Opinion: Eric Adams Says the New York Police Can’t Clean Up? Blame Trump’s Justice Department.
In a City Hall hearing last week, Representative-elect Eric Adams fired shots at Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general who resigned last week following abuse allegations. To Adams, Schneiderman’s departure was just another example of corruption in official New York City esteems like the Weinstein indictment and the suspension of City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito for abuses of power. Adams argued that these crises demonstrate an apparent irony in “high politicians preaching integrity on every side and then succumbing to the same scandals they accused others of”; he went on to criticize Mayor de Blasio for his handling of City Hall as well. While Adams’s comments touch on the current New York City political climate, his remarks also poised the table for his 2021 mayoral candidacy, giving him the right platform to call for immediate police, legal, and political reform in this tumultuous time.
Adams’s criticisms of de Blasio, Schneiderman, and others are timely and important, but in a remix of his own words, he seems to be boiling down complex issues to accusations of corruption. Adams isn’t just showing love for his future constituents, whose demands for change are coming to cities and institutions in rapid fire. Instead, he’s simply taking de Blasio’s critics last summer during #NYCPoliceBrutalityWeek and playing their tune.
Notably absent from his comments is any gesture toward a mighty organization that wields immense power in New York City’s policing systems: the Justice Department under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Adams’s comments regarding Police Commissioner James O’Neill’s “Neighborhood Policing Program” suggest that fixing New York City’s policing problems requires character revisioning for police officers. Even as O’Neill preaches the revamping of the department’s culture, it’s also important to note that this blueprint is essentially a public relations blitz for poor cops who have undergone questionable New York police training. In other words, the problem isn’t necessarily that the squad is overpopulated with Scott’s (untrained) quantity of questionable brass — the problem is something more sinister that touches the entire New York Police Department: police corruption.
This situation is exacerbated by more than half a century of the bipartisan and widely popular “law and order” sympathies that have given police departments an indispensable climate of political impunity. For decades, American police departments have politically shifted from mere protectors to powerful instruments of state violence (most notably under President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Drugs”). Through this evolution, law enforcement agencies complicit in curbing political, social, and economic justice in America have morphed into a “government” almost under its own jurisdiction.
In protecting the War on Drugs, Democrats and Republicans have made causal relationships between their primary donors — weapon makers and Big Pharma, on the one hand, and police unions and higher education, on the other. While these relationships benefit police and academia workers, they significantly restrain their professional workers’ ethics and violate the trust between the community, the police, and the education system.
The importance of policing does not preclude political offices from keeping an arm’s length from the police. Ozone treatments are important for maintaining clean oxygen in the atmosphere, but the people who develop, uphold, and distribute the treatment are still beholden to the ecological qualities and benefits sustained by environmental feasibility. Similarly, policing is indeed a duty, but the buck does not stop in police arms: it’s up to political offices to ensure the police consider their work in conjunction with these ecological qualities and benefits. The quality of any policing method only offers one possible solution to the problems it hopes to curtail. An excessively retributive prison or police system is necessary to account for criminals (especially recidivists), unless there are a bevy of restorative solutions like mandatory pre-trial diversion, behavioral analysis, and alternative trauma treatment practices at the ready.
Instead, police unions have operated as institutions wielding immense political influence through undeniable “blue” scourges like qualified immunity — a standard-of-proof principle for discriminatory actions taken against law enforcement officers that perversely prioritizes protecting the officer from liability rather than the victim from harm — as well as the NYPD’s response to the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, who was mistakenly identified as a suspect in a robbery. Despite the fact that four officers involved in the incident killed Diallo by firing 41 shots in his Bronx apartment, a federal court ruled that the officers weren’t entitled to a trial because there wasn’t enough conclusive evidence that they didn’t believe their actions were justified.
Moreover, the police defend their interests at the expense of the democratic process established by political offices to uphold the public good. Reforms have been put in place to reject a lengthy appeal process for police brutality victims or their surviving family members — a practice that embodies police interests while slowing and dismantling any victims’ pursuits of justice, prosperity, righteousness, and healing.
The recommendations are still being debated by various political and police interests, but the New York City Bar Association recently published a report detailing an impressive set of standards and practices to sharpen legal remedies for policies like the ones implemented by Police Commissioners Bill Bratton and O’Neill to minimize the severity of policy brutality’s residual sociopolitical effects.
More importantly, cities and institutions in New York have also been attempting to enact comprehensive deescalation and pre-trial diversion practices with enough mode of injection to counteract the conditions brought on by brass-head police hires and penal population spikes resulting from laws like New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, which rely on surveillance and imprisonment to deter drug use and sales.
Their challenges differ, but many of Detroit’s, Chicago’s, and New York City’s political and police interests today are similar: they continue to shirk the most egregious cases of police misconduct and avoid prioritizing pre-trial diversion programs, both of which epitomize political failures to protect either the public or police interest from sustaining systemic damage. Amidst Trump’s America, a New York police reform movement led by Eric Adams and other respected New York figures holds the possibility of sweeping the national police reform movement’s enterprise off its already questionable feet — if they can simultaneously refuse shields that protect the entire New York Police Department from imminent political reform.
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