Police Brutality, Misconduct and Shootings

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

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      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

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      Maya Wiley Takes Credit for Daniel Pantaleo’s Firing. Is That Justified?

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      When she was the head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Ms. Wiley was criticized for not being more aggressive in pursuing discipline against officers.Maya Wiley’s bid to become mayor of New York City is based largely on her promise to overhaul the Police Department, and she often highlights her one-year stint as head of the city’s police watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, as evidence of her commitment.In particular, she focuses on the agency’s role in the 2019 firing of Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death in 2014 — a flash point that became the impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement.But a review of her time leading the agency paints a more complicated picture of her actions in that case and of her experience holding officers accountable. Her critics say that the board felt more beholden to City Hall during her tenure, and they charge that the agency’s management and performance suffered.Ms. Wiley also faced criticism that she did not use her time at the board, where she was chairwoman from mid-2016 to mid-2017, to pursue cases more aggressively.In 2012, the agency recommended charges in about 70 percent of cases. The number declined steadily until 2016, when it was 12 percent. In 2017, it was 11 percent, according to agency reports.In the same period, the agency was much more likely to recommend training and instruction for officers, one of the least serious forms of discipline. That recommendation was issued in 5 percent of cases in 2012 and 44 percent in 2016.“The dramatic changes in C.C.R.B. recommendations over the last three years raise serious questions about the C.C.R.B.’s commitment to meaningful civilian oversight,” Christopher Dunn, then the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a 2017 letter to Ms. Wiley.Board leaders have said that they decided to seek lesser penalties in a bid to compel police officials to agree to impose discipline more often. Ms. Wiley added in an interview that the city had also expanded the array of disciplinary actions that could be recommended, allowing the review board to opt for less severe punishment.“It’s not really surprising that you would see charges going down as you had more tools, recommendations for those things that are the less extreme versions of some of those cases,” she said.Of all the cases that came before the review board, none was as highly charged or closely scrutinized as the death of Mr. Garner. It took five years for Mr. Pantaleo, who was never criminally charged in the case, to lose his job.Ms. Wiley, on the campaign trail and in candidate debates, has referenced her role in the process that ended with the firing of Mr. Pantaleo, and recently released an ad entitled “Breathe,” a reference to Mr. Garner saying repeatedly, “I can’t breathe” as officers tried to detain him.Gwen Carr, center, the mother of Eric Garner, at a 2019 protest following a decision by federal officials not to charge Daniel Pantaleo in her son’s death. Ms. Carr has endorsed Raymond J. McGuire for mayor.Byron Smith for The New York TimesIn the ad, Ms. Wiley said it was “time the N.Y.P.D. sees us as people who deserve to breathe.”At the time of Mr. Garner’s death, Ms. Wiley was serving as counsel to Mr. de Blasio. As such, she was one of his top two legal advisers, along with Zachary W. Carter, Mr. de Blasio’s corporation counsel.The de Blasio administration settled on a legal strategy of not pursuing its own administrative charges — a necessary prelude to firing a police officer — against Mr. Pantaleo, while the city deferred to the Staten Island district attorney and federal authorities, who were considering more severe criminal penalties.Mr. Carter said in an interview that City Hall did not want to initiate an internal Police Department trial at the N.Y.P.D. that might risk producing testimony that could muddy the state and federal cases.The decision allowed Mr. Pantaleo to remain on the city payroll for five years, as investigations by the district attorney’s office and the civil rights division of the Obama administration’s Justice Department wound down with no criminal charges ever filed.Mr. Carter defended the administration’s strategy and said that it was common procedure for local law enforcement agencies to defer to federal investigators.He said that when he was U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and prosecuting the Abner Louima police brutality case, he had similarly asked other authorities to suspend their investigations until he was done with his own. Justin Volpe, the officer who sodomized Mr. Louima, was not fired until the day that he pleaded guilty, Mr. Carter said.Mr. Carter said that Ms. Wiley was a “conscientious lawyer” who understands that lawyers have to respect the law, “when it favors you and when it doesn’t.”Despite her role in the administration, Ms. Wiley has faulted Mr. de Blasio for the city’s handling of the Garner case. During a mayoral forum held by WPIX-TV last month, she said that had she been mayor, “Daniel Pantaleo would have already been off the force.”But if she ever advised the mayor to more promptly fire Mr. Pantaleo while she was the mayor’s counsel, Ms. Wiley declined to say, citing attorney-client privilege.Two people who were in meetings with the mayor and his executive staff about the Garner case could not recall an instance in which Ms. Wiley argued for swifter discipline, though she might have done so privately.Anthonine Pierre, deputy director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, said that while Ms. Wiley worked to maintain relationships with police accountability organizers while leading the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Ms. Wiley was never “out of step with de Blasio.”“When we look at the fact that it took five years for Pantaleo to be fired and part of that time was under her watch, I think a lot of people should be asking her questions about what that was about,” Ms. Pierre said. “We’re not looking for another mayor who is good on rhetoric and bad on accountability.”Mina Malik, who was executive director for two years at the police review board until November 2016, accused Ms. Wiley of overstating her role in Mr. Pantaleo’s dismissal..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;}“Frankly, for Maya to take credit for bringing Pantaleo to justice is not accurate,” she said. “The investigation, chokehold findings and recommendations were made before Maya came on board.”But other current and former agency board members defended Ms. Wiley, who has also taken credit for ensuring that the review board’s civilian prosecutors bring the administrative case, rather than the Police Department’s lawyers.Angela Fernandez, a former C.C.R.B. commissioner whose tenure overlapped with Ms. Wiley, said that the Pantaleo prosecution was the highlight of Ms. Wiley’s leadership.John Siegal, another C.C.R.B. commissioner, still remembers the day the police commissioner ratified an internal judge’s determination that Mr. Pantaleo should be fired.