How NYC’s Eric Adams demolished the myth of the ‘law-and-order mayor’

Everybody is talking about New York City Mayor Eric Adams these days after the ex-cop who promised to run America’s largest city with “swagger” instead got tripped up by swag, and became the first Gotham leader to face a federal criminal indictment while still in office.

But for more than 8.3 million everyday New Yorkers, the brutal fallacy behind Adams’ disastrous 34 months in office had already exploded two weeks earlier on a subway platform in Brooklyn’s fraying East New York section, on the city’s outskirts.

Last May, Adams — a self-proclaimed “law-and-order mayor” who never met a request for more cops and more police spending he didn’t like, no matter what other public service got squeezed — ordered 800 additional officers into New York subway stations to combat the persistent problem of fare evasion, even as statistics showed subway crime was decreasing. That’s how two uniformed officers came to be patrolling the Sutter Avenue station on Sept. 15 when a 37-year-old man pushed through a turnstile once, was confronted, left, and then came back to do it again, alarming the officers when they saw he held a folding switchblade in his right hand.

This prompted a chaotic chase onto the elevated subway platform just as a train arrived. The suspect did not answer calls to drop the knife but, as video footage later showed, was not brandishing the weapon or charging when the officers unleashed a fusillade of bullets. The suspect, Derell Mickles, was wounded, and one of the officers was hit with friendly fire. On the train, a 26-year-old woman was grazed by a bullet while a second passenger, 49-year-old Gregory Delpeche — a city hospital worker commuting to his job — was struck in the head and suffered serious brain damage.

Adams — who visited the wounded cop in the hospital but not Delpeche — insisted the cops had shown “restraint.” That was strongly contested not just by hundreds of protesters but by Delpeche’s family and their lawyers, who could not believe such carnage was triggered by a $2.90 subway fare. Said attorney Nick Liakas, after watching the video, “There was no need for any bullets to fly in the subway station, especially in a setting where the officers put innocent bystanders at risk.”

And yet, there would prove to be an even bigger irony. New York City’s biggest fare evader was hiding in plain sight, inside the mayor’s office in City Hall.

Last week, federal prosecutors charged that Adams “evaded” thousands of dollars in fares for luxury travel on state-owned Turkish Airlines, as part of a yearslong bribery scheme that included air and hotel freebies and extreme discounts that amounted to more than $100,000 in perks. In return, they alleged, Adams, as Brooklyn borough president and then as mayor, provided various favors to Turkish diplomats in New York, including demanding an occupancy permit for a high-rise consulate even though fire inspectors had found serious safety hazards. To make matters worse, the corruption is linked to campaign finance violations that prosecutors say allowed Adams to improperly grab $10 million in matching public dollars — money that could have been put to good use in a cash-starved city.

The rank corruption that allegedly propped up Adams’ outward show of swagger is appalling, but it may also prove only the tip of the iceberg. There are multiple ongoing and overlapping probes into Adams’ closest aides — some of whom were hired despite dubious pasts — including high-ranking police brass under investigation for a reported scheme in which club owners were told that cop pressure on their establishments might ease up if they hired the police commissioner’s brother.

The Adams immorality play — he seems to have no intention of resigning, in the spirit of the Donald Trump era — has unleashed a flood of second-guessing among columnists who now wonder if they were too quick to print the legend of the up-from-nothing former police captain, and too tepid in questioning the warning signs not only about his unsavory associates but the basic questions about where he even lived, or whether he is truly a vegan.

I think that’s missing the even deeper questions raised by Adams’ stunning rise and fall. His 2021 promise that his police background and orientation would make him a law-and-order mayor — appealing in a city that was rattled by the pandemic and the temporary spike in crime that accompanied it — pushed Adams past a diverse field of mayoral rivals. But the essence of Adams’ unique brand of corruption is that the strongman’s world has two sets of law books — heavily policed authoritarianism for the masses, but no rules at all for the leader and his inner circle.

Arguably, the petty corruption of a mayor demanding extra legroom for himself and his girlfriend as frequent flyers to Istanbul pales to the massive moral corruption of New York City’s ballooning spending on police overtime, especially for the officers dispatched to the subways. There, cop overtime blew up from $4 million in 2022 to $155 million in 2023, even as City Hall looked to crimp and save on desperately needed social services, including cutbacks in weekend library hours. Imposing a police state at the expense of knowledge seems almost too on the nose for an autocratic mayoralty.

True, crime fell somewhat in the subways and across the city as the pandemic wound down — just as it did in scores of other cities without draconian policing or massive overspending. But misconduct allegations against New York Police Department officers skyrocketed. Adams, whose origin story is that he was a young victim of a police beating who fought as a rising young cop to reform the system, brought back an anti-crime unit linked to rampant brutality as well as stop-and-frisk policing tactics, with the inevitable results that some 89% of the New Yorkers questioned by cops were Black or brown people. The overwhelming number of those stopped were committing no crimes.

» READ MORE: U.S authoritarianism also means a police state | Will Bunch Newsletter

Meanwhile, activists said aggressive policing aimed to curb dissent in a city known for its protest culture. After police arrested a number of pro-Palestinian marchers in May at a Brooklyn event commemorating Nakba Day, and were captured on video repeatedly punching a woman they’d detained, Adams hailed their work as “commendable.” But the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, who would become mayor if Adams leaves office, blamed the current mayor for “almost insisting that the response for anything Palestinian be escalation and disproportionate force.”

And yet, history has shown that for strongman politicians imposing a “law-and-order” regime, corruption at the top is a feature, not a bug. One of Adams’ living predecessors — Rudy Giuliani, whose massive “broken windows” police crackdown on lowly squeegee men or graffiti artists also included rampant allegations of brutality — is now barred from practicing law as he faces criminal election-tampering charges in both Georgia and Arizona.

Indeed, the original “law-and-order” candidate, Richard Nixon, elected president in 1968 with violent, screeching ads against campus protesters, had a breaking and entering racket running from inside the White House before that scandal, Watergate, forced his resignation. The next presidential candidate who embraced Nixon’s 1968 language, Donald Trump, is a convicted felon. Here in Philadelphia, ex-top cop Frank Rizzo, the prototype for Adams, imposed brutal police tactics on the city’s Black neighborhoods while raising considerable eyebrows with his $400,000 spruced-up luxury home in Chestnut Hill as the city struggled through the recessionary 1970s.

Today, if Adams has taught us anything, it is that the continued promise of the “law-and-order” political leader is always a lie — that his core value is not really enhanced public safety, but a hypocritical two-tiered system on which the repression of everyday people goes hand in glove with nonstop bacchanalia of luxury perks for the elite few.

That’s why people are wrong when they suggest Adams’ first-class Turkish jaunts appear to be a victimless crime. His graft was yin to the yang of repressive policing that shattered the decent, hardworking life of Delpeche — and who knows how many other lives have been scarred by a mayor’s vanity? The next time a politician tells you they’re a law-and-order candidate, keep your hand on your wallet — and keep your head low.

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