Across the United States, policing has become one of the most important issues in politics. Nowhere is this more apparent than in New York with the NYPD, where arguments between those who want to defund cops, reform them, or back the unconditionally are constant. At the center of this discussion is Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who falls in the middle. Adams says that he supports reform, but fervently condemns the idea of defunding the police and promises to be tough on crime – a strange combination of the three typical views. However, this is a hard line to straddle, and his campaign promises reflect the dissonance between these ideas. As Adams’ campaign website reveals, the mayor “know[s] how entrenched systemic bias is in the department,” but in contrast to this, he believes that “The fastest way to true reform is to add as much diversity to the NYPD as fast as we can.” He also pushes the idea of “good cops” versus “bad cops,” citing individual troublemakers to avoid addressing systemic concerns with the police. While diversity is important, systemic problems need systemic solutions, and while Adams purports to recognize systemic issues in the NYPD, the only solutions he puts forth are tired semi-liberal reform options that do little to address institutional issues in police forces and instead ascribe police violence to individual “bad cops.”
Adams has always emphasized the necessity of focusing on rising crime in New York. At the beginning of his term in 2022, the city suffered from a spate of high profile crimes that seemed to reflect the growing focus on rising crime rates in the city, including a rise in shootings and hate crimes. Based on this idea of growing violent crime rates and the necessity of stopping them, Adams promised to implement new policing policies and also proposed raising the budget of the NYPD (the largest and best funded police force in the world) by 180 million dollars. Whereas during former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s time in office, criminal penalties were intentionally lessened, Adams took an opposite approach, implementing an initiative to toughen up on minor (and non-violent) “quality of life” crimes such as public drinking and urination. Another controversial action was the reintroduction of “Neighborhood Safety Teams”, units that were abandoned in the 1990s reinstated, and then broken up again in 2020 due to their association with a disproportionate number of fatal shootings. While there have been some changes to how they are organized, the teams are still in a position to cause harm within minority communities. For instance, they are still permitted to drive around in unmarked vehicles. Their return epitomizes an obvious change in New York policing policy and while Adams purports to act in the name of reducing violence, these initiatives don’t reflect that, as the majority of arrests by the new Neighborhood Safety Teams during their first months of reintroduction were for low-level and non-violent offenses. These policies recall the violent policing approach of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. While Adams fervently denies this charge, Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg also used the idea of “quality of life” to push similar policies that led to increased racial profiling and overpolicing of non-white communities. Not only is Adams’ policy implementation unhelpful for stopping violence, it also marks more than a few steps backwards in the fight against police secrecy and brutality.
While it may be obvious that these types of policies have the potential for causing harm, the larger idea about needing more police to stop crime requires a more thorough analysis of crime and the police, both historically and recently. In his book The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale argues that the problem with policing is policing itself, methodically discussing its failings through topics such as the school-to-prison pipeline, prostitution, the War on Drugs, and violent crime. Police departments have many responsibilities that correspond to the long list of criminalized activities in the United States. Unfortunately, they fundamentally fail with every one of them, and Vitale dissects both police failings and why reform doesn’t work. In schools, positioned as undertrained School Resource Officers, police presence has caused an exorbitant increase in arrests of students (disproportionately students of color) and the criminalization of minor acts of disobedience. When dealing with sex work, policing has historically had little impact on its suppression, frequently been embroiled in corruption, and stripped sex workers of legal recourse for abuse. The prohibition-based War on Drugs waged by politicians using the arm of the police never significantly curtailed drug use, and has instead made drug use more dangerous, led to mass and overly cruel incarceration, criminalized young people of color, and gutted privacy protections. Most specifically relevant to Adams’ call for more policing, the police also fail at managing violent crime: already only making up a small fraction of police activities, the police don’t solve most investigated crimes, and the number of police has no correlation with crime rates. These represent the problems in just some of the responsibilities of the police, but the truth Vitale presents is ubiquitous; these issues are foundational to police work (which has always prioritized control and management of those deemed dangerous and ignored all evidence of largely negative impacts) which cannot be “reformed” away. The various attempts to do so have not worked because the problem is with every aspect of policing rather than with small fixable issues.
The police presence and scope of activity that we know today is a relatively recent development, having expanded in previous decades in order to pander to white voters with the idea of promoting “law and order” (which, along with related phrases like “soft on crime”, still heavily persists in politics today), as well as to control poor Black communities. There is extensive research showing that the crimes of the rich are often ignored or under-penalized (the lack of arrests resulting from the 2008 financial crisis being a prime example), while the marginalized and poor are overpoliced and over-targeted for nonviolent crimes (e.g. the War on Drugs, which had little impact on drug availability or use but destabilized many non-white communities). Increased and inevitably targeted policing leads to mass incarceration, which in turn leads to cycles of poverty. Even in the rare cases where policing works for the safety of a community, it is at the expense of all the harm that the police commit and have committed in the past.
The uncomfortable reality is that the public is constantly misled about crime and the need for policing. It’s easy to repeatedly hear about the crime problem from government officials and the media and believe that the solution is more police. However, both the problem of a rising crime rate and the idea of the police as a solution don’t hold up under scrutiny. While crime did rise during the pandemic, and especially coming into Adams’ term in 2022, crime rates are significantly lower than they were in the ’90s. Coming into this year, the violent crime rate took a downward trend as the pandemic died down in severity. Contrary to what Adams says and what his policies suggest, New York has not regressed into a violent and lawless city. Looking at crime beyond the scope of Adams and the pandemic, it’s interesting to see the decline in crime between 2015-2019 (a period where in most other places crime remained stable or went up), during which policing policy was much less extreme. These trends show that in New York City, crime rates have little to do with strict policing, and much more to do with the state of the world and the economy. By choosing more police as a solution against the exaggerated violent crime in New York, just as when he tells us that one of his major solutions to issues in the NYPD is more diversity, Adams ignores actual problems of systemic racism, violence, overblown budgets, and ineffectiveness in favor of an easy fix that actually doesn’t fix much of anything and leads to more brutality against the marginalized. These types of policies are not new, they have never worked, and it’s far past time to try something else.
If Adams’ approach to stopping crime is harmful, what alternative solutions exist? In order to reduce crime and produce actual net good in people’s lives, our politicians and the media need to stop lionizing and overfunding the police and instead turn to expanding social services that actually help people. In this, Eric Adams has a huge responsibility. He says that he recognizes the importance of expanding mental health services, and that he does want to increase funding and has pushed to send more mental health workers onto subways, but he also pushes expanded police presence along with them. He has increased funding for the city’s summer youth employment program, but has also decreased education and social services budgets. In the past, he promised to expand the Crisis Management System, an underfunded network of city-funded anti-violence organizations, but has instead cut its budget. While he may say otherwise, Adams clearly believes that it is more important to throw money to the police than it is to better the lives of the people of New York City. Rather than listen to reason and move towards a better future, Adams implements the tired and ineffectual. In so doing, he only perpetuates myths of police efficacy and utility.