“I called Maya, and I said, ‘Congratulations, you were the one official in American who utilized her official responsibilities to move this case,’” he recalled. “‘The attorney general didn’t do it. The Justice Department didn’t do it, nobody else did it, you did it. And you are to be congratulated on that.’”Ms. Wiley’s leadership also came under fire for allowing the board to make decisions out of public view — a criticism that echoed similar assessments of her work as counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio.As counsel, Ms. Wiley argued that the mayor’s emails with a cadre of outside advisers did not have to be disclosed to the public because the advisers were acting as “agents of the city.” Thousands of pages of those emails were eventually released, to the mayor’s embarrassment.Under her watch at the review board, questions of transparency arose when a highly anticipated report on the use of Taser stun guns was released in October 2016.A draft report that had been leaked that spring said the police should prohibit the use of the stun guns on handcuffed subjects and highlighted that officers used the stun guns on people who were unarmed. But in the final version, released after the draft report had been circulated to City Hall and the Police Department, that language was absent — a change that officials said was part of the usual rewriting process.In February 2017, Mr. Dunn sent another letter to Ms. Wiley asserting that “the board has ceased to engage in any meaningful public business.”“In the 16 years I have been attending board meetings and monitoring the C.C.R.B., I have never seen the board abandon its public responsibilities as it has in the last eight months,” he wrote. In an interview, Ms. Wiley suggested that should an Eric Garner-like tragedy arise on her watch as mayor, she would defer to the Biden administration before taking action herself, much as Mr. de Blasio deferred to the Obama administration.“If for any reason, there was any indication that we were not going to get movement, then it would be a different story,” she said. “But look, we’ve got the A-Team in this Department of Justice on civil rights right now.” More

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      Has New York Hit a Progressive Plateau? The Mayor’s Race Is a Key Test.

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      Concerns about crime are dominating the Democratic primary, and the party’s left wing has just started to coalesce.A year ago, the left wing of New York’s Democratic Party was ascendant. Deeply progressive candidates triumphed in state legislative primaries and won a congressional upset, activists fueled a movement to rein in the power of the police, and Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to cut the Police Department budget.But for most of the Democratic primary season this spring, nearly every available metric has suggested that the political energy has shifted. The question is, by how much.The June 22 primary contests for mayor and other city offices are critical, if imperfect, tests of the mood of Democratic voters on the cusp of a summer that many experts believe will be marked by high rates of gun violence in cities across the United States.The Democratic race for mayor has in some ways reflected national tensions within the party over how far to the left its leaders should tack, after President Biden won the party’s nomination on the strength of moderate Black voters and older Americans, and Republicans secured surprising down-ballot general election victories.Now, a version of that debate is playing out even in overwhelmingly liberal New York City, where the Democratic primary winner will almost certainly become the next mayor. The primary underscores how the battle for the party’s direction extends far beyond concerns over defeating Republicans.Polls have increasingly shown that combating crime is the top priority among New York Democrats, a sentiment that was evident in interviews with voters across the city in recent months, from Harlem to Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. The debate over what role the police should play in maintaining public safety has become the biggest wedge issue in the mayoral campaign.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and former police captain who has recently led in the few available public polls, is a relative moderate on questions of policing and charter schools and in his posture toward business and the real estate industry.In other major contests — most notably, the Manhattan district attorney’s race — there are signs that the contenders who are furthest to the left are struggling to capture the same traction that propelled like-minded candidates in recent years.“The political class, I think, thought that the party, that the voters, had moved very, very far to the left,” Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner and another leading mayoral candidate, said in an interview last month. “That they were at a moment where they wanted to do radical, radical change. I just never believed that that was true.”The party’s left wing still holds extraordinary sway and the mayor’s race, which will be decided by ranked-choice voting, is far from the only test of its power. Progressive lawmakers are a force in the State Legislature and have already triumphed by passing a far-reaching budget agreement. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has stayed out of the mayor’s race, is focusing instead on City Council primaries.Some activists say that if the trajectory of the mayor’s race has sometimes been worrisome, it has more to do with controversies surrounding individual candidates than with New Yorkers’ attitudes.“It’s a little taxing with all the drama that has been happening,” said Liat Olenick, a leader of the progressive group Indivisible Nation Brooklyn. “Coalescing is happening. It is really late, so we’ll have to see.”Indeed, even with the primary just over a week away, there is time for progressive leaders to consolidate their support. Maya Wiley is increasingly seen as the left-leaning candidate with the best chance of winning, and many progressives are moving urgently to support her, which could reshape the race in the final stretch.In the last several election cycles, New York Democrats have undeniably moved to the left, galvanized in part by outrage over former President Donald J. Trump. But with Mr. Trump out of office, voters have become more focused on recovering from the pandemic than on politics.And while many Americans consider New York synonymous with coastal liberalism, the city’s voters also elected Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, mayor twice, and the moderate Michael R. Bloomberg three times before electing Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is much more progressive.It was always going to be harder for progressive activists to replicate their legislative victories in a vast metropolis that includes some of the most left-wing voters in the country, but also many moderates.On issues including homelessness, education and especially policing, the most progressive prescriptions have not always been popular, even in heavily Democratic neighborhoods.