Two things are happening in New York City at once: the Eric Adams administration is mired in police and corruption scandals, and New Yorkers are suffering greatly under austerity. It’s a perfect opportunity for a mayoral challenger from the Left.
Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a news conference at City Hall in New York on November 21, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This is probably the craziest time in New York City politics in a while. Last week, the FBI seized the cell phones and computers of top officials in Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, as part of an ongoing corruption investigation. His police commissioner resigned as a result. Unrelatedly, an internal report revealed that Department of Education employees took their families on trips to Disneyworld that were intended for homeless kids. Two former fire chiefs were indicted Monday for bribery and corruption. This comes on top of earlier investigations related to the Turkish government. It’s obvious to everyone that the federal government has something massive to drop on Adams or people very close to him — we just don’t know yet what it is.
And then there’s Sunday’s mass shooting on the subway — by cops.
After evading the $2.90 subway fare and then wielding a knife against them, police confronted and ultimately shot Derell Mickles, age thirty-seven, in the stomach, at the Sutter Avenue L train stop in Brownsville, one of the poorest — and, some residents say, overpoliced — neighborhoods in Brooklyn. By the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) own admission, the officers also shot three other people in the melee: one of their own officers, plus two civilians.
All this over $2.90. In many countries and municipalities around the world — and on some bus lines in New York City — public transit is free. There are many reasons why that makes sense, but as we can see, giving police officers fewer reasons to open fire on the citizenry is a compelling one. Even a National Public Radio host was moved to interject, “Wow, I mean, I have to say this does seem like quite an outsized outcome for someone who didn’t pay a $2.90 subway fare.” Under Mayor Adams, the city has spent millions more on cops in the subway, issuing tens of thousands more summonses for fare evasion.
Mickles apparently threatened the police when they came after him. The details of the cops’ story appear to be falling apart or at least unclear. But even if the official story were true, it would hardly render the police response more humane or sensible.
The officer and the female bystander are recovering. Mickles is in the hospital and in critical condition. Another bystander, Gregory Delpeche, who was commuting to his job at Woodhull Hospital, is brain damaged and barely responsive from being shot in the head by the NYPD that day, according to his family.
If that’s not surreal, tragic, and disturbing enough, look at what the mayor had to say about the matter. After four people, including a police officer, were injured after a mass shooting by his own officers, Adams praised the officers for “great level of restraint,” calling the deaths “just unfortunate.” That’s one way of looking at a mass shooting committed by people whose job it is to keep New Yorkers safe.
Sunday’s subway shooting is shocking. It has provoked public outrage, and on Tuesday, eighteen people were arrested in a protest demanding accountability from the police. But corruption is, in its way, just as bad, as it, too, undermines public confidence in government as a potentially positive force, a confidence which is essential to any left-wing project.
But even before this series of cascading disasters, Adams was an awful mayor, seemingly engaged in a kind of vendetta against the working-class New Yorkers who voted for him. During a time when those New Yorkers have struggled terribly and left the city in large numbers because of the high cost of housing and childcare, Adams doubled down on austerity, cutting library, school, and childcare budgets. His cuts to public preschool alone totaled some $400 million, according to the Independent Budget Office. The mayoral appointees that make up his Rent Guidelines Board have approved three rounds of increases on rent-stabilized apartments, even as it becomes disturbingly common to see human beings sleeping on the streets.
All these events feel like the death rattle of the Adams administration. But assuming the feds continue to move slowly here, Adams’s demise will need considerable electoral assistance. There are some promising primary challengers already, especially compared to the last mayoral primary’s dismal roster. Among those who have already declared, comptroller Brad Lander is progressive and popular, with a plausible path to victory. The charismatic state senator Jessica Ramos has deep ties to labor. Not yet declared, but carefully considering the race, socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has emerged as one of the most compelling young leaders on the Left, championing the taxi workers, a cease-fire in Gaza, and improvements to the public transit system.
A divided left cannot win this, since all the money will be on Adams’s side, and plenty of voters as well. There’s an emerging cry among progressives for “Anyone but Adams,” which will only work if the institutional left — progressive unions, nonprofits, left-leaning neighborhood Democratic clubs, the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America — are united on a strategy: who to rank in the first two or three, and who to emphatically reject. Ranked-choice voting, incoherent messaging, rampant egoism, and disunity on the Left is what brought us Adams last time; perhaps with better candidates and coordination, we could do better next year. There are more socialists and progressives in office and more organizing infrastructure than last time — not to mention, after three years of Adams, a more acutely shared sense of urgency.
I’m not sure I know anyone who knocked on any doors last mayoral election; left organizations were in disarray and the candidates were bad. A left united around not individuals and their egos but on the biggest challenges New Yorkers face, housing and child care, and on strengthening public goods like transit and schools, could probably beat not only Adams but also Andrew Cuomo, should the disgraced former governor throw his hat in the ring. Such an agenda could mobilize this still-vibrant city around an alternative to a status quo of corruption and austerity — and win.