Police Brutality, Misconduct and Shootings

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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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      Colombia’s Troubles Put a President’s Legacy on the Line

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      SEOUL — Iván Duque swept into Colombia’s presidency in 2018 as a young, little-known technocrat riding a surging right-wing movement. He tapped public anger against a peace deal that he said had treated the country’s deadly insurgents too softly. And he warned that the proposals of his left-wing opponent could stifle steady growth.Three years and a global pandemic later, it is Mr. Duque who is presiding over high unemployment and an angry electorate — and who is on the defensive about the steps he has taken to tame persistent violence by militants.Mr. Duque contends his policies have opened opportunities for the middle- and low-income classes, encouraged entrepreneurship and paved the way for Colombia to return to its prepandemic growth. He also touted social policies that could address issues of police conduct and social inequality that led to violent clashes this year, killing dozens.Mr. Duque after he won office in 2018, riding a surging right-wing movement. Three years into his term, he is presiding over high unemployment and an angry electorate.Andres Stapff/Reuters“The three pillars of our overall plan of government, which were legality, entrepreneurship and equality, have been producing results,” Mr. Duque said last week in an interview in South Korea with The New York Times. “Obviously, they were affected by the pandemic. But I think we have demonstrated our resilient spirit.”Mr. Duque’s legacy — and that of his patron, the firebrand former President Álvaro Uribe, who still dominates Colombian politics — is on the line. Colombian voters go to the polls in May, when Gustavo Petro, a former presidential candidate, previous mayor of Bogotá and a onetime guerrilla member, could become the country’s furthest-left leader in its history at a time when leftists are again claiming victories across South America.Mr. Duque can’t run again because of term limits, and his party’s candidate hasn’t been determined. Still, his government faces some of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. Colombia’s economy, trade and investment from abroad were hit hard by the coronavirus, which exacerbated long-running social tensions over stark wealth inequality and police conduct.Colombia’s economy, trade and investment from abroad were hit hard by the coronavirus, which exacerbated long-running social tensions.Federico Rios for The New York TimesHe has also come under increased pressure to tame Colombia’s armed insurgencies and hasten the fulfillment of the government’s peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish acronym FARC, despite his criticism of the terms of the deal on the 2018 campaign trail.In South Korea, Mr. Duque was seeking trade and investment opportunities, such as expansions by Korean manufacturers and increased sales of Colombian coffee, avocados and bananas. He even cited the filming of a South Korean movie — Mr. Duque has long championed creative investments in areas like the arts and research — in Bogotá.The president is trying “to get South Korean investors interested in playing big ball,” said Sergio Guzmán, of the Bogotá-based consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis.The challenge for Mr. Duque, Mr. Guzmán added, is that a victory by Mr. Petro could undo what he and his predecessors had accomplished.“He’s a weak president,” said Mr. Guzmán. “He’s a lame-duck president. He’s a president whose most important legacy will be for his successor not to be able to undo his own policies.”FARC rebels in the mountains of Colombia in 2018. Mr. Duque has come under increased pressure to tame Colombia’s armed insurgencies.Federico Rios for The New York TimesMr. Duque disputed that, saying that his efforts — including wage subsidies and a proposal to widen university access — could help put the economy back on track. Though a protégé of Mr. Uribe, the charismatic leader who revved up the government’s offensive against FARC nearly two decades ago, Mr. Duque never fully fit the populist mold. Born into a politically prominent family, the 45-year-old president worked for years in development banking. He speaks in clipped, think-tank English: “I will give you very concise numbers,” he said at one point before doing exactly that.He was elected after campaigning on increasing economic growth and changing the terms of the peace accord with FARC, but he quickly ran into challenges. In 2019, frustration over the lack of opportunities and possible pension changes sparked mass protests. So did a tax proposal this year meant to close a fiscal hole exacerbated by the pandemic.Mr. Duque’s tax proposal had merit, said Luis Fernando Mejía, director of the Colombian research institute Fedesarrollo, but he seemed unable to sell it to the public.The firebrand former President Álvaro Uribe, who still dominates Colombian politics.Federico Rios for The New York Times“It was a very, very good reform,” he said, “but he was not able to consolidate political capital and to create an adequate strategy to push through a reform that I think had been very important.”Mr. Duque is also trying to thread the policy needle in a polarized time, making it increasing difficult to please both his party’s base and unhappy voters.The tax protests became part of broader unrest over inequality and police violence. Some police used brutal and deadly force on demonstrators.In the interview, Mr. Duque cited his efforts to increase scrutiny on the police and to equip them with body cameras. But he said some of the demonstrators had been spurred by “people producing fake news” and other instigators to elevate the violence.His trickiest balancing act may be enacting the peace accord with FARC. In 2019, his effort to alter the terms, including tougher sentencing for war crimes, failed on legal grounds. Internationally, he is under intense pressure to carry out the accord, but domestically, his party and other conservatives continue to criticize it.Students protesting against changes to the tax code in Bogotá, the capital, in 2019.Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust weeks ahead of the deal’s five-year anniversary, more than half of its measures have not been applied or have barely begun, according to the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, an independent entity charged with oversight of the deal. Opposition groups and some of the electorate say Mr. Duque missed a critical window to push it forward.Mr. Duque and his supporters point to the accord’s time frame, which calls for its tenets to be enacted over 15 years. In the interview, he said that he had done more than his predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, to put in place the peace deal’s landownership overhauls and development plans that would give poor farmers and former rebels jobs and opportunities.