“More police need to be out here,” Linda Acosta, 50, said as she walked into the Bronx Night Market off Fordham Road on a recent Saturday. “Not to harass. To do their job.”Ms. Wiley, Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, have supported cuts to the police budget. They argue that adding more officers to patrol the subway would not meaningfully reduce violence. Ms. Wiley and others have promoted alternatives, including investments in mental health professionals and in schools.Those positions have been central to a broader competition among the candidates seeking to be the left-wing standard-bearer, even as Mr. Stringer and Ms. Morales have struggled with campaign controversies.Last Saturday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Ms. Wiley for mayor, a potentially race-altering move. The same day, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a left-wing Democrat who beat the longtime incumbent Eliot Engel last summer, said he was supporting Ms. Wiley as well.On Wednesday, Jumaane D. Williams, the city’s public advocate, also endorsed Ms. Wiley.“This moment is being dominated by a loud discussion of whether New York will return to the bad old days,” Mr. Williams said. “For so many of us, those ‘bad old days’ run through Bloomberg and Giuliani” and “the abuses of stop-and-frisk and surveillance.”Eric Adams, a relative centrist among the leading candidates, has led the field in recent polling.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Adams has led the mayor’s race in recent surveys, often followed by Andrew Yang and Ms. Garcia, two other relatively centrist candidates. Many strategists said Mr. Adams’s rise was tied to public safety concerns, even as he has begun to attract more scrutiny.All of the leading contenders stress that public safety is not at odds with racial justice, another vital priority for New York Democrats. The candidates who are considered more centrist support reining in officers’ misconduct and making changes to the Police Department, and Mr. Adams worked on those issues as a police 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;}But they are also openly skeptical of the “defund the police” movement, and have emphasized a need for more police on the subway. Those views have resonated with some voters.“My No. 1 is safety in the subway,” said Jane Arrendell, 52, after an Adams campaign event in Washington Heights. “I hate working at home but I feel safer.”There was much more violent crime in New York in earlier decades than there is today. But the city has been experiencing a spike in gun violence, along with jarring crimes on the subway and in bias attacks against Asians, Asian-Americans and Jews.The candidates’ talk about crime “has almost driven discussion about any other issues to the back burner,” said Lee M. Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which is polling the race. “I find that surprising given where New York is coming off of Covid.”“For the other candidates,” he added, “that really cedes that discussion to Adams.”An NY1-Ipsos poll released on Monday found that 46 percent of likely Democratic voters viewed crime and public safety as the top priority for the next mayor. A staggering 72 percent said they somewhat or strongly agreed that the Police Department should put more officers on the street.A quarter of likely voters polled for the survey identified themselves as more progressive than the Democratic Party. Nearly an equal share, 22 percent, said they were more centrist or conservative. Just over half called themselves “generally in line with the Democratic Party,” which has shifted significantly to the left as a whole in recent years.Whatever the primary results, party strategists warn against drawing sweeping conclusions from a post-pandemic Democratic municipal contest that is likely to be a low-turnout affair.Still, city elections in recent years have been important barometers of grass-roots energy, including the 2019 race for Queens district attorney, where Tiffany L. Cabán, who ran as a Democratic Socialist, nearly defeated Melinda Katz, a veteran of New York politics.In this year’s race for Manhattan district attorney, at least three contenders have sought to emulate Ms. Cabán. But the three — Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — have struggled to win support. A more moderate candidate, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, has led in fund-raising, including $8.2 million in contributions that she recently made to her own campaign, and the few available polls.Tensions on the left burst into public view when Zephyr Teachout, a candidate for governor in 2014, argued on Twitter that Mr. Quart, Ms. Orlins and Ms. Aboushi had no path to victory.That drew a sharp response from Cynthia Nixon, who challenged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from the left in the 2018 primary and supports Ms. Aboushi. (Ms. Teachout supports Alvin Bragg, a former prosecutor who has also won the backing of progressive groups.)“Your point of view is myopic, privileged, and just plain wrong,” Ms. Nixon wrote.In an interview, Ms. Nixon argued that Ms. Aboushi, who was endorsed on Wednesday by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, was the candidate of the left movement and that others should recognize that.“It’s really nice that the movement has all these people in it and we welcome them and we need them,” she said. “But there’s only going to be one Manhattan D.A.” 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 Keep Focus on Crime After a Feisty Debate

