handled by civilians.He also has laid out a process where community boards and precinct councils can help select local precinct commanders, and has vowed to create a more diverse police force, including by naming the first woman police commissioner.Officers stopping a driver at gunpoint in New York City.Wong Maye-E/Associated PressMs. Wiley, a former chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, has been vocally critical of the N.Y.P.D., most notably in a hard-hitting television ad that starts with jarring images of police officers clashing with protesters following the death of George Floyd, after which Ms. Wiley says: “It was an injustice to those of us who know Black lives matter. … As a mom and civil rights lawyer, I’ve had enough.”Her plan calls for “a radical reimagining of policing” that includes freezing incoming classes of cadets for two years, thereby reducing the N.Y.P.D. head count by 2,500 officers; creating a civilian commission to oversee the N.Y.P.D.; overhauling the Patrol Guide and removing cops from mental health crisis cases, traffic enforcement and school safety.All of these ideas should receive scrutiny and debate, because if one of these candidates wins, the N.Y.P.D. could become a laboratory of sorts for policing reforms and practices. Unfortunately, Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley have tended to caricature each other’s positions, and some interesting nuances about their careers have been lost in the sniping.While Mr. Adams did, indeed, spend two decades in the N.Y.P.D., he joined at the specific urging of the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a fiery activist who helped lead demonstrations against the department and recruited Mr. Adams and others to become police officers with the specific mission of making change from the inside.And Ms. Wiley’s career includes a three-year hiatus from civil rights work to work in the U.S. attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and a couple more years as a top adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio. She later became the head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and has drawn criticism from some activists who think she didn’t do enough to reform the N.Y.P.D. from her powerful perch.New York City police officers clearing a subway train of passengers at the Coney Island station in Brooklyn last year.Corey Sipkin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIdeally, the next mayor will blend both of their approaches. A Mayor Adams would have to take seriously the public’s demand to fundamentally change the mission and mind-set of the N.Y.P.D. in ways that go beyond bureaucratic tinkering. A Mayor Wiley would quickly discover that a much wider range of tasks than she imagined requires the use of force and must be entrusted to the cops we have, not the cops we wish we had.Police officers, especially Black ones, are constantly navigating the tension between keeping neighborhoods safe and remaining true to deeply held community values of the need to fight for racial justice. My late father, Edward Louis, a 31-year veteran of the N.Y.P.D. who retired as an inspector, often spoke with pride about traveling with a contingent of Black cops to the 1963 March on Washington as volunteer marshals helping with crowd control. My father loved the sounds, sights and people of his native Harlem, where he grew up and spent most of his career — but he also understood the need to do battle, including physically, against the gun-toting drug pushers, armed robbers and pimps who had disrupted, degraded and destroyed countless lives in his beloved neighborhood.Many years later, I find it heartbreaking and infuriating to read about killings and shootings going on in the same streets and public housing developments my father patrolled — and equally disheartening to read about abuses of police power that erode trust in the ability of the N.Y.P.D. to help keep communities safe.We arrive at this crossroads for public safety at a peak moment of Black political power in New York. Black leaders currently lead four of the five Democratic county organizations in the city (Staten Island is the exception), and the State Legislature is run by the Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, and the Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who both command supermajorities. And the seven Black members of the New York congressional delegation are the largest number of Black politicians ever sent to Congress from any single state in American history.In the past, Black leadership has periodically embraced harsh law enforcement tactics and tough-on-crime messaging. The controversial 1994 federal crime bill was passed with support from desperate Black officials in communities devastated by drug addiction and violent street crime. After other moments, like last year’s wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, more than 100 laws reforming bail, incarceration and police accountability were passed all over the country.It now falls to Black Democrats to show up and vote in big numbers in this primary election to resolve a debate where they have the most at stake, and offer judgments on two candidates who understand the issue and whose decisions as mayor would resonate beyond the five boroughs.Will we see a major investment of public dollars moved from the N.Y.P.D. into social services, as Ms. Wiley wants, believing that more community initiatives like youth programs and mental health services will translate into less crime? Or will we start with an Adams-style crackdown on guns and gun violence as a first step toward restoring safety and order in Black and brown neighborhoods? Or might we end up with some combination of both approaches?The 2021 election for mayor will be a moment that we’ll look back on — in satisfaction or in horror — at how New York chose to handle the twin challenges of public safety and civil rights. More so than in most elections, Black Votes Matter.Errol Louis is a longtime New York City journalist and the political anchor of NY1, where he hosts the weeknight show “Inside City Hall.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Eric Adams Is Awful. I’m Putting Him on My Ballot.

