Is Eric Adams The Pettiest Mayor In America? Office Takes Chairs from Reporters For Challenging His Sinister Police Policies
Is Eric Adams The Pettiest Mayor In America?
The New York City Council is facing off against Mayor Eric Adams, who wants to scrap a law that would require NYPD officers to document all encounters they have with the public.
The tension between Mayor Adams and the city council was on full display on Tuesday when the mayor’s deputy chief of staff abruptly entered the rotunda of City Hall and demanded chairs from reporters seated in the area awaiting a press conference held by the New York Council speaker, Adrienne Adams.
“We just want our chairs,” the mayor’s representative said in a video widely shared on X.
Last week, Adams vetoed Police accountability legislation. The Mayor’s office released statement that holding police accountable could “slow NYPD police response times, erode years of progress building police-community relationships and preventing crime through community-oriented policing, and add tens of millions of dollars in additional NYPD overtime each year.”
Adams also posted a video on his X account saying that the holding police accountable would require more work, and will require police to take down “additional, unnecessary information” subjecting brutal officers who are normally just used to freely harassing New York residents, without a pen, to more paperwork.
“You cannot handcuff our police,” Adams said tacitly revealing his thirst for more power via unaccountable policing in a news conference at City Hall following the veto. “I’ll say it over and over again, the goal is to handcuff bad guys who do bad things in our city.”
If doing “bad things in the city” is the final prerequisite for being detained by police many New York residents would argue that Mayor Adams himself should be handcuffed immediately.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said that, even though crime in general is down, civilian complaints are higher than they’ve ever been since the dawning of the crack epidemic.
“Despite being (supposedly) less than half of the city’s population, Black and Latino stops make up 97% of those stops on a daily basis. The federal monitor and NYPD’s own auditors have also shown the department to consistently underreport stops,” Adrienne Adams said.
The City Council just needs 34 votes to overturn the veto. Council members previously passed the bill with 35 votes in a 51-member chamber.
“If City Council wants to give you something to sit on,” Menashe Shapiro told reporters Tuesday at City Hall. “Explain to City County. Let’s go.”
Mayor Adams launched a program inviting members of the public to accompany officers on police calls. Only newly elected council member Yusef Salaam has taken up his offer.
In his time as mayor, Adams, a former top cop, has come under fire from much of the police reform community for supporting police use of the stop-and-frisk tactic, restoring anti-crime units that were directly connected to the deaths of Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, his handling of the city’s migrant crisis, and his response to the death of Jordan Neely.
The unseating of the journalists on Tuesday is not the first time the mayor’s office has attempted to shake down reporters, according to The New York Times. The mayor’s schools chancellor excluded major publications from access to speech about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the city’s schools this week and moved reporters from the press room at the police headquarters to a trailer outside earlier this month. Subscribe, Share, and Stay Tuned. THe revolution will not be televised. 2raw4tv.tv