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      Back on the campaign trail, the leading Democrats traded barbs over their competing visions for public safety.On the day after the leading Democratic candidates for mayor faced off in the first major debate of the election season, Andrew Yang attended a conference on the future of the waterfront. Scott M. Stringer went to a vacant lot in Brooklyn to talk about affordable housing. Maya Wiley toured a Puerto Rican cultural center on the Lower East Side. Eric Adams attended fund-raisers, and Raymond J. McGuire greeted business owners on Staten Island.But whatever the candidates’ ostensible agendas, public safety — which spurred some of the hottest exchanges during the debate — remained the topic of the day, after yet another rash of attacks in the subway kept the city’s focus on its shaken sense of order.And so there was Mr. Adams, a retired police captain, reminding New Yorkers in a statement Friday morning that he stood with transit workers in their demands for more officers in the subway. There was Mr. Yang on “Good Morning New York,” opining that the police “are going to drive our ability to improve what’s going on our streets, in the subway.”There, on the other side of the divide, was Ms. Wiley, at the Clemente Cultural and Educational Center in Manhattan, urging that more social service workers for people with mental illness, not more police officers, be sent underground.And there was Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller, sounding a similar note in front of the vacant lot in Brownsville, saying that without a comprehensive prescription that included social services and supportive housing, “We will be cycling people from the subways to Rikers,” the city’s jail complex, “back and forth and at a tremendous financial cost.”With less than six weeks left before the June 22 primary and a crowded field of contenders struggling to define themselves to a distracted electorate, crime, and how to stop it, has emerged as both a dominant public concern and a way for the candidates to score points against each other.Each day seems to bring a fresh cause for alarm. On Friday, a group of men slashed or punched commuters aboard a moving subway train. The attacks came at the end of a one-week stretch that included the shooting of three bystanders in Times Square, a police officer being shot three times while responding to another shooting and at least a half-dozen other seemingly random subway attacks.The candidates have clearly felt pressure to address the violence. After the Times Square shooting last Saturday, Mr. Yang, Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire held news conferences there, even as the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, stayed away.At the debate, Mr. Adams took Mr. Yang, a former presidential candidate, to task for holding a news conference “blocks from your home” in Times Square but not responding to recent shootings in neighborhoods with large Black populations, like Brownsville. Two other candidates, Shaun Donovan and Kathryn Garcia, responded to the Times Square shooting with plans to get guns off the streets.In many ways, the campaigning on Friday was a continuation of the previous night’s debate, where the candidates leaned into their sharply different approaches to law enforcement and to the question of whether the city can police its way out of a spike in gun violence.Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio and civil-rights lawyer, said at the debate that she would take $1 billion from the Police Department and use the money “to create trauma-informed care in our schools, because when we do that violence goes down and graduation rates go up.”Another candidate, Dianne Morales, who has called for cutting the $6 billion police budget in half, said that “safety is not synonymous with police.” Mr. Stringer and Mr. Donovan have also called for shifting at least $1 billion from the police budget to social services.Ms. Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, staked out a middle ground on Thursday, saying, “We do need to respond when the M.T.A. says we need more cops in the subway. That does not mean we’re not sending mental health professionals into the subway as well.”Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang have opposed “defunding” the police, and on Thursday night Mr. Adams repeated his call for a reinstituted unit of plainclothes police officers to target gang activity in the city.“​We have to deal with intervention,” he said, “and stop the flow of guns into the city,” adding, “We have to deal with this real, pervasive handgun problem.”In one of the debate’s fiercer exchanges, Ms. Wiley called Mr. Adams an apologist for stop-and-frisk policing. That prompted him to counter that he was actually a “leading voice against the abuse of stop-and-frisk” and that Ms. Wiley had showed a “failure of understanding law enforcement.”Ms. Wiley retorted that as the former head of the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, “I certainly understand misconduct.” Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, hit back, saying that under her, the board was “a failure.”.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-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Ms. Wiley picked up the thread on Friday, reminding a reporter at her tour outside the Clemente Center that Mr. Adams had called stop-and-frisk a “great tool” just last year. (She called the policy “lazy,” “ineffective” and “traumatizing.”)Mr. Adams also took flak from Mr. Donovan at the debate for having said that as mayor he would carry a gun.“As a New Yorker but also as a parent, I’m deeply concerned about the idea of a mayor who carries a gun at a time where gun violence is spiking,” Mr. Donovan, a former city and federal housing official, said.Mr. Adams replied that he would do so only if the police’s threat assessment unit found that he was the target of “a credible threat.”On Friday, Ms. Wiley spoke about there being a “false choice between either being safe from crime and being safe from police violence” and promised, “We can have both.”In an ad released on Friday by a political action committee that supports Mr. Adams, Strong Leadership NYC, Mr. Adams used similar words.“We can have justice and public safety at the same time,” he says in the ad, adding that after being assaulted by the police as a young man, he became an officer with the goal of reforming the department from within. In his statement on Friday, Mr. Adams called not only for more officers in the subway but for “serious mental health resources.”Still, there was no question where his emphasis lay: He also called for better monitoring of security cameras and closer coordination between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway, and the police.“Progress cannot be derailed by crime,” Mr. Adams wrote. “If New Yorkers themselves cannot rely on our public transportation to keep them safe, then tourists will not return and not the businesses that depend on them.” More

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      Winners and Losers of the N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate

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      Welcome to the Times Opinion scorecard for New York City’s first mayoral debate of 2021, which featured the eight leading Democratic candidates on Thursday night. A mix of Times writers and outside political experts assessed the contenders’ performances and ranked them on a scale of one to 10: one means the candidate probably didn’t belong […] More

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      Why Police Accountability Is Personal for This Manhattan D.A. Candidate