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      A primary aim of American progressive politics is assembling multiracial working-class coalitions. One candidate in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary appears to be doing that. He is, unfortunately for the left, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, an ex-cop and former Republican who defends the use of stop-and-frisk, supports charter schools and is endorsed by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. More

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      Dianne Morales Faced a Campaign Uprising. Will It Matter to Voters?

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      Dianne Morales Faced a Campaign Uprising. Will It Matter to Voters?Ms. Morales is running for New York City mayor on a platform of tackling inequality and shifting resources away from policing. But her campaign has been marred by defections and dysfunction.Dianne Morales campaigned last month at a barber shop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She is running on a leftist platform and advocates cutting $3 billion from the N.Y.P.D.’s budget.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe New York City mayoral race is one of the most consequential political contests in a generation, with immense challenges awaiting the winner. This is the eighth in a series of profiles of the major candidates.June 9, 2021Dianne Morales arrived at a racial justice protest in April, as she had done many times before. This one, however, was different: she was still a Black woman, a mother, an activist — but now, she had become well-known as a mayoral candidate, too.She was a familiar sight at the Barclays Center, hugging friends and greeting supporters, while a handful of aides flanked her. One speaker warned that the protest was not a “campaign stop.” So Ms. Morales asked a campaign staffer, outfitted in a loud purple T-shirt emblazoned with “DIANNE MORALES FOR N.Y.C. MAYOR,” to turn the shirt inside out.“I don’t want this to be political — this isn’t just a moment for us,” she said that evening.From the beginning of her campaign for mayor, Ms. Morales set out to establish herself as the activist-candidate-next-door, the person riding the bus instead of advertising on the side of it. Her long-shot candidacy sought to tap into the zeitgeist of last summer, when the pandemic and protests against police brutality shined a light on New York’s stark racial and economic inequities.Ms. Morales’s values attracted left-leaning voters to her campaign, but she is struggling to explain why her own staff has abandoned her weeks before the June 22 primary.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesBut in recent weeks, Ms. Morales’s campaign has been stalled by its own dysfunction. Two high-level staffers resigned following staff misconduct, six more were terminated and most remaining staff members, who have formed a union, are on strike. At least four political groups, including the Working Families Party, have rescinded their endorsements, donations slowed to a crawl and her senior adviser has joined a rival campaign.Over the weekend, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, Ms. Morales’s ideologically closest opponent. The endorsement was the most significant sign that progressive leaders see Ms. Wiley as their last, best hope to prevent a more centrist candidate from becoming mayor.Ms. Morales, who staked a claim to the “inherently radical” nature of her campaign, is now struggling to explain why her own staff has abandoned her weeks before the June 22 primary and why one of the most prominent left-wing leaders in the country is not supporting her.Still, she is marching on, holding campaign events and filming an ad in the wake of the walkout. She addressed the accusations last week during a mayoral debate, highlighting her decades of experience as a manager of the operations and staffs of large nonprofits and stressing that she had acted quickly to address personnel concerns.“We responded, we addressed it and we are moving on, moving forward on this campaign, and I’m looking forward to that,” she said.Nia Evans, Ms. Morales’s deputy campaign manager, spoke at a rally in favor of the campaign staff’s new union late last month.Anna Watts for The New York TimesHer career path, largely in education and nonprofits, stands out in a field of lawyers, politicians and businessmen. Her background — working class, Afro-Latina, first-generation college graduate — has helped her appeal to traditionally underrepresented groups. And her campaign, with the most left-leaning platform in the race, has drawn in supporters who believed she would eschew politics as usual.‘She may compromise, but she doesn’t lose’A native of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Ms. Morales, 53, was raised by Puerto Rico-born parents. Her mother worked as an office manager for a union, and her father as a building manager. Finances were so tight that Ms. Morales shared a bed with her grandmother until she left for college.She attended Stuyvesant High School, where one of her teachers was the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt, and Dartmouth College. Ms. Morales has said that she was sexually assaulted during her first week on campus, and she left Dartmouth at the end of her freshman year, eventually graduating from Stony Brook University, on Long Island. After college, she worked as a waitress and a special-education teacher; she later received master’s degrees, in social administration and education administration, from Columbia