(Bloomberg Opinion) — HOWARD WOLFSON: Let me start with the personal, if I could, because we have readers who may know that you’re Brooklyn borough president, but they may not know as much about your background. You’re a former police officer. Talk a bit about your decision to join the force.
ERIC ADAMS: When you talk about the evolution of any human being, I have continuously evolved over life. I was arrested as a child and we were assaulted by police officers, my brother and I — and I was bitter. I believe I was experiencing PTSD probably from 15 to about 18.
When Arthur Miller [a local businessman] was killed by police through a chokehold, civil-rights leaders came to me and asked me and 12 other young men to go into the police department and fight from within and change from within, and I did just that, and [in 1995] we started … 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care and continued to open up the problem. But what people are not aware of is that I came into the police department with computer skills. I knew how to program using COBOL and some other computer languages, and my fight for justice turned also into a fight for safety because I thought it was hypocritical to talk about just ending police abuse when we were seeing violence within those same communities. And so I was one of the small team of officers that [deputy police commissioner and creator of CompStat] Jack Maple put together to say that we are going to break the tradition of high crime in our city. Because remember at that time everyone had a “no radio” sign in their car — we had empty boxes where you pull your radio out of your car. We basically created an industry of not being safe.
I sat in the room with Jack when he told the chiefs and inspectors we were going to turn around crime, and they laughed at us. They said, What are you talking about? This city is always going to have 2,000 homicides. And what we did is started to see homicides and felonies turn around, and that was the pivotal moment and it set me on the course of saying, We’re better than what we are showing as a city.
LAST WEEK’S INTERVIEW: A Conversation With the Mayor of New York
HW: So at the same time that you are working with Jack Maple, you were also a pretty significant critic of the department and its practices. How did you balance your criticism with your service? How were you able to be critical of the commissioner at a Sunday press conference and then the next day go out and perform your duties as an officer?
EA: By that time I was in with the goal of reforming policing. We would meet regularly with some of the civil-rights leaders, some of the activists, and that set the foundation of being able to communicate with so many groups now. [As] I was doing the fight for reform, I saw that there was another fight that was parallel: During the afternoons, we were going to homes where children were shot and killed. There were places in this city where in order for [public housing] residents to get inside their buildings, they had to wait in line with crack dealers, deciding who can come inside the buildings or not. Our city was under siege and a lot of people don’t know that. It was basically in communities without voices.
And you know, fighting to end those horrific police civilian encounters I had, there was a duality going on. We were fighting crime and trying to get the police department to see the importance of justice. I remember crack was rampant. We had the Morgue Boys, we had the Dirty 30s. We also had all of those police who were not only being abusive during the day, but they were helping the crime epidemic and the crack epidemic. We were fighting against the same entity.
HW: So you know you talk about the bad old days, which anyone who grew up in New York during that time remembers. Murder has come down. Crime has come down over the last couple of decades, but in the last year murder was up 40% and the police commissioner has said that changes to the state’s bail laws are to blame for the increase. Do you agree with that assessment?
EA: I figure there’s a combination of things. In the first rollout of the bail laws, I was super-critical of them because they had crimes on the list where clearly there was not a full understanding that these were predatory and violent crimes.
They had burglaries, robberies, possession of a weapon on school grounds, and they went back and they cleaned up the list for the most part. But I believe in addition to that, we must give [bail] discretion to judges; you can’t have a person that committed burglary or robbery go in, no bail, come out, do it again and still no bail. That’s just an attack on public safety. I take a lot of hits from people sometimes, but the prerequisite to our prosperity is public safety. We must be safe as a city or we are not going to prosper as a city.
HW: What’s the Adams administration plan to bring down crime if you become mayor?
EA: Immediately I will reinstitute the anti-crime unit. Turn it into an anti-gun unit and have them focus on not only the street level guns, but long-term investigations to find out why guns are coming here in the first place. Who are our biggest deliverers? Where are they located? Let’s identify them, let’s stop the pipeline. I will also institute at all of our port authorities, including the bus terminals and other locations, where we would do random checks like we do in the subway system. We don’t have to do it for everyone but there is amazing machinery out now where you can put your bag through and check. We know people are using the Port Authority to bring guns into the city and we need to identify and slow them down.
I will also create a tri-state task force with New York City, New York state, New Jersey and the other neighboring states to crack down on the flow of guns into our communities. We’re not doing a good enough job. We have a new Congress and a new president: it’s time to get guns under control. This is what [Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP] tried to do. He understood what gun violence was doing.
Second, gang violence. We know that gangs are not only shooting themselves, but that innocent people are being caught in the crossfire. We need to go on the ground and identify the gangs, use crisis-management teams. I have been meeting with gang leaders for the last year and a half. We need to go after the leaders, bring long-term RICO criminal actions against them. Breaking up the crews and really zeroing in on these gangs — what we call precision policing.
Third, we need to be proactive. Many people think this is a feel-good notion but it’s not. Thirty percent of people in jail are dyslexic at Rikers Island; 80% of these 18- to 21-year-olds have reading and writing deficiencies. The real crime in this city is our department of education. If we don’t educate, we’re going to incarcerate. And we have to get our school system under control and stop producing criminals.
Every year, we know 6,700 people age out of foster care. We know they’re going to be victims of crime, participate in crime, homelessness, mental-health illness. We already know it. If we would just invest $50 million a year and allow them to age out at 26 instead of 21, 90% will graduate from high school instead of 12%, go to college and they would turn their lives around. It has been proven yet we refuse to make those long-term investments to be more proactive around crime. Finally, many of these crisis-management teams, they have been amazing at stopping retaliatory shootings. Start getting young people involved in campaigns, get young people involved to be more proactive and not reactive. But our police commissioner must buy into rebuilding trust.
We have too many dinosaurs in the police department that don’t believe in rebuilding trust. They simply believe that policing is supposed to be a heavy-handed approach. They have to really start purging them from the top of police department supervisory ranks.
HW: You mentioned education as one avenue to deal with crime. One of your signature proposals is a significant expansion of summer school, which I happen to think is a terrific idea, especially given the learning loss around Covid. My question is not so much whether it’s a good idea but whether or not you can afford it. Where does the money come from and how do you convince the union to go along and staff it?
EA: The real answer is: One, we can’t afford not to do it.
You know, Michael Bloomberg had it right by going after mayoral control in schools. The crisis we are experiencing in America, not only in New York but across America, every big city, is fed by education. Everything that we’re facing for the most part in our city stems from our failure to educate, and we can’t continue to say it’s too expensive. No. It’s too expensive if we don’t do it. I always talk about the quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He spent a lifetime pulling people out of the river — no one goes upstream and prevents them from falling in in the first place. We’re running our city downstream. We have to go upstream and change our thinking from a crisis-management system to a proactive one.
So just dealing with summer school — we could use remote learning. We should have the best remote-learning experience on the globe. We should reach out to Google, we should reach out to Facebook, we should reach out to our tech industry, and we should build out a state-of-the-art remote learning experience so that children don’t have to sit in the school building. We should require two to three hours a day where our young people during the summer months are receiving continuous instruction. And you could have a great teacher, math teacher, English teacher, from one of the specialized high schools, who can do this remotely, or one of the great teachers of schools, public, middle schools.
Covid has revealed to us we can do remote learning — we…
