New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been in office since January 1, 2022. Ever since then, the city has plummeted into several crises that have only gotten worse (especially in comparison to how the city was led under the leadership of his predecessor, former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who served from 2014 until the very end of 2021). And, despite the disapproval of de Blasio among New Yorkers during his tenure, they now seem to have gotten a far worse Mayor in the form of Eric Adams.
To truly understand the gravity of the situation and to understand how Eric Adams got himself to become Mayor of the biggest city in the nation, we have to go back to who Adams was before running for Mayor. As an NYPD cop for over 20 years, he made his way up to captain before retiring from the force in 2006 – although that tenure in the NYPD didn’t go as smoothly as the media have portrayed it.
Adams had a longstanding history of being a very vocal officer, even if it backfired against his career as an officer. The first recorded instance of Adams’ retaliation was in 1995 when he co-founded the advocacy group, known as “100 Blacks In Law Enforcement Who Care,” which was a direct response to the election of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The group focused on seeking criminal justice reform and often spoke out against acts of police brutality and racial profiling by NYPD officers. This program grabbed the attention of Reverend Al Sharpton, a known figure in social justice and civil rights advocacy, who claimed that he was merely teaching people how to “live under oppression.” It was also later confirmed that Adams was once the personal bodyguard for Rev. Sharpton in the late 80s, and according to POLITICO, they texted or called weekly as of the summer of 2023 – just over a year before the indictment of Adams by the Department of Justice.
Adams then came after then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2006 on live television, something that no New Yorker expected to happen. In October of that year, then-Captain Adams called the city’s response to a declared terror threat that same month “cosmetic” – going on to suggest that Bloomberg timed the announcement of the threat to distract New Yorkers from the fact that he did not appear at an election debate in Harlem the same day of the announcement. NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau opened an investigation into Adams following his remarks on television, and would later go on to charge Adams with disseminating misinformation, divulging official police business, and speaking as a representative of the department without permission. Shortly after IAB found him guilty, he retired from the NYPD after 22 years.
But there was another side to Eric Adams – a much more political one. Dating back to the late 90s, Adams had been eyeing a career in politics to some magnitude, when he spoke with William Lynch, Jr., who was an advisor to then-Mayor David Dinkins, who Adams was a supporter of. In this conversation between Lynch and Adams, Lynch was able to convince Adams to first obtain a bachelor’s degree, rise within the ranks of the NYPD, and then run for a lower political office within the city to establish himself in the political world of New York. Despite this advice from Lynch, Adams decided to run for the United States House against the then-incumbent Major Owens in the Democratic primary, but he failed to gain enough signatures to appear on the ballot – leaving Owens as the only contender for the nomination in that district. Adams went on to claim that the signatures were stolen by someone he claimed to be associated with either Owens or his campaign – to which the NYPD investigated and did not find any evidence to corroborate Adams’ story.
Moving forward to just after Adams had retired from the NYPD, he was finally on the ballot for an election – this time he was running for the New York State Senate, which he won election to in the 2006 midterm elections. While in office, he represented the 20th district – which was comprised of Brooklyn neighborhoods including Crown Heights, East Flatbush, Prospect Heights, Sunset Park, and a couple of others at the time. Despite his past of advocating for criminal justice reforms, he appeared to have moderated his political stances – putting billboards up throughout his district, criticizing pants sagging, and coming after the usage of marijuana and other substances, particularly amongst young children. During his time as a state senator, he opposed the unconstitutional practice of “stop and frisk” which was executed by NYPD officers at the direction of mayors Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Adams as well, which will be explained later.
After a fairly tame career as a state senator, he geared up to run for his next political office in 2013, Brooklyn Borough President. He won the 2013 election with an overwhelming majority of 90.8 percent of the vote, and he ran unopposed in his primary election for the position. He would also go on to run for re-election to the position in 2017, again running unopposed in the primary and receiving 83.0 percent of the vote in the general election. During his tenure as borough president, Adams focused on multiple issues ranging from banning processed meat from school lunches in the city, appropriating more zoning in Brooklyn towards affordable housing developments, and some other smaller issues – however what he was preparing to announce next was something that Adams had been waiting a long time to do.
On November 17, 2020, Adams announced he would run in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City. During this campaign, he would moderate his political stances much more substantially, going back on his initial disapproval of the “stop and frisk” policy used by the NYPD in the early-to-mid 2000s. Adams also faced major criticism from New Yorkers as they alleged that he never even actually lived in the city and that he instead resided at a co-op apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey – which he and his partner, Tracey Collins, own. Despite the many policy changes and the many controversies that surrounded his candidacy for mayor, he would end up winning the fiercely competitive primary which was the first in the city’s history to use the ranked-choice voting system that the city council had recently adopted with 50.4 percent of the vote compared to the other finalist, Kathryn Garcia, who received 49.6 percent of the vote in the eighth round of voting.
