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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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      2 Children Out Walking Get Caught Between a Gunman and His Target

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      The harrowing scene in the Bronx, captured on surveillance video, came about a week after a 10-year-old Queens boy was fatally shot.Two children were caught in the middle of a shooting in the Bronx on Thursday. They were not hurt and were not related to the gunman’s intended target, officials said.via New York Police DepartmentGunfire erupts on a Bronx sidewalk, and several passers-by, including a 5-year-old boy and his 10-year-old sister, rush toward a bodega’s entrance for shelter. But the children collide with a man who is also racing for cover, and all three fall to the pavement before finding safety.As they tumble down together, the children at one point are lying directly between the man, the gunman’s obvious target, and the gunman himself, who continues firing at close range.The girl yanks her brother’s wrist, pulling him to the ground and wrapping him in her chest as his left shoe comes off in the commotion. After about eight seconds, the gunman sprints off.Amazingly, the harrowing scene, captured on surveillance video, ended without either of the children being hurt and the 24-year-old man they were tangled up with in stable condition and expected to survive after being shot in the back and both legs, the police said.Still, the episode was a vivid example of how even the most innocent New Yorkers can suddenly get caught in the crossfire of a recent surge in shootings that has plagued some city neighborhoods and helped make crime a dominant issue in this year’s mayoral race.Just over a week before the Bronx shooting shown in the video, in the Claremont section on Thursday evening, a 10-year-old Queens boy was fatally shot while leaving an aunt’s house in the Rockaways. In May, a 4-year-old girl was among several people shot in Times Square.Cities of all sizes across the United States are confronting increases in gun violence that began amid the pandemic and have persisted through the first half of this year. In New York, 721 people had been shot as of June 13, the most to that point in the year since 2002, Police Department statistics show.The spike comes after a period during which violent crime in the city fell to its lowest levels in more than six decades, with the raw numbers still well below both what some smaller cities have recorded and New York’s own peak levels of the 1980s and ’90s.The city’s overall crime rate — which is based on seven major crimes, including murder, assault and rape — is also the lowest it has been in several decades, thanks largely to declines in reported burglaries and robberies.The rise in gun violence in New York has mostly been concentrated in a few parts of the city, including the Bronx neighborhood where the shooting on Thursday occurred.The area falls in the 44th Precinct, which, in addition to Claremont, covers parts of the Concourse and Highbridge sections and other slices of the southwest Bronx. The precinct had recorded 41 shootings as of June 13, compared with 13 in the same period in 2020, police data shows. Over the past decade, the number has rarely topped 20 by that date.“This is a good neighborhood,” Ante Rodriguez, a home health care aide who lives on the block where the shooting happened, said Friday evening. “You can see that everybody knows each other.”But Mr. Rodriguez, 20, also said he was aware there had been an uptick in shootings in the area.“I’ve seen shootouts before,” he said. “I’ve been shot at myself.”.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;}The two children, whom the police did not identify beyond their ages and saying they were siblings, were walking on the sidewalk when the shooting began near a storefront tucked between apartment buildings on Sheridan Avenue, officials said. They were not related to the man who was shot, the police said.After the gunman finished firing, he jumped onto a waiting scooter being driven by a second man and the two left the area, the police said. No arrests had been made as of Friday evening.Experts and city officials are watching closely to determine whether shootings continue at their current pace through the summer and whether the recent spike is a blip or a harbinger of a long-term trend.The latest weekly figures have begun to more closely resemble last year’s, police data shows, which gun-violence experts noted could suggest that things were not worsening, but also not getting better. They warned, however, that it was too early to draw solid conclusions.On Friday evening, the block where the shooting occurred had returned to a calmer pace: Children were playing on the sidewalk, watched by adults who were sitting on their front steps as others stood and talked nearby.Some residents were nonetheless shaken by the video footage.Noriann Rosado, 45, said she had moved to a new apartment on the block this week, picking up her keys three days ago and starting to bring her belongings over on Thursday. She said that she became aware of the shooting only after seeing it on an Instagram post but that it worried her.“They said it was a good building,” Ms. Rosado said. Now, though, she added, she had begun to wonder about the neighborhood. “I don’t feel OK.” More

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

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

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      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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      N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Name Rivals' Worst Ideas

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      The candidates were encouraged to sling a little mud when moderators asked them to name the worst idea they’d heard from one of their competitors.As might be expected in a race where concerns about crime have dominated, most of the answers and at least one heated exchange were about police and public safety.Both Kathryn Garcia, who has been hesitant to criticize other candidates on a debate stage, and Ray McGuire took issue with rivals who they claimed were oversimplifying the issue of policing.“These are complicated times,” said Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, “and several of my opponents are using hashtags, #DefundthePolice. I just don’t think that’s the right approach. You need to sit down and really think through these things.”Mr. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, said that he thought the movement to defund the police “will end up in disaster for New Yorkers.”Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer and a progressive, then said that she believed that suggestions by Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, to bring back stop-and-frisk policing and a plainclothes anti-crime unit were the worst ideas she had heard on the campaign trail.Then the sparring started, in a lengthy exchange over race and policing that involved the four Black candidates on the stage.First, Mr. Adams deflected Ms. Wiley’s criticism of his proposals by pointing out that her family had helped pay for her neighborhood’s private security patrol. Ms. Wiley tried to deflect the deflection, saying that New Yorkers understood that public safety meant more than increasing policing and required other investments.Then, Mr. McGuire jumped in to say that he thought both defunding the police and the return of stop and frisk were detrimental for “Black and brown” communities. He was quickly attacked by Dianne Morales, who is Afro-Latina, and who noted that many of the activists who started the defund the police movement were Black and Latino and said that Mr. McGuire could not purport to speak for them.“How dare you assume to speak for Black and brown communities as a monolith,” she said. “You cannot do that.”“Yes, I can. I just did,” Mr. McGuire shot back. “You know what else I’m going to do? I’m going to do it again.”After the heated crossfire, Shaun Donovan declined to answer the original question, speaking about one of his own campaign ideas instead of criticizing a rival’s proposal. Ms. Morales then said that she thought adding more police officers to the subway system, an idea supported by several candidates, was the worst suggestion she’d heard.At the start of the segment, Andrew Yang criticized Mr. Adams for once telling off-duty officers to bring their guns to churches to keep them safe. Mr. Adams shot back by criticizing Mr. Yang’s modified version of a universal basic income plan, which would give payments to the poorest New Yorkers. He called the idea “Monopoly money.”Scott Stringer also said the worst ideas he’d heard were Mr. Yang’s, highlighting his suggestions to put a casino on Governors Island, which is not legal, and to entice “TikTok hype houses” to come to the city. More

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      N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates on Police Reform

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

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

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