New York: The Democrats’ anti-crime candidate
“Something hopeful” just happened in New York, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has taken the lead in the city’s ranked-choice Democratic primary largely by pledging to fight a citywide rise in crime. With 120,000 absentee ballots yet to be tabulated, Adams, a Black New York cop for 22 years, got 51 percent of the ranked-choice votes by assembling a “multiracial coalition” of voters who understandably fear violent street crime and were turned off by progressive talk of scaling back policing. Perhaps Democrats will finally realize they must “tack rightward” on crime to “secure the Black vote.” Adams has a chance to “write a new chapter in urban policing,” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, Democrats have failed to adopt a coherent policing strategy. The “working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods” that voted for Adams want better policing—but not less of it.
No, this election was not “a referendum on ‘defund the police,’” said Zak Cheney-Rice in NYMag.com. None of the leading candidates supported any such proposal. Adams saw that voters in this election were concerned about “rising rates of gun violence and homicides” and he promised to make New Yorkers “safe.” When he was a cop, he was an outspoken critic of police abuses of Black men, and it’s unclear how he’ll achieve both reform and a crackdown on criminals. His stated plans aren’t encouraging, said
Kali Holloway in TheDaily Beast.com. Adams advocates a return to broken-windows policing, which targets mostly young men of color for minor offenses like graffiti and vandalism, and wants to bring back the “sustained campaign of harassment” that is stop and frisk. This is not the path to “rehabbing an institution rife with anti-Black racism, corruption, and criminality.”
Pundits are ascribing way too much significance to Adams’ narrow lead in an election that’s not yet final, said Alex Pareene in NewRepublic.com. In reality, Adams was both “the law-and-order candidate and the police-reform candidate.” He emphasized his Black identity, accused rivals of racism, and was endorsed by both critics of police abuses and the conservative New York Post. His apparent victory was “predictable” in a one-party town where many Democrats lean right. What does it tell us about national politics? Not much.