Outside the steps of New York City’s Gracie Mansion, Mayor Eric Leroy Adams, surrounded by more than a dozen Black clergy members and civil rights activists, approached the podium to make a statement before his indictment on bribery and other charges. But a hefty male voice from the crowd interrupted.
“Your policies are anti-Black. You are a disgrace for all Black people in this city,” Hawk Newsome, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter-Greater New York chapter, yelled through a bullhorn during a press conference on Thursday.
Adams grinded uncomfortably in between Newsome’s chants for him to resign. Once Adams was cleared to speak, he echoed previous remarks that he is innocent and will not resign.
“We are not surprised. We expected this,” Adams said Thursday following months of speculation after his cellphones and laptop were seized last November.
Across social media, memes of the hit Starz series Power were liked and reshared. Even the series franchise’s co-creator 50 Cent chimed in. Adams, “a proud son of Brownsville,” Brooklyn, and a retired New York Police Department captain, has a reputation for being eccentric, to say the least. But his relationship with Black New Yorkers has been complicated. Adams’ public safety plan included bringing back a controversial plainclothes anti-crime unit and stop-and-frisk that was banned because it disproportionately targets Black and brown people.
Adams is the second Black mayor in the city’s history, but that’s where he and the late David Dinkins’ similarities end, said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. (The one-term mayor was no stranger to criticism of his policies during racial tensions in 1990s New York — but he avoided scandalous headlines.)
“As we’ve seen with Black mayors in places like … New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., and Baltimore,” Greer said. “As the mayor of New York City, as a Black man, as a Black politician, you can’t always do the same things that other politicians do.”
Black New Yorkers have been split about whether Adams has been a leader who has put their interests first. They’ve called out the former Brooklyn borough president for policies on policing, crime, the surge of migrants, the city’s troubled jail system, and homelessness.
“Lots of people were skeptical about him from the beginning, just because of the history of the NYPD and some of their more unsavory behaviors,” Greer said.
“Just remember that the same Eric Adams who’s been indicted for stealing millions of dollars from New Yorkers and now demanding due process recently told us all it was ok for NYPD to shoot 4 people over $2.90 in unpaid subway fare,” Olayemi Olurin, an attorney and political commentator, wrote on X.
Olurin, who clashed with Adams during an interview on The Breakfast Club in April, was referring to a shooting earlier this month. Officers shot at a man carrying a knife who was first stopped for fare evasion. Two bystanders, an officer and the man, were struck.
Ahead of his first court appearance on Friday in the U.S. Justice Department’s Southern District of New York, the retired NYPD captain suggested that he was being targeted for his stance on the influx of asylum seekers into the city from the southern border.
“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target, and a target I became,” Adams said in a Wednesday video.
Newsome said Adams wasn’t addressing the Black and brown families in low-income communities like his hometown of the Bronx.
“We refused to allow him to say that this was a Black thing. This isn’t a Black thing. This is a justice thing. … We’ve been victimized by him, we’ve seen his policies, his arrogance,” Newsome told Capital B. The attorney and civil rights activist says he has an ongoing dispute with Adams that has escalated to where a permit application to host a Juneteenth event that included feeding a Bronx neighborhood was allegedly maliciously denied by the mayor’s office.
Do “real New Yorkers really care”?
Adams’ approval ratings from New York City voters dropped significantly at the end of his second year, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. Yet, he is still favorable amongst Black voters who were surveyed in that same poll and are mostly older, like the folks Adams was surrounded by on Thursday.
Shortly after Adams was sworn into office in January 2022, he quickly rose to the national spotlight. At first, New Yorkers thought it was comical that the former borough president was partying like a celebrity with the who’s who of the city’s nightlife, and becoming the butt of jokes on Saturday Night Live. Those moments followed by a flurry of Giphys, and hot takes from content creators for giggles and likes. Within months, those funny shares turned into a series of videos of everyday New Yorkers expressing their gripes about what seems like Adams’ questionable approach to governing one of the world’s most populated cities.
Adams entered a plea of not guilty Friday. The 64-year-old is accused in a five-count indictment of having 10 years worth of interactions with Turkish nationals that resulted in free business-class trips around the world on Turkish Airlines and “more than $10,000,000 in public funds” for Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign, according to the indictment.
Adams is the first sitting mayor of New York City to be indicted by a federal grand jury for charges of bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals, and solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national. If convicted, he faces up to 45 years in federal prison.
Ultimately, New Yorkers are not going to lean into the details of this indictment, Greer said, unless they understand how pocketing millions of illegally obtained campaign contributions funds from a foreign national in exchange for something could impact their lives.
“But like, is he making my groceries go up? Did he get the money, or is it that the money was just there? I don’t know if real New Yorkers really care if he’s getting an upgrade on Turkish Airlines,” Greer said.
Adams is accused of accepting contributions from Turkish foreign officials — who are prohibited from donating to U.S. political candidates — and then manipulating the city’s matching funds program, designed to generously match small-dollar donations. Prosecutors claim that his campaign received over $10 million in matching public funds, which should only be available to candidates who comply with the rules, according to the indictment.
For decades in New York City and across the Hudson River in New Jersey, politicians at various levels of government have been forced to resign, plead guilty in exchange for a lower sentence, or become a cooperating witness for the prosecution, and few go to trial to make the chief prosecutor’s office prove their case to a judge or jury.
“It’s a sad day for New York in general, anytime something happens to a politician,” Greer said. “The only people who really lose out are the citizens of New York.”
Greer agreed that calls for Adams to step down were premature, since the indictment is not a conviction. Plus, she asked, “Why would he resign? If Bob Menendez, the senator of New Jersey, who had gold bars literally in his house” didn’t step down until after conviction, and if former President Donald Trump can still run for president with 34 felony convictions, then why would Adams step down.
If Adams were to step down, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, would assume the acting mayoral role. Williams could run for a full term in 2025.