In New York City politics, a Republican candidate can rarely win, especially in a city-wide election. After the primary was over, Adams was almost immediately considered the front-runner against his Republican opponent, Curtis Silwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels. The Guardian Angels are a non-profit volunteer organization that focuses on unarmed crime prevention methods. While the organization started with major criticism from public officials, the group would later expand outside of New York City to over 130 cities in 14 countries. When the election happened, Adams won with 66.9 percent of the vote, with Silwa trailing far behind with just 27.76 percent; Silwa only won the borough of Staten Island in the election.
Once Adams had won the election, he took a trip to Ghana in December, where he visited the Elmina Castle and announced that he would be bringing back the “gifted and talented” school program, improving relations with the state government, and reducing agency budgets by 3 to 5 percent. Shortly after the ball dropped in Times Square, Adams took office on the first day of 2022. During the first few months of his tenure, the crime rate in New York faced a significant increase in crime. In addition to this, his approval rating when inaugurated was at 63% but, by June of 2022, his approval had dipped down to 29%, as his administration did not seem focused on taking serious action towards major problems in the city, including violent crime, which the same polling showed that 76% of New Yorkers at this time were worried about whether or not they could become a victim of a violent crime.
Adams got into even more controversy in February 2023, when he said that he disagreed with the notion of separation of church and state at the annual interfaith breakfast. He went on to say that he also disagreed with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Engel v. Vitale, which ruled that school prayer was unconstitutional, saying that “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools”, which led many people to be appalled by the Mayor’s words. The following month, he would move forward with proposed plans to convert vacant office buildings into affordable housing, to which he received even more backlash as his plan had stated that apartments “did not require windows” and that his proposal was more “dormitory-like”. Adams also proposed a $550 million budget cut for education in December 2023, which resulted in the United Federation of Teachers filing a lawsuit against Adams.
Then came 2024, which was undoubtedly the most chaotic year of Adams’ tenure as mayor. In January, the City Council rejected a veto from Adams on the How Many Stops Act, which limited the use of solitary confinement for prisoners being held on Rikers Island and all other jails in the city and requires NYPD officers to take detailed notes of encounters with citizens that they suspect of committing a crime. In May, he created a Charter Revision Commission, which proposed changes to the city’s charter. Only five proposals were made by the CRC, three of which seemingly intended to empower the Mayor while simultaneously disempowering city council members.
Then there is the elephant in the room, the investigations and indictment of Eric Adams. The FBI had actually begun investigating Adams back in the spring of 2023 for corruption. The FBI said that the Turkish government, who Adams was a massive public supporter of, had been funneling donations to Adams’ campaign through a company called KSK Construction.
In the fall of 2023, the FBI would raid the Brooklyn home of Brianna Suggs, Adams’ chief fundraiser. The FBI seized three iPhones, two laptops, and several other documents and items. On the same day, the FBI also conducted searches on a former Turkish Airlines executive and the Director of Protocol in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, Rana Abbasova. The FBI would also investigate frequent free flight upgrades that Adams received from Turkish Airlines.
After FBI investigators interviewed former FDNY commissioner Daniel A. Nigro, it was revealed that Adams had asked him to allow the government of Türkiye to occupy the Turkish House, a 36-floor skyscraper in Manhattan, while he was still in office. The commissioner refused to sign off on Adams’ request, citing fire safety issues. Days after the raid on Brianna Suggs had taken place, the FBI seized at least two cellphones from Eric Adams, along with an iPad belonging to him.
Following the extensive investigation by the FBI, the Department of Justice began gearing up for an indictment of Adams. The New York Times revealed on September 25, 2024 that Adams had been indicted by a grand jury on federal charges which were not known by the Times when the news was published. The following day, the DOJ unsealed the indictment, and the charges were revealed to the public. The indictment revealed that Adams had been charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, one count of wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and one count of bribery.
On February 10, 2025, the Department of Justice under recently-elected President Donald J. Trump ordered federal prosecutors to drop all of the federal charges against Adams, citing that they had concerns that the case had been affected by the publicity. They also stated that they believed that the trial was impacting Adams’ ability to fulfill his duties as Mayor.
Since the indictment was dropped, the calls for NY Governor Kathy Hochul to remove Adams from office have intensified. Hochul said that while she does not currently intend to kick Adams out of office, she also has stated that she is not relinquishing her power to do so if she feels that it is necessary. Hochul met with Rev. Al Sharpton and others, who asked her to not kick the mayor out of office and to instead allow voters in the upcoming primary election this summer to decide whether or not they will trust Adams to run the city for another term.
As of last month, polling showed Adams with just 6% of support amongst likely voters, according to polling conducted by Progressives for Democracy in America. Former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, a figure who has been floated around a lot in this election, was ranked in first place, with 32% of likely voters saying they would support him. As of the writing of this article, Eric Adams is not likely to win the primary election in June.
