Last year, President Joe Biden spent a day with New York Mayor Eric Adams in an attempt to spotlight Adams’ aggressive approach to tackling crime. Now a new report claims that the strategy that’s been deployed by Adams, a Black man, involves systematically violating the civil rights of people of color.
Biden should’ve listened to those of us who warned him against embracing Adams’ militant attitude toward policing. If Democratic leaders have any interest in pursuing meaningful police reform, then they’d keep their distance from politicians who believe brute force is the only way to handle any surges in crime. But maybe that’s the point — they don’t have any interest.
These units, which have existed in different forms as far back the 1980s, have long had a reputation for abusing power.
A court-appointed monitor filed a report in federal court Monday which catalogued how the monitor says the New York Police Department has been violating the law. Specifically, the monitor alleges that Adams’ resurrection of a controversial anti-crime unit has resulted in a surge in the violation of civil liberties of people of color. The monitor worked with a team of former law enforcement officers, who studied stop reports filed by police officers, footage from body cameras, and other information.
“Almost all of the stops made by the rebranded ‘neighborhood safety teams’ analyzed in the report — 97 percent — were of Black or Hispanic people, and 24 percent of the stops were unconstitutional. Of 230 car stops included in the sample, only two appear to have turned up weapons,” according to The New York Times. In one precinct in the Bronx, merely 32% of frisks and 26% of searches were deemed constitutional by the monitor, The Times reported.
It should not be a surprise that Adams’ resurrected anti-crime units are targeting people of color with allegedly unlawful policing tactics. These units, which have existed in different forms as far back the…
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