“We have been not only implementing, but the issues that we have been implementing are going to be decisive for the evolution of the accords,” he said, adding, “We have made a good progress.”Mr. Duque must balance competing interests overseas, as well. Tensions have risen between the United States — Colombia’s longtime ally — and China, a growing source of business for the country. China, Colombia’s second-largest trading partner after the United States, has invested in mines in the country and successfully bid on engineering contracts.A temporary hospital set up in April to house Covid patients in Bogotá.Federico Rios for The New York TimesMr. Duque said that the Chinese companies had won the work in open bids and that relations with the United States remained warm. “We try to build our relationship with our partners based on investment and trade and common opportunities. But usually I have to highlight that in the case of the United States, our alliance has been existing for almost 200 years, and we will continue to see the United States as No. 1.”With the United States, relations hit an awkward moment last year when members of Mr. Duque’s party endorsed Donald J. Trump and Republicans in the election, provoking a rare rebuke from the U.S. ambassador.“I think that was unwise,” Mr. Duque said. “I think that should have not been done.”These examples of polarization, he said, have complicated efforts to fix deep-rooted problems. The world is polarized, he said, as people “connect demagoguery and populism with violent sentiments and algorithms and people producing fake news and manipulating the truth.”He added, “That’s why we have concentrated in our administration not to promote polarization, but to move the country to the right direction.”Gustavo Petro, center, during a protest against tax changes in 2019. A former presidential candidate, he could become the country’s furthest-left leader in its history.Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCarlos Tejada More

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      Belarus Leader Lashes Out at the West, a Year After Crushing Protests

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      In an eight-hour news conference, President Aleksandr Lukashenko called Britain an “American lapdog” and took credit for averting World War III.MINSK, Belarus — President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the brutal and erratic ruler of Belarus, summoned his acolytes, docile members of the media and a few independent journalists on Monday to present his version of reality: The tens of thousands of Belarusians who rose up in mass protests against his disputed re-election last year were a clueless minority, he said, manipulated by the insidious West seeking to cleave his country from Russia.He insisted that his actions were not only justified, but had actually preserved world peace.“Today, Belarus is the center of attention of the whole world,” he proclaimed in the course of an eight-hour news conference in his vast, marble-floored Palace of Independence. “If we had shown weakness during the protests,” he asserted, it would have precipitated a new world war.While Mr. Lukashenko has worked hard to support his view of events, it is widely dismissed as nonsense by Belarusian activists, Western governments and independent analysts. In fact, they say, after blatantly stealing the election he ordered his law enforcement agencies to crack down on protesters using violence unseen in Europe for decades.Since then, he has driven hundreds of opposition leaders and others into exile, scrambled a fighter jet to force down a commercial plane carrying an opposition activist, and silenced independent media outlets by jailing entire newsrooms. He has paid several visits to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, seeking financial help to buoy his country’s sanctions-stricken economy.On Monday, a year after the most serious challenge to his rule, Mr. Lukashenko struck a defiant tone, receiving rapturous applause from most people in the audience as he held forth without taking a single break. Outside the palace, walls were decorated with photos of him with foreign dignitaries, and one displayed personal photos from his youth.Mr. Lukashenko lashed out at the few Western journalists who asked questions about the allegations that his regime is torturing its opponents and repressing civil society.“There were no repressions and there will be no repressions in the future because I do not need that, it would be like shooting myself in the head,” he said. His assertion contradicts findings by the United Nations; a Belarusian human rights organization, Viasna; and other watchdogs.He acknowledged that a prison in Minsk’s main detention center was “not a resort” as he had referred to it earlier in his address, but he denied allegations of torture, resorting instead to whataboutism.“Why have you killed a girl in Congress?” he asked a journalist from CNN, referring to the death of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by a police officer as she and other rioters raided the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. After that, Mr. Lukashenko said, “a question about repressions against civil society from my part just can’t be compared to the situation in your country.”He also belittled the Belarusian Olympic athlete Kristina Timanovksaya, who last week fled to Poland after openly criticizing her coaches for registering her in a race she had not trained for.“Who is she?” he asked, trying to diminish her record as a sprinter.Members of Mr. Lukashenko’s cabinet, pro-government bloggers and mostly friendly journalists from the region frequently interjected to show their support, to thank their president and to push back at the few critical questions from other journalists.Mr. Lukashenko has been living in his own, imagined world “for many years,” said Artyom Shraibman, an independent Belarusian analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, who watched the marathon speech from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. He had fled Belarus, fearing he would be arrested there. Mr. Shraibman said some members of the audience intervened after uncomfortable or challenging questions “to convince Lukashenko that the majority in the room is on his side.”Inside the ornate presidential palace on Monday.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesThose few questions, like one about the economic price of suppressing the largest-scale protest Belarus has seen since independence from the Soviet Union, seemed to throw Mr. Lukashenko off balance.“You can choke on your sanctions,” he said, referring to additional penalties imposed by Britain and the United States on Monday against him and his allies.“We didn’t know what this ‘Britain’ was for 1,000 years, and we don’t want to know it now,” he said. “You are American lap dogs!”The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday added 27 individuals and 17 entities to the list of those under sanctions, which drain the country’s export revenues. Last month, President Biden met with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’s unlikely opposition leader, who was forced to flee the country shortly after claiming victory in the presidential election.Over the years, Mr. Lukashenko has performed a balancing act with his foreign policy, playing the West off against Russia in an effort to preserve his independence while extracting economic succor from both. But Mr. Putin’s support during the protests — including a veiled threat to intervene militarily if necessary — was a critical lifeline for Mr. Lukashenko. Western sanctions have been pushing Mr. Lukashenko even closer to Mr. Putin.But during the news conference, billed as “the big conversation with the president,” Mr. Lukashenko portrayed Russia and Mr. Putin as more dependent on Belarus than vice versa. He asserted that Belarus, which borders Poland and the Baltic States, both NATO members, is Russia’s last bulwark against the West.Following that line of argument, he insisted that the protests against him last year were caused by Western countries seeking to attack “the heart of Russia” by fomenting unrest in Belarus.