and Harvard.Ms. Morales then spent two years at the city’s Department of Education, under Michael Bloomberg, as chief of operations and implementation in the Office of Youth Development. She held leadership positions at various nonprofits like The Door, a youth development organization, and Phipps Neighborhoods, the social services arm of Phipps Houses, a housing development group, where she served as chief executive for a decade before filing to run for mayor.She raised her two children in Brooklyn; both graduated from public schools. Ms. Morales has been transparent about struggles her family has faced: her son, 22, was punched by a police officer at a protest, her daughter, 20, was sexually assaulted, and Ms. Morales had to sue the D.O.E. for what she said was a lack of services provided for her daughter’s learning disability. The city provided the services Ms. Morales requested after six years. In the interim, she placed her daughter in a private school.Ms. Morales officially kicked off her campaign last November, after months of heavy involvement in a mutual aid group in Bedford-Stuyvestant, Brooklyn.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“There’s a fierceness about her, and you want that on your side,” said Lutonya Russell-Humes, a professor and longtime friend of Ms. Morales. “She just doesn’t lose. She may compromise, but she doesn’t lose.”She has talked about how after a career in advocacy work, she wanted to tackle inequity in a bigger, broader way. So in 2019, she filed to run for mayor. Ms. Morales said she was moved to act in part by her disappointment over Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, and she pledged to run a campaign that would be heavy on ethics, respect and dignity.She officially kicked off her campaign in November 2020, amid months of heavy involvement in a mutual aid group in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she coordinated food distribution efforts, organized a community fund-raiser, and later arranged for vaccine appointments.As a candidate, Ms. Morales has advocated for rent relief, hazard pay and the release of vulnerable people from Rikers Island. Her staff grew from about a dozen to nearly 100 aides this spring, as Ms. Morales continued to push her central proposal: cutting $3 billion from the police budget, which she says would ultimately lead to greater protection of New Yorkers, especially Black and Latino residents.Facing the progressive paradoxAlmost immediately, Ms. Morales faced the same paradox that has confronted politicians and activists in the progressive left at large: Members of the communities they say they speak for — especially Black and brown New Yorkers — do not always agree with the agendas they propose.Last year, many Black and Latino council members were hesitant to vote yes on a proposal that included, among other things, a pledge to cut $1 billion from the N.Y.P.D., worried that shrinking the police force would adversely affect underserved neighborhoods already marred by violence. Several Black council members vehemently opposed the proposed cut, calling the movement “political gentrification” or likening it to “colonization.”A recent NY1/Ipsos poll found that 72 percent of likely Democratic primary voters supported an increased police presence, following an uptick in high-profile incidents of violent crime. Ms. Morales said that many constituents she has spoken to wanted more access to resources and community programs, services she said could be funded by cuts to the police department’s budget.Ms. Morales has appealed to members of traditionally underrepresented groups, some of whom say they find her more accessible than past candidates for mayor.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHer plan for her first 100 days in office includes a citywide rent moratorium for individuals and small businesses, ending the N.Y.P.D.’s relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and providing immediate housing, through hotels and city-leased properties, for homeless people.The funding for her policies is largely contingent on increasing taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, and reimagining the city’s budget, cutting bloat and overspending.“I don’t think she identifies as a socialist, but a lot of socialists really like Dianne,” State Senator Jabari Brisport said in March, around the time he endorsed Ms. Morales.Still, Ms. Morales has battled questions of ideological consistency among activists on the left. She supported charter schools, which many progressives believe exacerbate inequality, as recently as last year. And an old interview in which she admitted to voting for Governor Andrew M. Cuomo in the 2018 Democratic primary for governor instead of his progressive challenger, Cynthia Nixon, made waves.“I’m one of those people that was at the point of feeling like the government wasn’t having an impact on my life on a day-to-day basis, and I went with the familiar,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “It’s definitely not something I feel great about.”She’s also faced plenty of scrutiny around her term as the chief executive of Phipps Neighborhoods: Tenant activists deemed its umbrella organization, Phipps Houses, one of the worst evictors in New York City in 2018 and 2019. (A Phipps spokesperson said the organization followed through with evictions on less than 1 percent of its tenants each year.)She emphasized the separation between the development group and the organization she led. “I’m very deeply proud of the work I did,” she said in an interview. “But it’s also true that Phipps Houses is a serious evictor. Those two things are true at the same time.”