Black Lives Matter vs. Eric Adams Anti-police activists test the Mayor-elect’s resolve to reduce crime.
Eric Adams won the race for New York mayor on a vow to reduce crime and homelessness, and he’s already facing a threat of “riots,” “fire” and worse if he follows through.
That’s what happened Wednesday after the Mayor-elect hosted members of a local Black Lives Matter chapter to hear out their agenda. The harangue started almost immediately. “Everybody talks about ‘good cops,’” said group co-founder Hawk Newsome. “We don’t believe in good cops.” Mr. Adams spent 22 years as a cop before entering politics.
Afterward the activists tore into Mr. Adams’s plans to increase street policing. “There will be riots, there will be fire and there will be bloodshed,” Mr. Newsome told the New York Daily News, referring to Mr. Adams’s proposal to reinstate plainclothes police units. Mr. Newsome’s sister Chivona added that “We will give him hell and make it a nightmare.”
This is no empty threat. After an officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, rioters in New York damaged or looted about 450 businesses in a 12-day period, according to a New York Post tally. Many protestors marched under the Black Lives Matter banner.
Violent crime spiked in New York and other cities after the protest wave. Yet under progressive pressure, Mayor Bill de Blasio and police commissioner Dermot Shea disbanded the NYPD’s plainclothes units. These officers had seized hundreds of illegal guns each year in dangerous neighborhoods.
Mr. Adams was elected to clean up the mess. “When I ran to become the mayor of the City of New York, I said I was going to reinstitute an antigun unit in plainclothes,” Mr. Adams said Thursday. “Voters voted on that.” He vowed to move forward with the plan.
The clash with Black Lives Matter is the first of many tests he’ll face in addressing crime. Voters largely rejected the antipolice policies that Democrats advocated after the Floyd killing. But left-wing activists continue to defend policies that weaken criminal enforcement, such as New York’s 2019 state law eliminating cash bail for many offenses.
Mr. Adams brushed off his critics’ riot threat as “silly,” and he’ll need all of that conviction to restore order to New York streets.
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