The False Choice Between Police Reform and Public Safety
Eric Adams, the NYC Democratic Mayoral Primary, and What It Means for America
After the first round of voting in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams (pictured speaking above) leads the field with 31.7% of the vote. Although Adams’ victory isn’t set in stone (NYC is using ranked-choice voting for the first time) he’s in a good position to win the primary and, given the Big Apple’s strong Democratic lean, become the city’s next mayor.
Adams’ success might come as a surprise to some who think of New York City as a bastion of American liberalism, since he cast himself as an alternative to the city’s burgeoning progressive political movement. In fact, much of his campaign seemed premised on repudiating his party’s shift to the left. Following the release of last week’s first round results, Adams declared himself “the new face of the Democratic Party,” adding, “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 election.”
Now it’s a fairly bold move for someone who was not the first choice of over two-thirds of Democratic voters in a city whose politics don’t exactly mirror the nation’s (its past three mayors have all run for president and bombed) to declare himself the “new face” of America’s oldest political party, but Adams does speak to a legitimate concern among Democrats that its increasingly progressive orientation is alienating middle-of-the-road voters. Some may argue Democrats shouldn’t worry much about pleasing moderates if that means abandoning the party’s core principles just to win elections that don’t subsequently translate into meaningful policies that make a positive difference in people’s lives, but if Democrats are running on ideas that wide swaths of voters are rejecting out of hand, Democrats could easily find themselves out of power and unable to pursue any of their agenda, including the popular parts. It also may seem strange to find Americans worried about the radicalism of a party whose policy prescriptions would make the nation more closely resemble (gasp!) Canada and the United Kingdom when the opposition keeps defending a wannabe autocrat who incited a mob to storm the Capitol in order to overturn the results of a democratic election, but hey, that observation also reinforces the stakes we’re dealing with here and why it’s so important for the Democratic Party to succeed politically. Consequently, it is worth examining if Eric Adams is offering Democrats a way forward in these tumultuous times.
One part of Adams’ appeal is his economic populism. Adams pitched himself as a blue-collar candidate and courted working-class black and Latino voters and moderate whites. He campaigned mainly in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx; when he ventured to Manhattan, it was usually to Harlem or Washington Heights. Numerous local unions endorsed his campaign. After pulling into the lead last Tuesday, Adams stated, “[W]e don’t want fancy candidates. We want candidates [whose] nails are not polished, they have callouses on their hands, and they’re blue-collar people.”
Since his campaign relied so heavily on the support of organized labor, Adams will likely go to bat for unions if he becomes mayor. That’s great; one way to strengthen the Democratic Party is to rebuild and expand union power, which would have the effect of improving the lives of working-class Americans. To win over those voters, Adams exploited the class divide within Democratic politics. Adams intuits working-class voters crave authentic, relatable candidates and that many progressive politicians, no matter the strength of their policy proposals, seem a little too bourgeois and a step removed from the day-to-day blue-collar grind. Placing a greater emphasis on recruiting more progressive candidates with populist appeal would help Democrats win the trust of working-class voters, whom many in the party fear are drifting into the Republican camp.
Yet Adams’ connections to real estate interests in the city justifiably trouble progressives, who regard him as a continuation of former mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s pro-developer/pro-landlord inclinations. The concern is that even if Adams is a pro-union mayor, he would still do too little to redistribute wealth and power in one of the most economically unequal cities in the United States. Progressives see in Adams a restoration of the post-New Deal Democratic Party that had a tendency to talk big when it came to labor but did little to change the systemic economic problems that have made it so hard since the 1970s for poor and working-class Americans to get by. It seems much of the politics of the past decade—from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump—has been about getting politicians to actually take a stand for blue-collar Americans rather than pay them lip service. It’s easy to imagine how eight years of an Adams administration could leave working-class New Yorkers more cynical and disengaged from the Democratic Party.
