For the second time in a decade, a new mayor of New York City is being tested by the killing of two police officers. In 2014, less than a year into Bill de Blasio’s first term, a Baltimore man who brought a gun to town shot two cops dead, in Brooklyn. The man had posted on social media about avenging the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. De Blasio had come into office vowing to put an end to racist policing practices at the N.Y.P.D. Many cops held him responsible for their colleagues’ deaths. At a funeral for one of them, officers in uniform turned their backs on the mayor. “There’s blood on many hands,” Patrick Lynch, the head of the city’s largest officers’ union, said. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”
Though de Blasio had plenty of defenders, including Eric Adams, who was then the Brooklyn Borough President, the killings haunted the rest of his tenure. Even as his administration made significant changes to how policing gets done in New York—cutting back on the practice of stopping and frisking Black and brown men by the hundreds of thousands, experimenting with violence-interrupter programs—de Blasio seemed to shrink from discussing the cops. For years, he resisted calls to fire Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who put Eric Garner in the chokehold that led to his death. Two summers ago, he kept quiet when police beat protesters at Black Lives Matter marches.
Last Friday, less than a month into Eric Adams’s first term as Mayor, a Baltimore man who brought a gun to town shot two cops dead, in Harlem. His mother had called 911 to report a domestic incident at her apartment. Three officers responded to the call. When two of them—Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora—approached a bedroom, Lashawn McNeil, who was forty-seven, reportedly emerged firing a .45-calibre Glock equipped with a magazine that could hold up to forty rounds. He shot Rivera and Mora, before being fatally shot in the arm and the head by the third officer at the scene.
The test now for Adams isn’t whether his relationship with the N.Y.P.D. can recover—he came into the mayor’s office vowing to defend the civic necessity of policing, and the cops have stood by him. “Our hearts are broken, we’re in shock, our knees are buckling,” Patrick Lynch said, hours after the shooting, at a press conference with Adams. “And we’re angry, because we’ve been here before.” The test for Adams is whether he can deliver on what he promised New Yorkers who voted for him: curbing the recent spike in shootings in the city while balancing police tactics against the rights of poor minority communities.
It cannot be overstated how thoroughly New York’s local political leadership has changed in the past few months. In addition to a new Mayor, there’s a new governor in Albany, a new District Attorney in Manhattan, a new police commissioner, and a new City Council. The reformers among them, like de Blasio in 2014, have appeared chastened by the murder of the officers. Alvin Bragg, who campaigned for Manhattan District Attorney promising a less punitive approach to gun-possession cases, was prompted to announce a change in “emphasis.” He appointed a prosecutor in his office to a new post dedicated to preventing gun violence. “It’s been a really tough moment to navigate,” City Council member Kristin Richardson Jordan, a thirty-five-year-old police abolitionist who represents the Harlem district where the cops were killed, told the Times. “Because people are searching for a villain.”
Adams has expressed no such anxiety about how to meet the moment. “It is our city against the killers,” he said last Friday night, in Harlem. “This was an attack on the city of New York.” On Monday, he unveiled a “Blueprint to End Gun Violence.” The plan nodded at reform efforts, including violence-interrupter programs, and at the ways in which the city’s crime concerns were connected to its issues properly running schools, providing mental-health services, and addressing homelessness. Adams pledged that “the abuse of police tactics will not return under my administration.” What Adams really emphasized, though, were the ways he wanted to beef up law enforcement in the city. He called on the state government to reëxamine new bail laws intended to reduce the number of people consigned to pretrial detention, and a law that sends certain teen-age defendants facing gun charges to family court instead of criminal court. He said he’d put more cops on the streets and wanted the city’s courts to return to pre-COVID levels of operation. He also said he’d reinstate modified versions of the plainclothes “anti-crime” N.Y.P.D. units that were disbanded, in 2020, after years of well-documented abuses. “New Yorkers feel as if a sea of violence is engulfing our city,” Adams said. “I will not let this happen.”
Lawmakers in Albany reacted coolly to Adams’s comments about the bail laws. The Times editorial board called the proposal to send more teen-agers to criminal court a “nonstarter.” Adams also argued that judges in New York need more leeway during arraignments. Unlike elsewhere in the country, judges in New York, when making a bail decision, are supposed to consider only a defendant’s likelihood of returning to court for trial, not whether or not a defendant poses a danger to the community. Yet in practice, many judges in arraignment court already take dangerousness into account when making bail decisions, regardless of what the law says. That they have leeway to do so is evidenced by the fact that they set bail at dramatically different rates. Adams has said he wants to break the “pipeline” to prison that fuels mass incarceration. But by questioning the bail rules, he’s aligning himself with those who oppose reducing the city’s jail population, even at a time when people are dying in city custody at a rate of more than one inmate a month.
The other pipeline that Adams spoke about this week was the “iron” one, a fresh metaphor for talking about New York’s gun problem. New York has strict local and state gun laws, and yet the city is full of guns brought in from other cities and states. “We must stop the flow of illegal guns in our city,” Adams said, announcing the Blueprint. “The iron pipeline must be broken.” Here, Adams called on the federal government to pass “common sense” gun-control measures. Joe Biden plans to visit Adams in New York next week, and his Administration has pledged to help combat gun trafficking. But the challenge is daunting. The killing of two police officers in New York is not going to change the Republican Party’s decades-long rejection of federal gun-control measures. Several of the steps that Adams is proposing to take on his own—including expanding the use of facial-recognition software and police checkpoints at bus and train stations—raise concerns about privacy, overreach, and racial profiling.
As with the crisis in the city’s jail system, Adams’s approach to policing starts with de-escalating the tensions between City Hall and the men and women in uniform. “Your brother was a hero," Adams said Friday, at the funeral of one of the officers killed last week. “You have physically lost your brother but you have gained me as your brother.” Much was made this week of whether the murder of the two officers augurs a return to the high crime and disorder of the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, and what the fact that both officers were Latino should mean about the future of policing in New York. “The two young officers—Mora was 27, Rivera was 22—were emblematic of a changing police force that has struggled to repair its relationships with the city’s Black and Hispanic communities,” the Times said this week. “Both Latino in a department that was once overwhelmingly white, the officers were cognizant of problems with policing and eager to play a role in confronting them.”
And yet in 2014, when the city’s crime rates were near historic lows—against which today’s spikes are being measured—the murder of two cops prompted worries about the bad old days all the same. “The shooting on Saturday seemed reminiscent of decades past,” the Times said then, “when the city was mired in an epidemic of drugs and violence.” In that tragedy, too, both the officers who were killed—Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu—were also emblematic of the changing N.Y.P.D. The issues confronting the new mayor, and the rest of us, are not new. The old days aren’t returning. What’s at issue is what’s ahead.