.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 addition to concerns about Phipps’ reputation, Ms. Morales’s reported take-home pay, nearly $350,000 in 2018, was an eye-popping figure for a candidate who has strongly emphasized her working-class identity, though even as chief executive, Ms. Morales was not the highest paid employee at the organization — filings show that at least three men earned more than she did.“I’m not going to apologize for making a decent living and being able to provide for my family,” Ms. Morales said. Since she stepped down from that position in January 2020, she says, she has not collected a salary. Ms. Morales has been transparent about struggles her family has faced. She and her son celebrated his graduation from college last month.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA leftist candidate in a liberal townRunning for major office as a leftist is no easy feat, even in a town as overwhelmingly Democratic as New York City. As last summer’s uproar over police brutality, social justice and inequality began to cool, polls mostly placed Ms. Morales in the single-digits, despite some indications that voters were looking for a progressive candidate.She became increasingly focused on capturing voters who felt either excluded by or disappointed with their current representation: people on the front lines of protests and the pandemic.“It’s surprising to me, given what the appetite felt like a year ago,” Ms. Morales said. “It felt like we were ready for a little bit more of rebel revolution. And now it feels kind of like, we’re like, ‘OK, that’s nice.’”Gabe Tobias, manager of Our City, a super PAC that supports progressive candidates, pointed to the recent elections of Mr. Brisport and Representative Jamaal Bowman as proof that left-leaning candidates can win. “People in New York are open to voting for people on the left if they like the candidate,” he said. “But the candidates aren’t rallying people.”Still, Ms. Morales had a devoted, even if small, following that she thought she could grow. Fervent supporters defended her when an investigation by The City last month revealed that in 2002, Ms. Morales paid a $300 bribe to a corrupt water inspector to erase a $12,000-plus water meter bill and then lied twice to city investigators.She was working as a senior employee at the Department of Education at the time, and investigators recommended that she be fired. Instead, Ms. Morales resigned. The water bill turned out to have been fraudulently inflated, and the inspector was later convicted of misconduct.Ms. Morales sought to turn the negative press into a moment that, once again, reinforced her theme of being an ordinary New Yorker. In a statement, she cast herself as a victim, and emphasized how many people were vulnerable to similar scams: “When I say I know what it means to be a New Yorker, I mean it.”The day after her statement appeared was her best fund-raising day on record: she received over $50,000 from 1,225 people.Throughout the race, Ms. Morales has sought to be seen not as politician or a manager, but as a public servant who is still connected to the public. Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThen, later in May, Whitney Hu, Ms. Morales’s campaign manager, and Ifeoma Ike, her senior adviser, resigned to protest what they called weeks of inaction regarding two staff members accused of discrimination and sexual harassment. (Ms. Hu and Ms. Ike did not respond to requests for comment; Ms. Ike has since joined Ms. Wiley’s campaign.) The two accused staff members have since been terminated. Allegations of poor management, discrimination, lack of pay and health care and a hostile work environment had plagued the campaign for weeks.Some of her staff members said they felt she was not living up to the lofty ideals she espoused on the campaign trail: A candidate who immediately called for the resignations of Mr. Cuomo and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller and mayoral candidate, over allegations of sexual misconduct, was now accused of not addressing it among her own staff.Many of the 90-plus members of the staff moved to unionize, striking after Ms. Morales fired four employees associated with the organizing effort and did not provide a reason. Less than two weeks before the mayoral primary, the strike is still underway, and union members have reported being locked out of work accounts.Ms. Morales recognized the union, but she said she could not agree to many of its demands, some of which — such as for workers to be paid severance after the campaign’s end — she contended violated campaign finance laws. (The Campaign Finance Board handbook disputes this.)“I’m supportive of the organizing, I’m supportive of folks making good trouble, but I can’t actually tolerate disruptive, undermining behavior, and I think that is an issue that we have to deal with,” she said.The fallout has been particularly damaging for Ms. Morales, whose progressive base of supporters may be less likely to forgive what they see as ethical transgressions.“Was there anything that could’ve been done differently? I guess so,” said Peter Ragone, a political adviser who has worked on more than two dozen campaigns. “No candidate or their advisers has ever had to manage their way through something like this, so of course it’s a mess,” he added.But Ms. Morales has embraced the tension within her campaign. In a recent interview with NY1 about the unionization effort, she said: “It’s a beautiful and messy thing.” More

