New York’s new Mayor-elect, Eric Adams, certainly has his work cut out for him. The former police officer is inheriting a city in decline that’s seeing its worst violent crime spike in decades (though, there has been some slight decrease in the past several months).
Adams had to address this issue prominently during his campaign. Adams appears to have a plan. Adams wants plain-clothed anticrime units back in service. They were disbanded during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Here’s how the move was described at the time per NPR.
Make no mistake,” Shea said. “This is a seismic shift in the culture of how the N.Y.P.D. Police this wonderful city. It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.”
Surprise announcement by Commissioner Shea on Monday was that units were to be dismantled, and then reassigned for other purposes. He said the units were a last vestige of the city’s aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policy, which overwhelmingly targeted non-whites.
It was evident, although not immediately in the manner Shea claimed. Instead, the murder rate continued to climb into 2020. Things have only recently stabilized. While 2021 might see a decrease of 2% in gun crime relative to 2020, that number will still exceed 40% from 2019, which was the year prior to the rise of the national anti-police movements.
In response to Adam’s pronouncement, BLM leader Hawk Newsome levied a threat to the city he claims to want to help. This was during a Brooklyn sit-down. The New York Post.
“If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” New York BLM co-founder Hawk Newsome said outside Borough Hall after the meeting.
“There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed,” he threatened.
I’m not sure it gets any clearer than that. There’s no ambiguity in Newsome’s comments that I can find. You are seeing a terroristic threat directly to New York City. But while the FBI is busy rounding up grandmas and people who drank Nancy Pelosi’s beer, this kind of thing will almost certainly unchecked.
This is also self-destructive. New York’s rise in violence is almost entirely affecting minority communities. You’d think someone whose motto is “black lives matter” would be concerned for all the dead black people that have resulted from the politicized decisions regarding policing. Instead, he opposes measures that would make streets safer.
The cold reality is that unjustified police shootings (and many called unjust actually aren’t or have extenuating circumstances) represent a tiny fraction of the black people murdered in New York. It’s understandable that someone would like to protest violence from the government. I’m as skeptical of the police as the next person at times, and if an officer does something wrong, they should be held accountable. But to demand policies that lead to far more black people being killed in the end while simply serving to stroke some activist’s ego? It is completely insane and selfish.
Let me end by asking Adams, why is he even considering meeting with him? Newsome is clearly not a good-faith actor. Newsome is an extremist partisan seeking an outcome that suits his ideology and not one that protects New Yorkers from all kinds of danger. If the best he can do is threaten “bloodshed” when his nonsensical demands aren’t met, then he doesn’t deserve a seat at the table.
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