“Together with the Russian president, we immediately realized what they wanted from us,” he said.Today, his protestations notwithstanding, Mr. Lukashenko’s rule hangs on his personal relationship with Mr. Putin, said Katia Glod, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis. At any moment, Mr. Putin can “make some other decision,” regarding the Belarus leader, she said, for instance “push him toward a referendum” on a new constitution and resignation.While allowing during the news conference that Belarus is in talks with Russia on another $1 billion loan, Mr. Lukashenko insisted that his country would remain independent and never merge with Russia.Visitors at the presidential palace, which features a display of Soviet flags.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMr. Lukashenko has little leverage against the West. But he has been accused by the European Union of retaliating for its sanctions by trying to foment another immigration crisis in Europe when he allowed 4,000 migrants to cross into Lithuania this year, compared with 81 in 2020.“You put us under economic pressure, why should we protect you?” he asked, referring to the E.U.’s measures, which include a ban on commercial flights to Belarus.“If your planes do not fly to our country, some other planes will come,” he said. “And if planes from Afghanistan come, we will also accept them,” he added, referring to the increasing exodus from that country as the Taliban gain control of increasing territory.At the end of the news conference, Mr. Lukashenko issued a warning to the few Western journalists who were admitted to the event.“If you bring this war to us, we will have to respond,” he said. “But in this case our community, our society, is united. You can’t break us.”At that, nearly the entire audience rose in a rousing ovation. 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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      Why Top Democrats Are Listening to Eric Adams Right Now

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      Some prominent Democrats think their party’s nominee for mayor of New York offers a template for how to address issues of public safety.When Eric Adams won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, his supporters in Congress were bombarded with questions about him from colleagues representing districts in Michigan and Florida, Chicago and Los Angeles.When a national group of Irish American Democrats gathered in Manhattan recently to toast President Biden’s victory, Mr. Adams was there too, touting his admiration for Irish American former co-workers in the Police Department.And in the span of a week, Mr. Adams met with Mr. Biden at the White House and with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on Capitol Hill. He appeared with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to discuss combating gun violence. And he stood with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, endorsing her proposal for federal gun trafficking legislation.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has been his party’s mayoral nominee for less than three weeks. But already, many national Democrats appear eager to elevate the former New York police captain, as gun violence shatters parts of major American cities and Republicans seek to caricature their opponents as naïve about crime.Mr. Adams, for his part, is seizing the mayoral bully pulpit, moving to cement a national reputation as a Democrat who speaks with uncommon authority about both public safety and police reform.“Every year, you have these different playbooks,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee who recently encountered Mr. Adams on the set of ABC’s “This Week.”“He has the commanding playbook for the moment,” she said.In some ways, it is a difficult playbook to replicate. Mr. Adams, who will be New York’s second Black mayor if he wins in November, as expected, grew up in poverty and says he was beaten by police officers before joining the force himself.He spent years drawing attention for challenging police misconduct, only to emerge as the most public safety-minded candidate in this year’s mayoral primary. His striking trajectory and promises to combat inequality helped him connect with a broad swath of Black and Latino voters and with some white working-class New Yorkers. And the buzz around him now is due in part to interest in the likely next mayor of the nation’s largest city.But some party officials and lawmakers also say that Mr. Adams offers a template for how to discuss matters of crime and justice, urgent issues for Democratic candidates across the country as the early contours of the 2022 midterm campaigns take shape.“He’s a unique messenger carrying a message that we should all be carrying,” said Representative Thomas Suozzi, Democrat of New York.Whether party leaders are ultimately comfortable with Mr. Adams as a national standard-bearer will hinge on how he governs, should he win, following a primary campaign in which he faced significant scrutiny over issues of transparency and ethics tied to tax and real estate disclosures, his fund-raising practices and even issues of residency. But for now, many Democrats seem ready to promote Mr. Adams, whose primary win has fueled fresh intraparty debates about which kinds of candidates best represent the base of the Democratic Party. And the good relations Mr. Adams is working on building with Democratic leaders could yield help from Washington — where the city already has powerful representation — as New York emerges from the pandemic.Some argue that Mr. Adams’s victory is a potent reminder that many Black and Latino voters object to the most far-reaching efforts to curtail the power of the police, even as those same voters revile police misconduct.Mr. Adams insists that those views are not inherently in conflict, and he has not shied away from bluntly challenging left-wing Democrats on the subject. Last fall, a conference call of House Democrats devolved into an emotional brawl over key issues, including whether the “defund the police” movement had damaged their candidates — a subject that remains deeply divisive within the party in New York and nationally.David Axelrod, the veteran political strategist, said Democrats who believe that “the policing issue was a negative in 2020 for Democratic candidates” appear especially interested in Mr. Adams’s pitch.“Whether they’re in love with him or not, they seem to be in love with his message,” he said. “Adams gives you a way to talk about crime and civil and human rights in the same sentence.”Mr. Adams met with President Biden at the White House and with Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, on Capitol Hill. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Suozzi said that colleagues from other states have taken note of Mr. Adams’s primary victory and peppered him with questions about the candidate. Representative Adriano Espaillat, another New York Democrat who backed Mr. Adams, said he has had similar experiences — and added that strong relationships between the federal government and the city’s next mayor have tangible implications for New Yorkers.“We’re joined at the hip,” he said. “I’m sure he recognizes that and he’ll try to make his voice be heard here.”Mr. Adams is engaged on his local agenda, including weighing his transition, he has said. But he also has federal priorities, including a focus on what the current infrastructure negotiations and federal resources to combat gun violence mean for New York.“Eric is always going to leverage whatever political capital he has on behalf of the city,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams.But given Mr. Adams’s message around public safety, justice and combating inequality, Mr. Thies said there may also be opportunities “to talk to mayors who are struggling with the same problems across the country, and members of Congress who are facing tough re-elections or candidates who are running for office outside of New York.”In recent weeks, Mr. Adams has appeared to relish his turn on the national stage, declaring himself the “face of the new Democratic Party” before he had even won the nomination.Celinda Lake, who was one of Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign pollsters, said national Democrats have so far been taken by Mr. Adams’s life story and the diverse coalition he built, adding that some believe he offers a vital new perspective on policing issues ahead of the midterm elections.“A lot of Democrats are really nervous about that issue and are really, really intrigued by the idea of having such a great new voice,” she said.On the day before Primary Day, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, endorsed Mr. Adams. Less than a week after he emerged as the winner, Mr. Adams, rather than the current mayor of New York City, was at the White House discussing ways to combat gun violence, and soon after the administration featured him in an Instagram video. Mr. Adams also posed right next to Mr. Biden in a photo from the White House.“If he can show that you can be both pro-law enforcement and pro-reasonable reforms, then he will greatly help the perception of Democrats when it comes to criminal justice,” said Representative Brendan F. Boyle of Pennsylvania, an early Biden endorser.Still, many Democrats caution against drawing sweeping political conclusions from a pandemic-era municipal primary that was decided by fewer than 7,200 votes. Mr. Espaillat suggested that applying lessons from deep-blue New York City to the midterms landscape has limitations, noting that “it’s a whole different ballgame internally in every district.”And while Mr. Adams prevailed at the top of the ticket, candidates with more left-wing messages won elsewhere on the ballot.“It’s about having a strong message and actually working hard, and what a lot of people are taking from this election is the split between what happened at the highest level and what happened everywhere else,” said City Councilman Antonio Reynoso, who won the primary for Brooklyn borough president.Mr. Adams is hardly the first mayoral nominee to be embraced by the national party early, reflecting the stature of New York City.Mayor Bill de Blasio was initially celebrated by many Democrats as a champion of economic equity and police reform, with glossy national coverage of his family.But as he faced the challenging realities of governing and his administration experienced numerous controversies, his star faded.Mr. Adams met recently with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at a Brooklyn church. “Eric is always going to leverage whatever political capital he has on behalf of the city,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesStill, there is no question that Mr. Adams has quickly made a national splash.Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, Ohio, the president of the United States Conference of Mayors, has been texting with Mr. Adams and intends to speak with him soon, she said. She plans to invite him to the Conference’s annual meeting, slated for Austin toward the end of the summer.Mr. Adams is also navigating critical relationships closer to home. He met with Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, over the weekend. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, among others, has also reached out.And then there is his dynamic with the governor, historically a fraught relationship for mayors to manage.Ahead of the joint appearance with Mr. Cuomo, the governor’s team said that the attire for the event involved ties, according to someone familiar with the conversation. (Mr. Thies declined to comment. “We made no requests, but we told them what others were wearing to inform their own decisions,” said Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo.)When the two men appeared together at a Brooklyn church, Mr. Cuomo was indeed in a suit and tie. Mr. Adams had decided to chart his own course.“I said it then and I’ll say it again,” declared a tieless Mr. Adams. “I am the face of the Democratic Party.” More

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      Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York

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      Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York. More

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      Eric Adams Has Plans for New York, Beyond Public Safety

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      Mr. Adams, the Democratic mayoral nominee, has stances on policing, transportation and education that suggest a shift from Mayor Bill de Blasio.In the afterglow of winning the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, Eric Adams began to set out his mission if elected in November.“Safety, safety, safety,” Mr. Adams said in one interview. “Making our city safe,” he said in another.On Thursday, as a torrential storm flooded the city’s subway stations, Mr. Adams offered another priority: Fast-track the city’s congestion pricing plan, which would charge fees to motorists entering Manhattan’s core, so that the money could be used to make critical improvements to the aging system.The two initiatives encapsulate Mr. Adams’s self-characterization as a blue-collar candidate: Make the streets and the subway safe and reliable for New York’s working-class residents.But they also hint at the challenges that await the city’s next mayor.To increase public safety, Mr. Adams has said he would bring back a contentious plainclothes anti-crime unit that focused on getting guns off the streets. The unit was effective, but it was disbanded last year amid criticism of its reputation for using excessive force, and for its negative impact on the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.Congestion pricing was opposed by some state lawmakers, who wanted to protect the interests of constituents who needed to drive into Manhattan. But even though state officials approved the plan two years ago, it has yet to be introduced: A key review board that would guide the tolling structure has yet to be named; its six members are to be appointed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is controlled by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.Mr. Adams, who would be the city’s second Black mayor, would face other steep challenges: steering the city out of the pandemic; navigating the possibility of a new City Council trying to push him to the left; grappling with significant budget deficits once federal recovery aid is spent.How he intends to accomplish it all is still somewhat theoretical, but he has offered a few concrete proposals — some costly, and with no set ways to pay for them — mixed in with broader ideas.Some of New York City’s mayoral transitions have reflected wild swings from one ideology to another. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, ran on a promise to end the city’s vast inequities, which he said had worsened under his billionaire predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg. The gentle and consensus-building David N. Dinkins was succeeded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a hard-charging former federal prosecutor.Privately, Mr. de Blasio supported Mr. Adams in the competitive primary, believing that he was the person best suited to carry on Mr. de Blasio’s progressive legacy, and if Mr. Adams defeats the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, an abrupt change in the city’s direction is unlikely.But in some ways, Mr. Adams has staked out positions on issues like affordable housing, transportation and education that suggest a shift from Mr. de Blasio’s approach.On policing, Mr. Adams, who has pledged to name the city’s first female police commissioner, has already spoken to three potential candidates, and is believed to favor Juanita Holmes, a top official who was lured out of retirement by the current police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea. Mr. Adams has also vowed to work with federal officials to crack down on the flow of handguns into the city, and he has expressed concerns about how bail reform laws, approved by state lawmakers in 2019, may be contributing to a recent rise in violent crime.On education, Mr. Adams is viewed as friendly toward charter schools and he does not want to get rid of the specialized admissions test that has kept many Black and Latino students out of the city’s elite high schools, a departure from Mr. de Blasio’s stance. He has also proposed opening schools year-round and expanding the universal prekindergarten program by offering reduced-cost child care for children under 3.Transportation and safety advocates hope that Mr. Adams, an avid cyclist, will have a more intuitive understanding of their calls for better infrastructure. He has promised to build 150 new miles of bus lanes and busways in his first term, and 300 new miles of protected bike lanes, a significant expansion of Mr. de Blasio’s efforts.Increasing the supply of affordable housing was a central goal of Mr. de Blasio’s administration, and Mr. Adams supports the mayor’s highly debated plan to rezone Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighborhood to allow for hundreds of affordable units.Mr. Adams has said he supports selling the air rights to New York City Housing Authority properties to help finance improvements to authority buildings.  Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Adams also supports a proposal to convert hotels and some of the city’s own office buildings to affordable housing units. The proposal originated with real estate industry leaders, who have watched their office buildings empty out during the pandemic.Mr. Adams favors selling the air rights above New York City Housing Authority properties to developers, an idea the de Blasio administration floated in 2018. Mr. Adams has said the sales might yield $8 billion, which the authority could use to pay for improvements at the more than 315 buildings it manages.Mr. Adams is viewed as pro-development — he supported a deal for an Amazon headquarters in Queens and a rezoning of Industry City in Brooklyn, both abandoned after criticism from progressive activists — and he was supported in the primary by real estate executives and wealthy donors.During his campaign, Mr. Adams met three times with the Partnership for New York City, a Wall Street-backed business nonprofit, according to Kathryn Wylde, the group’s president. Ms. Wylde expressed appreciation for Mr. Adams’s focus on public safety — a matter of great importance to her members — and confidence that he would be more of a check on the City Council, which she said was constantly interfering with business operations.“I think with Adams, we’ll have a shot that he will provide some discipline,” Ms. Wylde said. “Why? Because he’s not afraid of the political left.”Some of Mr. Adams’s stances have drawn criticism from progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Maya Wiley in the Democratic primary.Alyssa Aguilera, an executive director of VOCAL-NY Action Fund, said that “having a former N.Y.P.D. captain in Gracie Mansion” only means “further protections and funding for failed law enforcement tactics.”“With that framework, it’s hard to believe he’s going to make any substantial changes to the size and scope of the N.Y.P.D. and that’s what many of us are hoping for,” Ms. Aguilera said.Mr. Adams, a former police officer, has expressed confidence that, under him, the Police Department could use stop-and-frisk tactics without violating people’s rights. Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesMr. Adams insists that even though he has been characterized as a centrist, he views himself as a true progressive who can meld left-leaning concepts with practical policies.To address poverty, for example, Mr. Adams has proposed $3,000 tax credits for poor families — an idea he said was superior to his primary rival Andrew Yang’s local version of universal basic income.“There’s a permanent group of people that are living in systemic poverty,” Mr. Adams said recently on “CBS This Morning.” “You and I, we go to the restaurant, we eat well, we take our Uber, but that’s not the reality for America and New York. And so when we turn this city around, we’re going to end those inequalities.”To deal with the homelessness crisis, Mr. Adams has proposed integrating housing assistance into hospital stays for indigent and homeless people, and increasing the number of facilities for mentally ill homeless people, especially those who are not sick enough to stay in a hospital but are too unwell for a shelter.Mr. Adams did not emphasize climate change or environmental issues on the campaign trail. But in his Twitter post about the subway flooding on Thursday, he called for using congestion pricing funds to “add green infrastructure to absorb flash storm runoff.”His campaign has pointed to initiatives from his tenure as borough president: helping to expand the Brooklyn Greenway, a coastal bike and walking corridor, not only for recreation but for flood mitigation; and improving accountability for the post-Hurricane Sandy reconstruction process. Those actions are dwarfed by the sweeping change he will be called on to oversee as mayor — particularly by a City Council with many new members who campaigned on a commitment to mitigate and prepare for the effects of rising seas and extreme weather on a port city with a 520-mile coastline.Mr. Adams expresses confidence that he can reinstate the plainclothes police squad and use stop-and-frisk tactics without violating people’s rights, contending that his administration can effectively monitor data related to police interactions in real time, and intervene if there are abuses.