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      Alvin Bragg has had encounters with the police both in the streets and in the courts. He wants to change the system from within.The first time Alvin Bragg began thinking about police accountability was not long after an officer put a gun to his head, when he was a 15-year-old in Harlem in the 1980s.Nearly 30 years later, as a prosecutor at the state attorney general’s office in 2017, Mr. Bragg found himself confronting the same issue, overseeing the case against Officer Wayne Isaacs, who was off duty when he killed Delrawn Small in the early morning in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.The officer was charged with murder and manslaughter. Video of the shooting, prosecutors argued, appeared to contradict the officer’s account. The jury acquitted him anyway.“I felt dejected, demoralized, really upset for the family,” Mr. Bragg recalled. “I felt like our system had not worked.”Now, the issues of police accountability and public integrity that Mr. Bragg confronted as a prosecutor are at the center of his campaign to lead one of the most important district attorney’s offices in the country. Mr. Bragg, 47, a Democrat, is one of nine candidates vying for the office, and is among those seeking to balance concerns about public safety against a progressive push to make the criminal justice system less punitive.In seeking to position himself as the candidate most capable of changing the system from the inside, Mr. Bragg has leaned on his personal history — including both his street-corner and courtroom encounters with the police. And Mr. Bragg, who is the only Black candidate running, would be the first Black person to lead an office where, researchers have found, race continues to be a critical factor in nearly every part of the process.But his history leading the unit that tried Officer Isaacs — a unit charged with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians — undermines a record that sounds better than it looks, his opponents and their supporters charge. Under Mr. Bragg, the unit, then called the Special Investigations and Prosecutions Unit, investigated 24 cases and brought back zero convictions. (It has not fared any better since he left, three years ago.)Officer Wayne Isaacs, center, was found not guilty after a 2017 trial; Mr. Bragg said the verdict still troubles him.  Dave Sanders for The New York Times“The Manhattan district attorney needs to be able to manage the most complicated and difficult cases, and that includes holding police accountable,” said Lucy Lang, another candidate in the race, who at a debate last week attacked Mr. Bragg’s record on police accountability. “Unfortunately, in the 24 cases of police killings that came before him, Alvin wasn’t able to hold a single officer accountable.”Mr. Bragg said that his record leading the unit, now called the Office of Special Investigation, showed only that the law makes it extremely difficult to successfully prosecute police officers.Experts agree. Though there are exceptions, including the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Mr. Bragg’s record with the unit at the attorney general’s office is not unusual. It remains extremely difficult to charge, let alone convict, police officers.Peter Neufeld, head of the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions, said that Mr. Bragg was fighting within a system that was heavily weighted against him. (Mr. Neufeld endorsed Mr. Bragg last month.)“It doesn’t make sense when looking at somebody who is taking on an adversary with both hands tied behind his back to measure his win-loss record,” he said.Close to homeMr. Bragg grew up on 139th Street in the heart of Harlem. Born in 1973, on the cusp of the city’s fiscal crisis, he said he learned at an early age which blocks were safe and which were not, the places he could go and the places that were best avoided.His mother, a math teacher, kept a close eye on him and made sure he focused on school, drilling him on his multiplication tables on the M10 bus and asking him to stay within the confines of their block. His father, who worked for the New York Urban League, regaled him with stories about the Willis Reed-era New York Knicks and encouraged him to get outside.There could be trouble, even close to home. When Mr. Bragg was 10 years old, he had a knife put to his neck by some teenagers in the middle of the day, in what he described as a “hazing,” but a very scary one.And then there were the police. About five years later, he was walking with a friend when an unmarked police car began driving the wrong way on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, he said. Three officers emerged from the car. One put a gun to Mr. Bragg’s head. They asked if he was dealing drugs and started going through his pockets.“You didn’t need to go to law school to know this was unlawful,” Mr. Bragg said. His interest in criminal justice started there.He went to Harvard and Harvard Law School and clerked for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., where he first began to see the way that prosecutors could work on behalf of public safety. After several years working as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, he became a prosecutor at the New York attorney general’s office, looking at public corruption and white- collar crime. He later worked under Preet Bharara, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District, as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, before returning to the attorney general’s office, where he focused on police misconduct.Mr. Bharara, who has endorsed Mr. Bragg, said that he had been set apart while a federal prosecutor by his concerns about police accountability and public corruption.“He’s not jumping on the bandwagon in connection with the race for office,” Mr. Bharara said. “He’s cared about these things for a long time.”Mr. Bragg, who met volunteers in Union Square this month, has sought to balance progressive ideas about the criminal justice system with public safety concerns.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesCivil Rights and Public SafetyMr. Bragg is one of nine candidates, eight Democrats and one Republican, running to replace Cyrus R. Vance Jr. as the chief prosecutor in Manhattan, a position that carries immense power to affect the criminal justice system in New York City.He has said that his overall focus will be on decreasing the number of people behind bars, that he will create a new unit to investigate police misconduct, move resources toward prosecutors investigating economic crime and overhaul the sex crimes unit. He has proposed a plan that would work to stem the flow of guns into New York from out of state.Many of Mr. Bragg’s ideas reflect the move to the left in prosecutorial elections in cities around the country in recent years — a shift that has ushered in a new breed of progressive prosecutor.Initially the race in Manhattan seemed to follow that pattern, as the majority of the Democratic candidates promoted lenient approaches to certain low-level crimes.But in recent months, as gun violence has continued to rise in New York City and another leading Democratic candidate, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, has stressed the importance of prosecuting crime, tension has grown between those pushing for leniency and those emphasizing public safety. (As of January, Mr. Bragg had raised more money than anyone other than Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and on Saturday, a racial justice organization, Color of Change, said it would spend $1 million promoting his candidacy.)Mr. Bragg has found a synthesis, based on his biography, that he hopes will persuade voters.