Most pundits, however, have attributed Adams’ success to his position on crime. Adams, who is Black, worked two decades as a police officer, rising to the position of captain. He joined the NYPD not because he saw it as a force for good but to help reform it from within, and he spent his career there as a critic of it, often holding news conferences that drew attention to police brutality and the department’s excessive use of stop-and-frisk. As a candidate for mayor, however, he has positioned himself as a candidate of law and order while blasting calls to “defund the police.” Although he intends to pursue reforms that would hopefully reduce racial profiling in the NYPD, he has also proposed boosting the police budget and hiring more officers. A gun control advocate who wants to reduce the number of handguns on the streets, Adams has also said he would carry a gun as mayor to protect himself.
The New York City mayoral primary campaign took place against a backdrop of rising homicide rates in the city and across the United States. Law enforcement agencies actually reported an overall decline in crime during the COVID-19 pandemic, but murder has been the exception. NYC counted 462 homicides in 2020, a 45% increase over the prior year; through Memorial Day this year homicides were up 23%. Homicides in Washington DC in 2020 were the highest since 2004. Los Angeles has recorded a 22% increase in homicides over the previous year. Similar trends are evident in many American cities.
While other cities like Chicago have struggled more recently with high murder rates (769 in 2020 and 518 in 2019; the last time there were fewer than 400 homicides in a single year was in the mid-1960s) New York City is often looked at as a barometer for violent crime in the United States. The number of murders in the city began rising in the 1960s, going from 482 in 1960 to 1,117 in 1970. Another spike occurred in the 1980s, with homicides peaking in 1990 at 2,245, but that was followed by a sharp decline through much of the 1990s (dropping to 633 in 1998) and then a more gradual decline over the next twenty years. By 2013, the city averaged less than one homicide per day, and as recently as 2017 and 2018 NYC counted fewer than 300 total murders, which hadn’t been achieved since 1950. (See image below, from Wikipedia.) While New York’s 462 murders in 2020 were the most the city had recorded since 2011—a time when people often boasted of the Big Apple’s relatively low crime rate—the sudden burst of violence has conjured bad memories of the 1980s.
Why is homicide on the rise? That’s a good question. Criminologists will admit they don’t have many convincing answers that can explain the current situation or what accounts for increases and decreases generally. Economic conditions might play a role, but homicides don’t follow economic trendlines. Police tactics may also matter, but major changes in tactics (such as New York ending stop-and-frisk) don’t always produce the expected results (homicides continued to fall). Hopefully the current surge in homicides is somehow connected to the atypical social conditions generated by the pandemic and that violence will subside once things begin returning to normal over the coming year.
Many on the right, however, have blamed the surging homicide rate on the protests that erupted after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis thirteen months ago. Republicans said the Democratic mayors of the United States’ largest cities refused to intervene forcefully when the unrest got out of hand and that their efforts to reform police departments to eliminate racial bias in policing hindered the ability of law enforcement agencies to fight crime. It was a cynical argument in the way it marginalized the Black Lives Matter movement, whose concerns about police violence against Black Americans could no longer be denied or explained away by skeptics after video of Floyd’s murder went public. Even when some protests turned violent, it was hard to dismiss demonstrators’ anger and calls for reform as unjustified or unfounded.
One year ago, Americans finally seemed prepared to reckon with the issues of police brutality and systemic racism. With homicide numbers rising, though, Americans seem to have put those issues on the backburner. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from last week indicated 55% of Americans identified violent crime as a “very big problem.” No other issue—not even the economy (41%) nor the pandemic (36%)—rated as high. Nationally, both Republicans (65%) and Democrats (53%) cited violent crime as a major issue. Republicans intend to hammer Democrats and Joe Biden on crime over the coming months. Democrats, meanwhile, still endorse police reform but have distanced themselves from calls to “defund the police” (a dumb slogan Republicans easily exploited for political gain despite Biden’s repudiation of it) by allocating more money to departments. (That still won’t stop Republican attacks or convince Republicans that what they’re saying isn’t true.) The idea of actually increasing police budgets seemed unimaginable just a year ago.