“We are not going back to the days where you are going to stop, frisk, search and abuse every person based on their ethnicity and based on the demographics or based on the communities they’re in,” Mr. Adams said on MSNBC last week. “You can have precision policing without heavy-handed abusive policing.”When some subway stations flooded on Thursday, Mr. Adams called for using money raised through a congestion pricing plan to make the system more resilient against bad storms. Fiona Dhrimaj, via ReutersMr. Adams seems most likely to differ from Mr. de Blasio on matters of tone and governing style.He is known for working round-the-clock, while Mr. de Blasio has been pilloried for arriving late to work and appearing apathetic about his job. Mr. de Blasio is a Red Sox fan who grew up in the Boston area and lives in brownstone Brooklyn; Mr. Adams, a lifelong New Yorker, was raised in Jamaica, Queens, by a single mother who cleaned homes. He roots for the Mets. Mr. Adams will come into office in a powerful position because of the diverse coalition he assembled of Black, Latino and white voters outside Manhattan.“De Blasio spoke about those communities; Eric speaks to the communities,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University. “There’s a real difference. De Blasio was talented as a campaigner. Eric is going to be a doer.”Where Mr. de Blasio rode into City Hall as a critic of the police and a proponent of reform, he will end his term buried in criticism that he ultimately pandered to the department — a shift that many attribute to a moment, early in his tenure, when members of the Police Department turned their backs on him at an officer’s funeral.Officers were upset that Mr. de Blasio spoke about talking to his biracial son about how to safely interact with the police, a conversation that the parents of most Black children have. As mayor, Mr. Adams said he would gather with officers around the city for a different version of “the conversation.”“I’m your mayor,” Mr. Adams said he would tell officers. “What you feel in those cruisers, I felt. I’ve been there. But let me tell you something else. I also know how it feels to be arrested and lying on the floor of the precinct and have someone kick you in your groin over and over again and urinate blood for a week.”Mr. Adams will most likely be different from Mr. de Blasio in another way: He mischievously told reporters last week that he would be fun to cover. Indeed, he was photographed on Wednesday getting an ear pierced; the next day, he was seen dining at Rao’s, an exclusive Italian restaurant in Harlem, with the billionaire Republican John Catsimatidis.“He got his ear pierced and went to Rao’s,” Mr. Moss said. “He’s going to enjoy being a public personality.”Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Matthew Haag, Winnie Hu, Andy Newman and Ali Watkins. More

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      ‘New York City Is a World Unto Itself.’ But It May Tell Us Where Democrats Are Headed.

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      On the Democratic side of the New York mayoral contest, Eric Adams, the African-American former police captain and Brooklyn borough president, continues to hold a lead over Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley. From a national vantage point, the most significant element of Adams’s campaign so far lies in his across-the-board success with working class voters of all races and ethnicities.Before we turn to the possible national implications of the race, we have to understand the extent of Adams’s victory, at least as far as first-choice balloting went. In census tracts with a majority or plurality of whites without college degrees, Adams — who repeatedly declared on the campaign trail that “the prerequisite for prosperity is public safety” — led after stage one of the New York City Democratic primary last week, according to data provided to The Times by John Mollenkopf, director of the Graduate Center for Urban Research at C.U.N.Y.Adams took 28.5 percent of the first-choice ballots among these white voters, compared with the 17.1 percent that went to Garcia, who is white and has served as both sanitation commissioner and interim chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, and the 15.4 percent that went to Wiley, an African- American who has been both legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a New York Police Department watchdog.Adams’s strength in non-college white tracts shows that his campaign made substantially larger inroads than either Garcia or Wiley among white working class voters, a constituency in which the national Democratic Party has suffered sustained losses.On Staten Island, the most conservative of the five boroughs, Adams led the first-choice voting with 31 percent to Garcia’s 20 percent and Wiley’s 17 percent. In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Staten Island with 61.6 percent of the vote.Adams’s biggest margins were in Black majority non-college tracts, where he won with 59.2 percent to Wiley’s 24.4 percent and Garcia’s 4.7 percent. In Black majority college-educated tracts, Adams won a plurality, 37.5 percent, to Wiley’s 32.5 percent and Garcia’s 13.0 percent.Counting all the census tracts with a majority or plurality of adult voters who do not have college degrees, Adams won decisively with 42.1 percent — compared with Wiley’s 19.7 percent and Garcia’s 10.3 percent. Both Wiley and Garcia continue to pose a threat to Adams because they have more support among college educated voters, who make up roughly 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. According to Mollenkopf’s data, in census tracts with a majority of college-educated adults, Adams’s support fell to 14.7 percent, Wiley’s rose to 26.2 percent and Garcia won a plurality at 34.9 percent.If elected in November, either Garcia or Wiley would be the first woman to serve as mayor of New York — the first Black woman in Wiley’s case. In the first round, Garcia was strongest among college-educated whites, among whom she was the biggest vote-getter, while Wiley’s winning constituencies were college-educated Black and Hispanic voters.Mark Peterson/ReduxGrowing public anxiety over the sharp increase in gun violence in New York proved crucial to Adams’s success, although it was not the whole story. A May Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos NYC Mayoral Primary Poll of 3,249 New Yorkers found that crime and violence topped the list of concerns, outpacing affordable housing, Covid and racial injustice. Through June 6 of this year, 687 people were wounded or killed by gunfire in the city, the highest number for that period since 2000.The results in the mayoral primary so far are evidence of the continuing power of Black voters to act as a moderating force in a Democratic Party that has seen growing numbers of white voters shift decisively to the left. The results also suggest that Adams’s strategy of taking a strong stand on public safety in support of the police, combined with a call to end abusive police practices, is an effective way for the party to counter the small but significant Black and Hispanic defections to the Republican Party that began to emerge in the 2020 presidential election.I posed a series of questions about the implications of the still-unresolved New York City Democratic Primary to a group of scholars and analysts.Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, argues that the initial tally affirmed a basic but often overlooked truth about the Democratic Party nationwide:The outcomes are more evidence of an innumerate punditry that conflates the share of educated, professional voters who support the Democratic Party with their electoral clout. It remains true that a majority of Democratic voters are working class without college degrees. So it is the same dynamic in New York that played out in the presidential race. While other candidates battled over of the support of the highly educated segments (of all races), Biden understood where the votes were.While most of the national attention has focused on levels of education in shaping the partisanship of white voters — with the more educated moving left and the less well educated moving right — a parallel split has been quietly developing within the multiracial Democratic coalition. Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, elaborated in his reply to my email:There has been a growing education and age divide in the Democratic Party beyond racial divisions. Additionally, Adams tapped into an N.Y.C. pattern of politicians winning with strong “outer borough” ethnic support. In the past it was white ethnics — Italians, Irish and Poles living in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — who supported the Tammany-style politicians. Today it is Hispanics and Blacks from different parts of the diaspora supporting Adams, who leveraged his shared background with voters, with ties to powerful political institutions (e.g., municipal unions) much like Tammany.Older Black voters, La Raja continued,will continue to be a moderating force in the Democratic Party. They deliver votes and they are pragmatic in their vote choices. They bear the traces of New Deal liberalism with bread-and-butter concerns about jobs, education and safe neighborhoods to raise families.There are significant differences between the values and agendas that shape the voting decisions of the Garcia constituency, of the Wiley electorate, and of those Black voters who were the core of Adams’s support, La Raja notes:Garcia won the good government progressives and liberals south of 110th street in Manhattan, who are more likely to be executives at major institutions of finance, technology, entertainment and fashion. These voters want a livable city to support their institutions. They — like The New York Times editorial board — believe Garcia is the most credible on managing city operations. Wiley, in contrast, gets the young progressives just across the river in Brooklyn and Queens who haven’t quite made it up the career ladder yet. They have fewer institutional responsibilities. They are less likely to vote out of a desire to get well-functioning government and more based on their personal values.Jonathan Rieder, a sociologist at Barnard and the author of “Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism,” had more to say in his reply:The local discussion of crime gets entangled in the national culture war within the Democratic Party and within “liberalism.” As with “limousine liberalism” before it, what some dub “woke” liberalism flourishes in the zones of the educated and often affluent whose lives, neighborhoods and moral understandings differ from those of working and middle class people.Because of this, Rieder contends, the party remains caught in what has become a 50-year “battle between what used to be called ‘lunch-pail’ Democrats and more righteous ones, between James Clyburn and AOC.”Rieder argues thatFor all the gradual shrinkage of white non-college voters, the Democrats still require a multicultural middle to include non-affluent and lesser educated whites in their majority coalition. And that will be hard to secure if the party is identified with ceding the border, lawlessness, ignoring less privileged whites, exclusionary versions of anti-racist diversity that smack of thought reform, phrasing like Latinx that large numbers of Latinos find off-putting, esoteric or perplexing, and so much more.Taking a more optimistic stance, Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton, acknowledges that the primary “reflected these intraparty divisions along lines of race, income and education,” but, he argues,What was more surprising was the level of cohesion. Candidates from a wide range of backgrounds ran and, overall, there was remarkably little race-baiting rhetoric. In the final high-pressure days of the campaign, calls to vote along racial or ethnic lines did increase but, given the high level of diversity in the candidate pool and in New York City more broadly, the relatively limited presence of appeals to in-group solidarity or out-group antipathy was remarkable. While some of this behavior is specific to New York, it also likely reflects a strong norm among elite Democrats more generally that certain kinds of ethnic threat and resentment politics are off-limits.Wasow agrees that Black voters have become a moderating force in Democratic politics:Put simply, direct experiences of racism and dreams deferred appears to have forged a more moderate or pragmatic politics among African Americans. Where the whiter, more liberal wing of the Democratic Party was considerably more optimistic about the country’s willingness to elect a woman, a democratic socialist or a person of color, African Americans exhibited far more skepticism. Given the narrow margins with which President Biden won, the Black assessment of national white voting behavior does seem to have been more accurate.For two generations, Wasow continued, “Democrats have struggled to articulate a response to attacks that they’re ‘soft on crime.’ Some candidates co-opted toughness and others emphasized ‘root causes’ but ‘law and order’ kept winning.”In this context, according to Wasow, “Adams’s activism as a cop against police abuse is a powerful embodiment of the position that recognizes both demand for reform and desire for public safety.”Adams affirmed this two-pronged stance toward policing and crime on his website:Our city faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens to undo the progress we have made against crime. Gun arrests, shootings and hate crimes are up; people do not feel safe in their homes or on the street. As a police officer who patrolled the streets in a bulletproof vest in the 1990s, I watched lawlessness spread through our city, infecting communities with the same terrible swiftness of Covid-19.At the same time, Adams declared,We face a crisis of confidence in our police. I understand that mistrust because as a young man, police beat my brother and I at a precinct house — and we still carry the pain of that. I called out racism in the NYPD as an officer and helped push through reforms, including the successful effort to stop the unlawful use of Stop-and-Frisk. The debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice: You are either with police, or you are against them. That is simply wrong because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD — we just need them to be better.The strong appeal to Black voters of a candidate like Adams who combines calls to reform police behavior while simultaneously pushing for aggressive enforcement to increase public safety can be seen in the results of a survey Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, conducted with colleagues during the week after George Floyd’s murder.Specifically, Weaver found that:40.5 percent of Black respondents (compared to just 16.7 percent of whites) strongly agreed with this statement: “I have rights as a matter of law, but not in reality.” 