“People care about both,” he said. “They want civil rights and public safety. Being safe is your first civil right, and we can’t have safety without community trust, which is based on civil rights.”And so he relies on his record — even when his opponents say it is unflattering. Under pressure from Ms. Lang during last week’s debate, he called the unit that has garnered zero convictions “the most transformative, transparent unit in this space in the history of this country.”Mr. Bragg has argued that the way his office worked with the victims’ families marked the beginning of a productive alliance between prosecutors and protesters, both pushing for justice. The unit was created after Eric Garner’s death in police custody in 2014; Mr. Bragg has been endorsed by Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr.Mr. Small’s brother, Victor Dempsey, said that Mr. Bragg had consulted him throughout the case against Officer Isaacs. He has endorsed Mr. Bragg’s candidacy.“Alvin has been a tremendous part in my advocacy work and my family’s advocacy work because he kind of gave us the impetus to keep fighting,” he said.But not all of Mr. Small’s family has backed Mr. Bragg. Victoria Davis, his sister, has endorsed Ms. Lang, who worked as a prosecutor under Mr. Vance.In a recent conversation, Ms. Davis said that she did not feel Mr. Bragg had done everything he could for her brother, who she said was demonized during the officer’s trial because of a tattoo. “I think he wasn’t humanized,” she said of her brother.Mr. Bragg still dwells on the acquittal of Officer Isaacs. He agreed with Ms. Davis that the defense team had successfully dehumanized Mr. Small, transforming him into what Mr. Bragg called a “Black boogeyman,” a tactic that predated the modern criminal justice system.“The part that is sad is that it works,” he said. “That racial imagery is a tie that binds throughout our history. Ultimately that’s the original sin, and we’ve got to address that.” More

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      Eric Adams, N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidate, Has Something to Prove

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      Eric Adams Says He Has Something to Prove. Becoming Mayor Might Help.Mr. Adams is a top fund-raiser in the New York City mayoral race, with key endorsements and strong polling, but he still faces questions about his preparedness for the job.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has made public safety a focus of his campaign for mayor.Gabriela Bhaskar for 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 third in a series of profiles of the major candidates.May 7, 2021Nearly three decades ago, when Eric Adams decided he wanted to someday be mayor of New York City, he started a journal of observations about local governance, making periodic entries before bed.He has now filled 26 notebooks.The long arc of Mr. Adams’s career — from the son of a Queens house cleaner to a reform-driven New York City police officer, from state senator to Brooklyn borough president and now a leading mayoral candidate — is an ode to personal discipline. By his telling, his life has been carefully structured to land him on the precipice of the only job he has ever wanted, in the only city where he has ever really lived.During an Easter Sunday visit to the Church of God of East Flatbush, Mr. Adams cited a biblical passage that describes a test of courage under duress.“I believe in all my heart that this is an Esther 4:14 moment,” Mr. Adams, 60, told the parishioners. “God made me for such a time as this.”To Mr. Adams, his broad life experience is what sets him apart in the vast and fractured field of mayoral candidates.He speaks of growing up poor and Black in Queens, being beaten by the police at age 15, starting as a police officer during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic, and then, in later years, becoming a voice for police reform. In 2013, he was the first Black person elected Brooklyn borough president.Yet there is a perception among some Democratic leaders, strategists and mayoral rivals that Mr. Adams’s career has been driven by self-interest rather than civic-mindedness, and that he is unprepared to lead the city as it tries to emerge from the pandemic.That perception rankles Mr. Adams, who equates efforts to dismiss him to reductive treatment of Black elected officials.His campaign, he believes, will surprise those he said have underestimated him and his ability to connect with the New Yorkers who make up his base: working class and older minority voters outside Manhattan, who prioritize authenticity in their politicians and issues like public safety.Mr. Adams, who has adopted more moderate positions than his left-wing rivals, says his broad life experience has prepared him for the role.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThis confidence gives Mr. Adams’s campaign stops — and his political strategy — a sense of assured purpose. He is not only trying to appeal to voters; he is seemingly running for personal validation, to prove that he is equally worthy to the rivals whom the city’s political class has deemed more polished, serious or qualified.“For years, I’ve had people — for years — calling me an ‘Uncle Tom’ or calling me a sellout,” Mr. Adams said in an interview, adding that he was “immune” to such attacks.“They don’t believe in me, but I believe in me,” he said. “Because I know me, and I’m a beast.”He will nonetheless be tested by a changing city and Democratic Party. New Yorkers have embraced big personalities in politicians before, particularly in mayoral races, but brashness and Blackness can project differently when packaged together.It may not help that Mr. Adams has had a history of embracing divisive figures, aligning himself with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, and the ex-boxer Mike Tyson after his 1992 rape conviction. Mr. Adams has also faced several ethics probes during his career, including one that questioned his role in allowing a politically connected company to gain a casino franchise at Aqueduct Racetrack.He first rose to prominence in New York by challenging Police Department policies during news conferences, earning scorn from police officials that persists decades later. And bombastic statements, like a pledge to carry a gun while in City Hall and forgo a security detail, have fueled detractors.Mr. Adams, as he darts around Queens and Brooklyn with less than seven weeks to go before the June 22 primary, thinks that unconventionality is a political superpower. He gives out his personal cellphone number to people on the street and often refers to himself in the third person. He shuns the popular language of progressive academics in favor of a relatable grit.He is, at once, a candidate who desires to be taken seriously as a liberal policymaker, and one who mocks the idea that elite-educated activists get to determine what is or is not serious.