Does our cop-turned-mayor distrust the NYPD?

The reason I can do that is because I’m the mayor,” Eric Adams said on Friday about why he wanted his younger brother Bernard overseeing his security detail and Philip Banks III, an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to bribe the last mayor and high-ranking members of the NYPD, as his deputy commissioner for public safety overseeing the NYPD.

The mayor said that Bernard was “the best person for the uniqueness of how I want my security to be” since “I love my brother, my brother loves me, I trust him.” Speaking about both his brother and Banks, Adams said he was being unfairly scrutinized and criticized because “I had the audacity to hire blue-collar people.”

Actually, the questions about Bernard — a long-retired NYPD sergeant who’d been working as a parking administrator for a Virginia university until the new mayor reportedly tried to quietly install him as a deputy police commissioner, with a $240,000 salary and command authority, before settling on a $210,000 job in a newly created position in the department as executive director of mayoral security — have focused on nepotism and the city’s ethics rules.

And the questions about Banks have focused on his judgment and integrity given that three men with whom he flew around the world and regularly broke bread when he was the chief of department for the NYPD before abruptly resigning all ended up as convicted felons.

But there’s another lens that helps explain both of these hires, which The New York Times touched on in a story about Bernard drily noting that “It remains unclear what experience Mr. Adams has that would make him particularly well equipped to protect the mayor — beyond the fact that they are brothers ... Indeed, the mayor’s selection of his brother seems to underscore his apparent distrust of the Police Department.”

WNBC reported on Friday that a retired NYPD inspector serving on the Adams transition team had floated the idea of removing the detectives stationed at City Hall (where, speaking of parking, walkways are now being used as de facto parking spaces, sort of like what happened at Borough Hall Plaza when Adams was Brooklyn borough president) with civilians hired through a separate city department and designated as special patrol officers with gun licenses and arrest powers.

The Adams administration emphatically denied rumors that the idea, which wasn’t implemented, had also been intended for the mayor’s security detail, and Adams himself said that the story was inaccurate, without specifying how.

But Adams’ distrust of NYPD leadership — dating back to his 22 years in the NYPD when he ended up leading two different groups of Black cops that frequently blasted the department for letting Black citizens and officers down while he ended up the subject of three separate investigations that turned up almost nothing, including one intended to strip him of his captain’s pension — is unquestionable.

That distrust helps explain why he brought in new Commissioner Keechant Sewell from outside the ranks of the NYPD, and why he brought back Banks, who’s said that his sudden exit in 2014, when he was widely seen as the commissioner in waiting, wasn’t about the corruption scandal he was tied to but rather the machinations of the department’s overwhelmingly white leadership.

And why he’d want his brother watching his back, after seeing all the ways the police had jammed up his predecessor, who ended up as something of a hostage to the NYPD after cops turned their back on him in 2014 yet who also ended up using his security detail as “essentially a concierge service” for his family and inner circle.

Adams speculated in an interview with The City last year that shots fired at his car in 1996 could have come from “some officer, someone in their drunken rage, [who] said, ‘Enough of this guy.’ ”

Adams, who’d said in 1996 that the men shooting at him were Black, concluded: “When I look back, I’m amazed I was able to get out of the department alive.”

In an interview in 2020 on the FAQ.NYC podcast I co-host, Adams said he would carry a gun as mayor and that “I won’t have a security detail. If the city is safe, the mayor shouldn’t have a security detail with him — he should be walking the street by himself.”

Some of that was candidate talk, and last weekend Mayor Adams said “I have to take my security in a very serious way” when CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed him about hiring his brother to run his detail. Adams cited “an increase of anarchists” and “a serious problem with white supremacy” and, more to the point, alluded to how he’s been traveling the city by train and Citi Bike, where his predecessors favored SUVs, and with a much less visibly commanding and intrusive police presence.

“When you talk about this type of security that I want, it’s extremely unique,” Adams said. “I don’t want to be away from my public.”