“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target.” These are the words that New York City Mayor Eric Adams spoke in a pre-recorded video released on September 25, 2024, ahead of federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting a political contribution from a foreign national.
As the first New York City mayor to face federal charges while in office, Adams maintains his innocence. Despite this, his indictment is lengthy and far-reaching. It spans his days as an elected official in Brooklyn to his current tenure at City Hall.
These considerable charges stem from a years-long federal investigation. They allege that Adams accepted benefits from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official, accepted campaign donations from foreign nationals during his 2021 mayoral campaign, and demonstrated favoritism in turn. They also allege that Adams accepted over $100,000 worth of these benefits, which included free business class flights and luxury accommodations, both without public disclosure and while working to create fake paper trails to cover his tracks.
Adams is taking a martyr’s stance. His message is clear: he has done so much good for the city, and it is those in power who want to take him down. He is a target, a victim and not a perpetrator. His position is textbook in the face of a corruption scandal, but Adams does not have the track record to back his statement up.
One of Adams’ major failures has been his approach to policing. A former NYPD captain himself, Adams has ushered in a new era of Broken Windows policing, which focuses on cracking down on low-level crimes, to the city. According to the ACLU of New York, NYPD stops have skyrocketed during Adams’s tenure, reaching rates in 2023 unseen since 2015. Adams has touted these stops as important to lowering crime rates, despite widespread evidence that increased stops do not correlate to less crime. Unsurprisingly, nearly 70% of people stopped were innocent, and 89% were Black or Latine. Adams also revived special units–”Neighborhood Safety Teams” and “Public Safety Teams”–focused on getting firearms off of the streets. Instead, these units have been involved in a huge amount of illegal stop and frisks. While deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2013, Adams sees stop and frisks as a tool that “must be used correctly.”
While policing may be one of his most egregious offenses, Adams has been involved in numerous other policies that have hurt the people of New York. A small sampling includes cutting back on funding for the New York Public Library system and New York City universal Pre-K for all programs, leaving community coordinators that provided assistance in homeless shelters out of his budget plans and misallocating emergency contracts for migrant care.
It is difficult to see what Adams is talking about when he declares that he’s stood his ground for the people of New York City.
Just a short time after the indictment, there is still a whirlwind of action and reaction spinning with Adams at its center. The press conference held just after the unsealing of his indictment was filled with community calls for resignation. Those calls have come from other public officials as well, including Representative Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Jerry Nadler and Adams’ successor as Brooklyn Borough President, Antonio Reynoso. 69% of adult New York City residents agree with these calls, according to a poll conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.
This indictment is just the beginning. There are several related ongoing investigations that may lead to further charges for Adams and the people close to him. Governor Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove Adams from office, has so far instead committed to monitoring what happens in the coming days and weeks. Nonetheless, many around Adams–including the mayor’s senior advisor, Tim Pearson, and First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright–are already resigning.
The coming months will prove a hectic time in New York City politics as the Adams administration faces its biggest challenge yet. No matter the outcome of Adams’ corruption scandal, the mayor has proved time and time again that he does not have the city’s best interests at heart. These charges, while damning if true, are just the latest in a long line of disappointments.
