The Patriot Post® · Eric Adams Gets Off on the Wrong Foot

We had high hopes for Hizzoner Eric Adams, who seemed like the perfect antidote to the awful New York City mayoral tenure of Bill de Blasio. The former is black, confident, a former cop, and a proponent of both law and order and the Second Amendment, while the latter was white, woke, soft on crime, a hater of cops, and a grabber of guns.

During a campaign-season podcast, Adams was asked whether he’d carry a gun if elected. He didn’t hesitate: “Yes I will, number one. And number two, I won’t have a security detail. If the city is safe, the mayor shouldn’t have a security detail with him. He should be walking the street by himself.”

That sounded good to us, especially coming from a Democrat, and from a guy whose electorate went 76% to 23% for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020. Adams, too, won in a landslide this past November, and he started off with goodwill around him and the wind at his back. After all, he ran on a promise to get tough on crime, and no one was weaker on crime than his predecessor. Nowhere to go but up, right?

Six weeks into the job, though, we’re beginning to have our doubts.

Clearly, the predators who’d plagued the city throughout de Blasio’s two terms didn’t get the memo. Last month, when two young NYPD cops, Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, were ambushed and murdered in a Harlem apartment, Adams called for help from the Biden administration to fight the flow of guns into the city. “We don’t make guns here,” he said. “We need Washington to act now to stop the flow of weapons into our cities.”

Adams didn’t seem to draw a distinction between illegal guns and legally owned ones, nor did he seem to care. But he should have. When seconds matter and the cops can be there in minutes, an armed citizen is often the difference between deterrence and disaster, between life and death.

Nor did Adams respectfully ask Biden to knock-off the talk of “police reform” and the BLM-inspired demonization of cops, whose unintended consequences are the Ferguson Effect and the inevitable rise in crime in the urban centers where wary cops no longer dare to tread. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board has noted, “Police departments are down in manpower not because of a lack of money for hiring, but because officers are leaving law enforcement and telling family and friends to avoid it.”

Things haven’t gotten any better for the mayor in the days since. Earlier this month, he rightly apologized for having referred to white NYPD cops with a racial slur during a private (read: all-black) Harlem Business Alliance event in 2019. “Every day in the police department,” he bragged, “I kicked those crackers’ a**, man.”

He was un-be-LEEV-able, man, if he does say so himself.

We’ll forgive Adams for this, because we understand the context, and because we’re not as race-obsessed as Democrats and leftists. He thought he was among friends, and we let our guard down when we’re among friends. (If you disagree, pay closer attention to the language flying around the card table next time.) Besides, Adams also referred to his black critics as “nig-roes,” so he’s clearly an equal-opportunity offender. And, hey, at least he didn’t say he was misquoted.

But Adams’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month got even worse on Tuesday, when he started complaining about how New York City’s notoriously nasty media are treating him. As the New York Post reports, “Adams repeatedly suggested that race played a factor in news coverage of him, telling an almost all-white group of reporters who were hand-picked by his office and invited to cover the City Hall news conference, ‘I’m a black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me.’”

He continued: “How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written? How many Asians? How many East Asians? How many South Asians? Everyone talks about my government being diversified, what’s the diversification in the newsrooms?”

Dude needs to grow some thicker skin. And he needs shut his soup cooler and get to work for the people who elected him — not the people who are paid to cover him.