WASHINGTON — Eric Adams, the favorite to become New York City’s next mayor, said after a White House meeting Monday that he is known as “the Biden of Brooklyn” — though he rejected the president’s call to beef up police forces to combat the scourge of illegal guns.
The former cop-turned-Brooklyn Borough president met with Biden and other local leaders on crime, but attempted to paper over Democratic divisions on whether to defund police forces or heed Biden’s call to hire more of them in response to spiking violent crime.
“The first thing we need to do is to do an assessment of how we are using our police officers now. Far too many police officers are doing clerical duty. Far too many police officers are patrolling in groups,” Adams said after a TV hit on the White House driveway.
“I was a transit police officer. I rode the trains alone. I don’t know why I have four or five police officers congregating around a booth area. So let’s look at how we’re using our police officers and then make the determination, do we need more? That question is still a question mark. I think we have improper deployment of police officers.”
Adams told a small group of reporters that Biden didn’t ask the local leaders to commit to hiring more cops during a mostly closed-door meeting. “It didn’t come up in our conversation,” he said.
Adams is the heavy favorite to win the mayoral election after narrowly winning the recent Democratic primary, vanquishing rivals who included a prominent advocate of defunding the police.
“They call me the Biden of Brooklyn because you can just tell when someone is not trying to rush you through the meeting and engaging…. He is a plain-talked person and it is just a pleasure having him as president,” Adams said.
“A large number of Americans responded to him. It’s just so similar to how people responded to me as a candidate. When you look at those blue collar locations in outer boroughs, it was the same signal. And I borrowed his blueprint when I ran for office as the borough president.”
He added: “This crime problem is destroying my borough and I’m happy that he allowed me to come in and share my insights.”
Adams left the White House en route to a meeting in DC with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and said he plans to tell her “these are real problems, families being fearful of violence. I had a 13-year-old child shot, assassinated in the Bronx, a 10-year-old child was shot and killed near Rockaway. These are real problems and the party must start speaking directly to the American people.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio was left off the guest list for the White House crime summit.
Although Adams equivocated on hiring cops, the White House said in a memo Monday that it wanted to support local officials to help “put more police officers on the beat – including hiring above pre-pandemic levels in communities experiencing an increase in gun violence.”
Much of the White House summit happened behind closed doors after a brief introduction.
Biden, seated at the center of a large boardroom table, said “most of my career I’ve been dealing with this issue,” referring to his historical anti-crime advocacy, which included authoring harsh drug laws in the 1980s and ’90s that contributed to the mass incarceration of minorities and sent some people to prison for life for dealing marijuana.
Biden emphasized in his opening remarks that the federal government was focused on “stemming the flow of firearms used to commit violent crimes,” referring to a recent initiative to crack down on gun dealers who violate policies.
The president added that localities can use leftover funds from the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus bill that passed in March “to hire police and pay them overtime,” repeating a suggestion he made last month as violent crime soared.
Adams did not make publicly viewable introductory remarks, nor did other local leaders invited to attend.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at her daily briefing that Biden wanted to make sure localities have “the support they need to hire more police officers.”
Psaki said Biden would be “advocating for more police with better training and accountability” and “advocating for keeping illegal guns out of the hands of criminals.”
Other meeting attendees included DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, San Jose, Calif., Mayor Sam Liccardo and the police chiefs of Chicago, Memphis, Tenn., Wilmington, Del., and Newark, NJ.
De Blasio insisted he wasn’t offended about being left out of the meeting.
“I think the White House put together a group of people that they wanted to talk to about this issue. And I think it makes sense that Eric brings a particular perspective from 20-plus years as a police officer. So I think it’s great that he is there and I want them to listen to his voice,” the current mayor said.
“He has, I think, some great ideas about how to protect people while continuing reform. I think it’s great that they want to hear his ideas. He’s the borough president of Brooklyn — one of the biggest counties in the whole country — of course it makes sense for him to be there.”
New anti-crime ideas floated by Adams included education reform, in addition to more enforcement of handgun laws.
“We have abandoned black and brown and poor communities in this country… The problem in America is the handgun. Yet the demographics of the victims are blank, brown and poor. We have ignored it for far too long,” Adams said after meeting with Biden.
“We continue to have institutions in place in practices that feed crime in our country. How do we have a prison system where 30 percent of the people — the inmates — are dyslexic? That means the real crime didn’t take place only on the streets, it took place in the department of education across America.”
Defeated left-wing mayoral candidate Maya Wiley tweeted that she liked what she heard from Adams. “This is welcome news as a statement of investment in jobs, education and addressing causes, rather than symptoms. We need trauma informed care and to commit to moving forward and not backwards,” she wrote.
Adams, who was a Republican until 2001 during former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s tenure, slammed Giuliani-era crime policies that coincided with reductions in violent crime.
“What the Giuliani years did incorrectly: They used tools to really target communities based on ethnicity and based on crime numbers. That was wrong. You took the small number of people who are committing crimes and you treated the entire community based on that,” Adams said. “We abused stop-and-frisk, we abused the street crime unit, we abused proper policing, and we created a wall between police officers and the everyday public that they were supposed to serve… What we must do is rebuild that trust. We have an entire generation that was raised to dislike the police.”
In a nod to his past as a Republican, Adams cast himself as offering a middle-ground approach to fighting crime.
“As a former police officer, as a former, as you say, Republican, as a current Democrat, as a former person who was arrested and beaten by police officers, I’m so many formers, I’m trying to figure out the current. One thing I’m clear about is [that] the prerequisite to prosperity is public safety and justice,” he said.
As Adams was treated by Biden as the presumptive mayor, New York City Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa argued that as a major-party candidate, he also should have been invited to the White House to discuss crime.
“I’m the only mayoral candidate who has been actually the victim of gun violence, being shot five times by the Gottis,” Sliwa said.
“I would have hoped to have been invited. But what specifically has to be addressed today in Washington about New York is the defund the police,” Sliwa added. “President [Biden] was willing to give money [to the NYPD]. I hope Eric Adams will say, ‘Hey, the Mayor, de Blasio, should have taken the money because we need them now.’”
Although Biden said last month communities can spend COVID-19 relief money on hiring more police, de Blasio said New York wasn’t going to be hiring more cops as a result.
New York City murders are up 8.5 percent as of early July compared to the same period of 2020. Car thefts are up 24.9 percent. The increase continues a spike that began around May 2020. In 2020, New York City’s murder rate soared 44 percent, shootings were up 97 percent, burglaries were up 42 percent and car thefts increased 67 percent. Similar spikes have been seen in other major cities across the country.