In politics, when certain issues are thrust into the national spotlight, voters tend to trust and follow the lead of the party that is seen to have developed a kind of popular credibility in managing affairs related to that issue. This is called “issue ownership,” and Republicans have long “owned” the issue of crime. Now perhaps their hold on the issue has waned somewhat following 1/6, when a Republican president and his idolaters in Congress inspired a gathering of their supporters to raid the Capitol and assault a bunch of police officers. My guess, however, is most citizens still regard Republicans as the party of “law and order,” a loaded phrase many Americans, either consciously or subconsciously, understand to entail not just crime prevention and law enforcement but also a willingness to crackdown on illegal immigration, combat terrorism, confront and control protesters, and aggressively police Black men.
When Republicans harp about law and order, they tend to rely upon and reinforce the frame through which Americans have come to understand that issue. For a while there last year, Republicans lost control of that frame. In the time since Floyd’s death, however, the Right has slowly reasserted their control over the law-and-order frame by turning the call for just policing into a choice between reform and a crimewave. Their suggestion is you cannot have one without the other, that police cannot keep crime in check if they lack the resources and leeway needed to level up to the criminal threat. The rotten assumption at the core of that idea is that the police can only do their job and keep people safe so long as they are permitted to treat any person of color as a dangerous suspect.
That, of course, is a false choice. It is possible to have good policing, a safe society, and unbiased policing all at once. That will take work, however, work that involves not just additional racial bias training but reversing the militaristic orientation of many law enforcement agencies and augmenting the public safety mission of police departments with social service support. There is an opportunity here after the death of George Floyd and in the wake of the pandemic to review the way law enforcement agencies do their work and institute reforms. We’ll be unable to do that, however, if we continue to buy into the frame that would have us believe reform costs us security.
Although I live in a metropolitan area of over 6.3 million people, I’ve never lived in a high crime neighborhood. I can imagine, however, the anxiety people feel living in neighborhoods plagued by gun violence, so I do not hold anything against those who would vote for a candidate promising to take action to reduce violent crime in their communities. Adams may just be the candidate these voters, who are disproportionately people of color, are looking for: As a former cop, Adams knows his way around the issue of public safety and what it takes to be an effective police officer, but as a Black man also understands at a very personal level how police power can be abused and how racial bias seeps into policing. He has summed up his position by stating, “America is saying, we want to have justice, and safety, and end inequality.” That’s the sort of synthesis many residents of high-crime neighborhoods have been looking for, and the sort of nuanced position the media struggle to convey to voters. Given his background, Adams may be uniquely situated to both take on crime and reform police departments.
Adams’ dismissive attitude toward progressivism, however, is distressing because it runs the risk of playing into the conservative frame that crime can’t be reduced if police departments are compelled to reform. Again, that’s a false choice. One has to worry Adams might try to prove to voters he is cracking down on crime by putting the brakes on reform efforts. If he were to do that, Adams wouldn’t be the new face of the Democratic Party at all. Instead, he would resemble the last generation of Democratic politicians who sympathized with voters’ concerns about racial bias in the criminal justice system while endorsing law enforcement policies that ultimately left them disenchanted.
Thanks for reading.
Further reading: “‘Keep an Eye on This Guy’: Inside Eric Adams’ Complicated Police Career” by Rothfeld, et al., New York Times, June 19, 2021; “Staving Off GOP Attacks, Democrats Show New Urgency on Crime” by Alexander Burns, New York Times, June 23, 2021; “What Does Eric Adams, Working Class Champion, Mean for the Democrats?” by Katie Glueck, New York Times, June 26, 2021
Photo credit: Eric Adams Facebook page
Exit Music: “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin (1973, Houses of the Holy)