“I’m in these forums, and they’re talking about legal crack, legal fentanyl, legal heroin! Are you kidding me?” Mr. Adams said to a resident during a recent stop in the Laurelton section of Queens. “Do they remember what crack did to your communities?”A son of two boroughsMr. Adams, right, appeared alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton, center, during a news conference in 1993.Bebeto Matthews/Associated PressThree omnipresent dangers loomed for a young Black man growing up in South Jamaica, Queens, in the late 1970s and 1980s: the crime, the drugs, and the police.At age 15, Mr. Adams and his brother were arrested on criminal trespassing charges. Mr. Adams said he was beaten by officers while in custody and suffered post-traumatic stress from the episode. Yet it fueled his desire to become a police officer six years later, he said, after a local pastor suggested that he could “infiltrate” the department and help change police culture.Beginning as a transit officer and rising to the rank of police captain, he made his largest impact not on the police beat but through his involvement in two Black police fraternal organizations: the Grand Council of Guardians, and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that he founded.“Eric was always the guy who not just complained about the issues, but then pushed the group to organize to do something about it,” said David C. Banks, president and chief executive of the Eagle Academy Foundation in Brooklyn, which operates a network of schools for boys.“He was a pain in the neck and a thorn in the side of the central command at the police headquarters,” said Mr. Banks, who has known Mr. Adams for 30 years. “A lot of other officers would be afraid to raise these kind of issues.”Mr. Adams helped amplify cases of police brutality or errors, raising public awareness of uncomfortable policing issues, even if it did not sway top police brass, who tended to view him as an attention-seeking gadfly.His reputation also suffered from a series of unorthodox stances or appearances while on the force: He traveled to Indiana in 1995 to escort Mr. Tyson after his release from prison; he repeatedly defended Mr. Farrakhan in the 1990s; and he was registered as a Republican during that same time period, when New York, a predominantly Democratic city, was led by Republican mayors.Flanked by members of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group he founded, Mr. Adams held a news conference in 2000 in response to a shooting of a Black man by the police.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York TimesPaul Browne, a former chief spokesman for the Police Department under Raymond W. Kelly, said it was “laughable” that Mr. Adams was drawing on his law enforcement career to run for mayor on a public safety platform.“I don’t remember him distinguishing himself in any way, except promoting himself through 100 Black Officers in Law Enforcement Who Care,” Mr. Browne said.Mr. Adams “would try to have it both ways — that he was a cop but that we were all racist. He would say Blacks that weren’t as radical were an Uncle Tom,” said Mr. Browne, who is white. “He’d be a disaster as mayor.”Yet on the other side of the political spectrum, Mr. Adams’s law enforcement background is often viewed as a drawback, and as evidence that he is not the right candidate to bring significant changes to policing at a time when activists are demanding a paradigm shift.Mr. Adams rejected that notion, arguing that he helped lay the groundwork for more recent social justice movements. He cited a 2013 federal trial over the constitutionality of the stop-and-frisk program, when he testified that the police commissioner at the time had told him that it existed to “instill fear” in Black and Latino men. The judge cited his words in her ruling that the program violated the constitutional rights of those who were stopped.“They’re marching now saying Black Lives Matter, they’re doing Chapter 2 — I was Chapter 1,” Mr. Adams said. “When no one else was doing this, Eric Adams was doing this.”Mr. Adams, seen at the Capitol in Albany, was elected to the State Senate as a Democrat in 2006. Previously, he spent several years as a registered Republican.Mike Groll/Associated PressRising up in politicsAs early as 1994, Mr. Adams had decided that he wanted to be mayor — a desire he expressed to Bill Lynch, a deputy mayor under David N. Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York City.Mr. Lynch gave him four pieces of advice, Mr. Adams recalled: get a bachelor’s degree, gain managerial experience in the Police Department, work in Albany, and become a borough president — a path that somewhat resembled the one Mr. Dinkins followed to his historic victory.Mr. Adams followed the advice, but largely kept his mayoral ambitions quiet. It was better to be known as an earnest doer than an ambitious climber, he said, particularly as a Black man.“I am the poster child of missteps, but I am also the poster child of endurance,” Mr. Adams said. “I had a plan.”The first step was to leave the police force and enter politics. There was a failed congressional run in 1994, when Mr. Adams’s relationship with the Nation of Islam proved divisive. His switch to the Republican Party in the following years, while Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor and the party controlled the State Senate, seemed opportunistic; he explained then that “if you take a look at some of the concepts of the Republican Party, you’ll see that many of them are our values.”By 2006, however, he was a Democrat again, in time for a successful run for State Senate. In the political career that has followed, Mr. Adams has often been ideologically fungible, displaying an independent streak as well as attention-grabbing skills.He was an early supporter of marriage equality and continued to rail against policing practices, like stop-and-frisk, that were shown to disproportionately affect Black and Latino communities. He turned his focus to issues many other politicians would avoid, such as a “Stop the Sag” campaign that called on Black men to pull up their pants and emphasized personal responsibility as a response to racism. He also pushed for higher pay for elected officials — including himself.