60 percent of Black Americans agreed ‘The Constitution doesn’t really protect us from the police’ (compared to 32 percent of whites). Similar breakdowns occurred on “the official rules say the police can’t do certain things but in reality, they can do whatever they want.”Weaver summed up her findings:The responses show some alarming divergences in how Americans of different racial positions understand their citizenship, the logic of governing authority, and whether the law applies to everyone equally.Jim Sleeper, the author of “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York,” wrote me (citing his friend Curtis Arluck, a Democratic district leader in Manhattan):Garcia ran better than Wylie among older white voters, even those who skew pretty far left. So she did much better on the Upper West Side, the West Village, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope than in the East Village, Astoria or Williamsburg. And Wylie performed much better among younger and more affluent Black voters than those who were older and more working class. Both older white liberal voters and older less affluent Black voters saw Wiley as too “woke.”If Garcia has more second place votes to be allocated from lesser candidates, Sleeper notes, she “could well overtake Wylie for second place.” That may not be enough for Garcia to capture first place, according to Sleeper’s reckoning. If Wiley is dropped reducing the final count to Adams versus Garcia, “enough Wylie votes will go for Adams second, so that Adams should prevail.”Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, who founded the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture with her husband Peter Steinfels, argues that Adams’s lead rests on four factors:(A) the “crime wave” that became the hot issue in the campaign; (B) on Adams’s story of experiencing police abuse and then being in the police; (C) on the emerging sense that Black voters are “moderates” — pace the views of progressives and young B.L.M. advocates (Black and white) — that N.Y.C. is a union city and that Adams had important endorsements; (D) Adams was pretty clearly the “working class” candidate and he campaigned in relevant districts. Defunding the police, which Adams opposes, is not a winning policy as Biden’s announcements on crime this past week underlined.Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, wrote to me to say that:The New York voting clearly undermines progressives’ claims that a bold agenda on issues like policing is the best way to bring out the Democratic base. That certainly was not the case with New York Latinos and Blacks.Recognition of these patterns is crucial for Democrats seeking to maintain high levels of minority support, Suro continued:The same differences among Latinos in New York plays out nationally. Older, working class Latinos shifted to the Republicans across the country last November amid Trump’s claims that Democrats are dangerously radical. The New York results suggests that segment of the Latino electorate might be susceptible to Republican campaigns next year, painting Democrats as anti-police.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, put it succinctly: “Black voters are a moderating force and should tell the party to focus on economic, health care, and equality issues, and less on culture war issues.”Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, disputed the argument that Black voters have become a moderating force within the Democratic Party:The pre-election polling data suggests that Maya Wiley is the second choice candidate among African-American voters, despite having a political message that is far more progressive on the issues than a number of other candidates, notably on police reform. That ought to push back against a narrative that Black voters are necessarily more moderate than the rest of the party. Wiley is a very progressive candidate and has ample support from African- Americans, losing only to a more moderate Democrat, and outdistancing a number of more conservative Democrats.“New York City is a world unto itself, making it hard to discern national trends from its voting patterns,” cautioned Doug Massey, a Princeton sociologist who has written extensively about urban America.“That said,” Massey continued,The election results would seem to confirm that Black and Hispanic voters form the core of the Democratic Party’s base. They appear to be strongly motivated by racial justice and progressive economics as well as public safety, but lean toward candidates who have experience and insider knowledge rather than flashy liberals from outside the system who are proclaiming dreamy agendas.Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, in Massey’s view,are insiders to N.Y.C. politics and the bureaucracy with reputations for getting things done, and Wiley appealed to better educated young people and Blacks in Brooklyn, while Garcia appealed to better educated white and Latino Manhattanites. But it was the strong support of working class voters across all the boroughs that has carried the day so far for Adams, with particular strength among Blacks and Latinos but seemingly with some popularity even among blue-collar whites on Staten Island.For all the potential embodied in Adams’ candidacy, there are deep concerns that, if he wins, he could disappoint.Adams is a hardened player in the rough and tumble of New York. I asked Rieder if Adams represents a resolution of the difficulty of developing a credible but nonracist approach to crime and public safety. Rieder replied: “I think he’s such a flawed incarnation of the stance — his history of corruption, his race-baiting — it’s too early to say. Alas.”Adams himself is not given to false modesty. “I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he declared last week. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential elections.”While the unresolved primary fight has come down to a contest between Adams, Garcia and Wiley, it is effectively the contest for mayor because the Republican Party has shrunk to insignificance in the city, despite holding the mayoralty for decades not that long ago. Whichever one of the trio comes out ahead, he or she is very likely to run far ahead of the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Ranked-choice voting — which despite its virtues remains poorly understood by many voters — means we won’t know who the next mayor will be for some time. What we do know is that whoever wins will have a very tough row to hoe.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