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      N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates on Police Reform

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      We interviewed the eight leading Democratic candidates for mayor about the biggest issues facing the city. Here’s what they said.The protests last summer following George Floyd’s death sparked a national outcry over police brutality. Here are the most important police reforms eight of the leading candidates for mayor of New York say they would pursue:Eric AdamsWe’re no longer going to allow police officers who are abusive to remain in the department for such a long period of time. I’m going to have a fair but speedy trial within a two-month period to determine if that officer should remain a police officer. The goal here is to rebuild trust, look at our police budget, look at areas such as overtime and civilianization of policing.Shaun DonovanWe need to reform policing by creating real transparency, real accountability, weeding out the bad apples. But we also need to reduce what we’re asking the police to do. They’re asked to be mental-health experts with our homeless and in so many other situations.Kathryn GarciaThe most important police reform that I would pursue as mayor is to ensure that we have very clear and transparent discipline for our officers. We have to instill new training programs, and make sure that we are promoting those officers who are rebuilding trust with communities.Raymond J. McGuireI would create an emergency social services bureau, 24 hours, seven days a week, given that four to five out of the 10 calls that go into 911 have to do with mental health issues.Dianne MoralesI don’t believe that we can reform the Police Department. I think we need to transform it. And that means divesting from the department, investing in the services that we need, and then fundamentally transforming the way the department operates in our communities.Scott M. StringerI will put forth a community safety plan that meets the challenges of reducing police interaction in communities of color but at the same time recognizing that we have an ability to keep our city safe. They’re not mutually exclusive. We can do both.Maya WileyPolice brutality has been at a crisis point in this country. I have many plans on transforming policing in the city. That starts by putting people back in public safety, and that means focusing on the job of policing that police should be doing to keep us safe, but taking those functions police did not sign up for the force to do and should not be doing, like mental health crisis response.Andrew YangCultures change from the top. We need a civilian police commissioner who’s not of the N.Y.P.D. culture to help our police force evolve. More

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      N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Divided on Calls to 'Defund the Police'

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      The idea of “defunding” the police, which a year ago became a rallying cry after the murder of George Floyd, proved to be a contentious proposition during the debate, dividing the candidates along ideological lines, particularly as New York City reels from an uptick in crime.“The police are going to be a core way for us to address the public safety concerns that so many New Yorkers have and let me be clear defund the police is the wrong approach for new city,” Andrew Yang, considered a more moderate candidate, said.But Maya Wiley, who is viewed as a more progressive candidate, argued in favor of shifting resources away from the police.“I’m going to take a billion dollars from the New York City Police Department and shift that money to create trauma-informed care in our schools, because when we do that violence goes down and graduation rates go up” she said.Dianne Morales, also considered one of the more progressive candidates, said that “safety is not synonymous with police.”“We actually need to recognize that police respond to crime they don’t prevent crime,” she said. More

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      Keisha Lance Bottoms Won’t Seek Second Term as Atlanta Mayor

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      Ms. Bottoms, who was mentioned briefly as a potential running mate with President Biden, is the latest mayor to move on after a year of pandemic challenges and social justice protests.ATLANTA — Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first-term Atlanta mayor who rose to national prominence this past year with her stern yet empathetic televised message to protesters but has struggled to rein in her city’s spike in violent crime, will not seek a second term in office, according to two people who were on a Zoom call with the mayor on Thursday night.The news shocked the political world in Atlanta, the most important city in the Southeast and one where the mayoral seat has been filled by African-American leaders since 1974, burnishing its reputation as a mecca for Black culture and political power.It is unclear why Ms. Bottoms, a Democrat, is not seeking another term, but 2020 took a toll on mayors nationwide. It was one of the most tumultuous years for American cities since the 1960s, with the social and economic disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic as well as racial justice protests that sometimes turned destructive.In November, St. Louis’s mayor at the time, Lyda Krewson, announced she would not pursue a second term. A month later, Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle announced she would not run for re-election. Several mayors in smaller cities have also declined to run again, exhausted or demoralized by the ravages of 2020.Two contenders who have been seeking to unseat Ms. Bottoms in the November election have promised to do a better job fighting what Ms. Bottoms has called a “Covid crime wave,” which includes a 58 percent spike in homicides in 2020.But Ms. Bottoms, 51, was expected to mount a formidable defense. She has a loyal ally in President Biden, whom she was early to endorse, and who repaid her loyalty with an appearance at a virtual fund-raiser in March. Ms. Bottoms was mentioned briefly as a potential vice-presidential running mate and said that she later turned down a cabinet-level position in the Biden administration.Ms. Bottoms, who served as a judge and a city councilwoman before being sworn in as mayor in 2018, is also blessed with a voice — measured, compassionate, slightly bruised and steeped in her experience as a Black daughter and Black mother — that seemed uniquely calibrated to address the challenges of the past year.It was in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that Ms. Bottoms went on live television and became a national star as she spoke directly to protesters. Some of their demonstrations had descended into lawlessness, with people smashing windows, spray-painting property and jumping on police cars.“When I saw the murder of George Floyd, I hurt like a mother would hurt,” she said. Then she scolded the protesters, insisting that they “go home” and study the precepts of nonviolence as practiced by the leaders of the civil rights movement. More