“I don’t know how some of you are living on $79,000,” Mr. Adams said at the time. “Show me the money!”The comments hurt Mr. Adams’s reputation among the city’s political class in the same way the police news conferences had in the years before. In 2010, a scathing state inspector general report said that Mr. Adams, then the chairman of the Senate Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, had given the “appearance of impropriety” by getting too close to a group that was seeking a casino contract at Aqueduct Racetrack.The inspector general said Mr. Adams had attended a party thrown by the lobbyist, earned campaign donations from the group’s shareholders and affiliates, and conducted a process that amounted to a “political free-for-all.”By 2013, Mr. Adams had left Albany for a successful bid for Brooklyn borough president, succeeding Marty Markowitz, and becoming the first Black person to head New York’s most populous borough..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-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}As borough president, a job with limited formal duties but a sizable bully pulpit, Mr. Adams expanded the role that Mr. Markowitz pioneered as a garrulous cheerleader for Brooklyn.He put himself through what he sometimes calls “mayor school,” reaching out to donors, community activists and business leaders to check their pulses on which direction they felt the city should go in.“I knew I had to prove I was serious,” Mr. Adams said. “People had to see Eric had serious plans. They had to see Eric could raise the money and that I could articulate issues of impact.”But he also drew more criticism over potential conflicts of interest. In his first year as borough president, the city’s Department of Investigation found that his office appeared to have violated conflict of interest rules in raising money for a nonprofit Mr. Adams was starting. No enforcement action was taken.The final taskMr. Adams accepted an endorsement from the FDNY Uniformed Fire Officers Association last month. He has earned several major endorsements from organized labor.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn the early stages of the mayoral race, Mr. Adams was viewed as one of three leading candidates, along with Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker. Only Mr. Adams was thought to appeal to large swaths of Black and Latino voters, especially outside Manhattan.He also had longstanding relationships with union leaders and other elected officials, and a network of donors cultivated over the past decade.But the dynamics have changed. Mr. Johnson is running for comptroller, not mayor. Mr. Stringer is now facing an allegation of sexual assault.The Black Lives Matter movement has pushed younger voters and some white liberals to the left of Mr. Adams on racial justice and policing. And other top Black candidates — Maya Wiley, the former lawyer to Mayor Bill de Blasio and MSNBC analyst; Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street leader; and Dianne Morales, a nonprofit executive — are in the running.And then there is Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate who appears to be the front-runner, according to the limited polling that exists, and who has drawn donors and media coverage to match.“Before Yang, I was the Chinese candidate,” Mr. Adams said. “I was the Bangladeshi candidate — which I still am. I’m going to get overwhelmingly the Muslim vote.”Mr. Adams has sought to portray Mr. Yang as unprepared to be mayor.“When I look over the lives of everyone else, I see moments of commitment. And I’m asking like, ‘Who is Andrew?’” Mr. Adams said. “Maya Wiley, I see a civil rights activist. Ray? Successful businessman. Dianne Morales, I see her commitment to fighting against injustice.”He added: “They didn’t just discover that we have injustice in this city.”Mr. Adams believes people have underestimated his ability to connect with the working-class New Yorkers who make up his base.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesIn a statement, the Yang campaign pushed back against the idea that Mr. Yang had not demonstrated a commitment to service. “Andrew is known by the most New Yorkers in the race for starting a national movement on universal basic income,” said Alyssa Cass, Mr. Yang’s communications director. “While some candidates were handing out patronage jobs or getting investigated for corruption, Andrew was fighting poverty.”Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang tend to have more moderate positions than some of their left-leaning rivals, like Mr. Stringer, Ms. Wiley and Ms. Morales.But Mr. Adams argues that his platform, which includes an expanded local tax credit for low-income families, investment in underperforming schools, and improvements to public housing, amounts to the systemic change progressives want.His “100 Steps for New York City,” a plan he partly drew from his journal of observations that began decades earlier, includes a special focus on public safety initiatives like releasing the names of officers being internally investigated for bad behavior.Mr. Adams has proposed diverting $500 million from the New York police budget to fund crisis managers and crime prevention programs, and has pledged to further diversify the police force.He has also proposed restoring a maligned plainclothes anti-crime unit that was disbanded by the Police Department last year, and refashioning it to focus on getting guns off the streets. Mr. Adams says proposals like these showed a responsiveness to the city’s most needy residents, including some Black neighborhoods suffering the brunt of violent crime. Critics point out that the disbanded unit has been behind several police shootings.As he runs to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio, left, Mr. Adams has faced skepticism from the city’s progressive Democrats.Dave Sanders for The New York Times“Those other candidates, their names don’t ring out over here,” said Takbir Blake, a community activist who shepherded Mr. Adams during a business tour in Laurelton. “It’s that you know he’s been on the front lines. But you also know he’s from the streets.”As the primary approaches, Mr. Adams has begun to demonstrate the benefits of his long-honed political relationships. He has won major labor endorsements, including from the city’s largest municipal union, 32BJ SEIU, which represents private-sector building service workers. He has raised more money than his rivals participating in the city’s matching-funds program, yet has spent less than several of them — maintaining his war chest for the stretch run.And he believes that he will eventually win over the party’s progressive wing, especially if it becomes clearer that Democratic voters still favor Mr. Yang as their top choice.“The polls are not everything, or always honest, but it’s going to send a message,” Mr. Adams said. “They not only need a person that they agree with, but I’m the person that could win the race.”Mr. Adams says he can form a coalition of the marginalized, who want a mayor who has not had an aspirational New York experience, but who has experienced the common struggle.It is the path of Mr. Dinkins, laid out by Mr. Lynch, and executed over decades by the most disciplined loose cannon in New York City politics.“Say what you want, but there’s very little misunderstanding about me,” Mr. Adams said. “When you pull that lever, you know who you’re voting for.”“An actual, real blue-collar New Yorker.” More