Eric Adams is the second coming of Rudy Giuliani

Two years into the administration of Mayor Adams, many of the forebodings against his mayoralty have come true. Under Adams, New York City has experienced a collapse of its social safety net all the while draconian punitive measures balloon. As the city’s processing rates for SNAP and cash assistance benefits have hit record lows, the mayor has found the necessary resources to offer historic raises for police and jail guards and advance a mass incarceration agenda over New Yorkers.

He’s fought tirelessly against measures to boost police transparency, which the New York City Council rebuked by overriding his veto of the How Many Stops Act.

Although the mayor casts himself as a progressive, he’s aligned with conservative groups like the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association and has held fundraisers with billionaire donald Trump-backer John Catsimatidis and Trump-alum Anthony Scaramucci. One doesn’t have to dig very deep to see that Adams is molding himself in the likes of his now-indicted predecessor: Rudy Giuliani.

Nowhere is the Adams-Giuliani alignment more clear than in how the two approach policing and justice in our city.

While Giuliani touted his efforts to “clean up” the city, everyday New Yorkers like me remember him as the mayor who slashed social services and flooded the streets with police, criminalized poverty and splintered our communities.

Giuliani arrived at City Hall in 1994, the same building where he helped incite a police riot against efforts to increase police oversight just months before. He would be a “zero tolerance” mayor who promised to tackle crime head-on.

Giuliani’s vision, of course, did not include addressing the underlying causes of crime or better meeting the needs of underserved communities like Bushwick, where I grew up. Instead, Giuliani introduced “broken windows” policing to target fare evaders, graffiti artists, and others in the name of preventing future murders, thefts, and violence.

Despite there being no evidence that low-level offenses pave the way for serious crimes, Giuliani had no problem endangering the lives of vulnerable New Yorkers by targeting communities of color and ushering a new age of mass incarceration into our city.

As “broken windows” became mainstream, stop-and-frisk emerged as the NYPD’s tactic of enforcement. Police officers were authorized to racially profile, question, and search hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

Despite making up just about 50% of the city’s population in 1999, Black and Latine New Yorkers accounted for 84% of stops. Though Mayor Bloomberg followed Giuliani by dramatically expanding stop-and-frisk, the shameful practice was finally declared unconstitutional in 2013.

Adams brought it back.

In fact, the statistics have only gotten worse. Though stop-and-frisk is no longer legally permissible, the Adams administration has employed vague pretenses including claims someone “fit a relevant description” to stop thousands of New Yorkers. Under Mayor Adams, 97% of police stops were of Black and Latine people and 1-in-4 were unconstitutional.

Even worse, the mayor is stripping communities of supportive programs they need while ramping up police enforcement. Last fall, the city abruptly defunded a mentoring program serving 200 young adults in NYCHA developments while sending more teenagers to overflowing juvenile jails.

This shift in policing is having a dramatic impact on the appalling conditions inside of Rikers Island. From January to June 2023, police made more arrests than in any six month period since 2000 — an approach that has contributed to the largest annual jail population increase since 1996, when Giuliani was in office.

At least 31 people have died in the Department of Correction custody since Adams assumed office, leading to a jail death rate that, in 2022, was the highest since 1996.

It’s been 22 years since Giuliani left office and, in many ways, it appears he’s still running our city.

Adams’ Giuliani-esque approach to public safety threatens to derail legally mandated plans to close Rikers by 2027. The plan, signed into law in 2019 after years of organizing, commits New York City to reducing the jail population in order to shift to a smaller borough-based jail system. The mayor’s mass incarceration agenda puts these plans in jeopardy, prolonging the suffering of New Yorkers on Rikers Island.

Before Eric Adams, years of careful decarceration coupled with community investments put us on the path to eradicate Rikers. But the mayor is dead set on extending his predecessor’s legacy as Giuliani 2.0 and delaying a more just future for New York.

It is not yet 2027 and there is still time for Adams to reverse course. If our city adequately invests in housing, mental health, employment programs, youth development — and the workforce required to deliver these services — we can decarcerate while building safer communities.

All Eric Adams needs to do is listen to the communities of color he claims to represent.