Head-Spinning Day for the Left: A Cop to Run New York City?

A s voting in the Democratic primary for New York City’s next mayor takes place (or, rather, concludes) tomorrow, ex-NYPD captain Eric Adams is in a strong position, having led in every recent poll, in some cases by wide margins. His victory, should it occur, in a city in which the Democratic primary is tantamount to a general election, will be another indicator of the gulf between working-class Democrats and elite progressives.

Writes Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times:

An Adams administration would most likely be a head-spinning time of marginalization for the left. Just three years ago, New York City seemed an epicenter [sic] of democratic socialism with the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. One year ago, mass demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd sparked national demands to reimagine policing. For New York Democrats to choose a law-and-order mayor now would be seen as a rebuke to progressives all over the country.

Pretty much! Adams is winning via the support of poor people and people of color who support the police, want a greater police presence in their neighborhoods, and believe it is folly to defund or partially defund the police. Surveys consistently show that crime is the No. 1 issue on New Yorkers’ minds; for a year and a half, the crime rate has been rising after decades of nearly uninterrupted declines going back to the early 1990s. Among crime-conscious voters, Adams is the top pick.

A recent New York Post survey found that 35 percent of Bronxites were casting a vote based more on crime than anything else, compared to 26.3 percent of voters in Manhattan; 38.7 percent of people making less than $20,000 cited crime as their top issue. Meanwhile, Maya Wiley, the former city council to Bill de Blasio, MSNBC talking head, and endorsee of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren, has surged from the back of the pack to the second spot in some polls. Wiley’s cop-antagonizing platform is curious considering how little effort she put into police oversight as head of the city’s built-in police watchdog group, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, for which she was paid $346 an hour. She left that gig, she said, as it was merely a “volunteer” job, and she had money to make elsewhere.

Wiley speaks fluent Progspeak and, still, amazingly, thinks police should be reined in and their budget further cut. (In the wake of last summer’s anti-police demonstrations, Bill de Blasio and the City Council immediately cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget. However, former police chief Ray Kelly dismissed the maneuver as an “accounting gimmick” that, for instance, moved some policing costs to other fiefs, such as the Department of Education. In other words, the move served primarily to insult the police without saving much, if any, money.) Wiley lives in a $2.7 million house in Brooklyn, and when things got hairy last summer, took advantage of private policing to secure her property.

Adams’s surge is baffling to the likes of white progressives who live in safe, comfy neighborhoods surrounded by other college graduates, tell themselves that policing is poisoned by racism, and wonder why it’s so hard to get elected mayor in 2021 on a platform of equity and bike lanes. All people are hearing right now is that Adams is saying the right things on crime.

Still, the Brooklyn Borough president is an odd duck. He refers to himself in the third person, sleeps at his office in Brooklyn Borough Hall, and is hard to nail down on anything. He claims credit for ending the progressive-reviled, and judicially quashed, “stop and frisk” policy that ended eight years ago, but also talks about reviving a less-aggressive version of it. He has been on both sides of the Rudy Giuliani debate; these days, it’s having pro-Giuliani remarks on your record that create the potential for embarrassment. Some cops back him, others are suspicious; one leading police union, the PBA, is urging members to vote Adams even as the captains’ union supports rival Andrew Yang.

Adams has made some silly claims (he said it was racist for Yang and another rival, Kathryn Garcia to campaign together against him on Juneteenth) and strange errors of judgment; last summer, when the “Karen” became a great progressive bogeywoman, he suggested New Yorkers who had minor disputes with one another should try to settle them in person, without calling the police. A woman who did so (over a dispute about fireworks) got herself shot eight times and killed. Two weeks ago, Adams said he would skip a recent mayoral debate in favor of attending a vigil for a Queens boy killed by a stray bullet five days earlier, creating the startling impression that he would be unavailable for routine business if there had been any particularly nasty crimes in the city lately, then reversed course and attended the debate anyway. When Yang made a common-sense remark about getting homeless people off the streets — “You know who else have rights? We do! The people and families of the city. We have the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out at us” — instead of seconding the remark, Adams veered to Yang’s left. “I was really disturbed. Don’t criminalize mental-health illness,” Adams later said. So is he going to get winos and schizophrenics off the streets, or let them continue to slump in doorways in the name of not stigmatizing them? It’s hard to say. Meanwhile, as always when he gets in hot water, Yang showed his trademark uncertainty, whining about being taken out of context. If he had stuck to his guns and told detractors to stuff it, he might have bounced back into the lead in polls. As it is, one poll had him rebounding to a strong second place, from as low as fourth.

Alas for New York City, none of the leading candidates on the ballot offer a return to the reasonable policies of the Giuliani–Mike Bloomberg era, when the city flourished for 20 years and even 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis proved merely short-lived setbacks to the city’s steady improvement. Among the candidates who are attracting major support, Adams looks like the best choice as well as the likely winner. In any case, New Yorkers can’t be rid of Bill de Blasio soon enough.