The Other Eric Adams Scandal

Most people now assume that one of the many investigations swirling around the mayor's office will be what brings down Eric Adams . But what if the real peril to his longevity and legacy is just his everyday policies in action?

On Sunday, September 15, Derell Mickles hopped a turnstile, got asked to leave by cops, then entered the subway again ten minutes later through an emergency exit. This was at the Sutter Avenue L station, out by his mother's house, five stops from the end of the line. Police said they noticed he was holding a folded knife. They followed him up the stairs to the elevated train, asking him 38 times to drop the weapon. ( Here is the body-cam footage; note that it is extremely graphic.)

The two officers pursued him at length down the station platform; they confronted him while he stood with his hands behind his back and said "Leave me alone!" repeatedly. They instructed him over and over to drop or put down the knife. A train arrived, and he backed away into it, saying, "Don't touch me." They Tased him, and he left the train and ran. In the body-cam video, a small knife is visible in his hand against the outside of the next subway car as they shoot him many times. Four people were ultimately hit by bullets, including Mickles and one of the two cops. The officers alternate between yelling "Put it down!" and "I'm shot!" No one on the platform or in the car was stabbed.

"Earlier today, one of our officers was shot while protecting our subway system," Adams told the public, neglecting to mention that the shooting was done by another of those officers. A bullet went through a bystander victim's brain, his family announced, and he faced a terrible prognosis.

Nights of demonstrations, first in Brownsville, marching on the 73rd Precinct, then in Union Square and at the Brooklyn Museum, led to multiple arrests by an aggressive and bristling NYPD . "I also wanna state some of the narratives that are being discussed for people who know better, a narrative that we shot somebody over $2.90 fare, which is wrong, and quite frankly irresponsible of those people," said Chief of Patrol John Chell on Wednesday.

What, then, do the police believe was the actual narrative? This was a "complicated, fast-paced, special situation involving a person in mental distress," Chell said. He leaned hard on this characterization of the man who got shot: "This was necessary to help someone in mental stress who was armed with a deadly weapon." This is the good stuff, the stuff we want to read in the Daily News: We've all been through it with aggressive and/or unwell folks on the subway, and we've become trained to see ourselves as the potential victims of some knife-wielding maniac.

In fact, the police love what they're getting from fare-evasion stops. So far this year, about half of the 46 gun arrests and nearly a third of the 1,593 knife confiscations in the subway system have begun that way. Those numbers sound a little less thrilling when you learn that, each month, an unknown number of stops, resulting in about 10,000 summonses and about 660 arrests for fare evasion — in a system with 34,000 police officers and 10,000 police vehicles, and in which the average response time to police 911 calls is now 15 minutes — captures fewer than three guns per month on average.

The attempt by the police to broadcast their narrative didn't help much. The knife disappeared but then was recovered; police detained a passenger on the train who they say had picked it up. (That they'd earlier found a different, somehow-unrelated-but-maybe-related knife, a confusing plot twist, floated out of view.) Gothamist said its reporters had seen video of one man seemingly bleeding and handcuffed on the floor of a subway car and another person face down in the next car; who were these people?

When its actions went beyond physical force, the NYPD in 2023 most often used electrical weapons like Tasers about 1,500 times. Only 45 firearm use-of-force events were reported last year. Fortunately, these NYPD Tasers, when fired, trigger every body cam within 50 feet. Soon, we should have Ridley Scott levels of coverage showing what really went down.

The Adams administration is for the first time actively campaigning to make us appreciate it. Someone even seemingly, blessedly, muzzled the NYPD's deranged, aggressive social-media accounts, although not before the department went to war with the press, evicting a pair of New York Post and Times reporters from the press trailer at One Police Plaza in early September; a remarkable Post editorial then lambasted the "thin-skinned propagandists" of the NYPD. Adams was uncharacteristically cheery and chatty with reporters in the days after the shooting, particularly for a mayor on his third police commissioner, with nobody running the city's Law Department, with new video surfacing of the NYPD viciously beating a homeless-shelter worker, and whose top legal adviser had quit over the weekend. Lisa Zornberg had had enough and left with no notice. The Post said she'd wanted many of Adams's favorites to resign, which he would surely never allow.

Pretty much every media organization is now forced to update charts and explainers daily detailing the multiple investigations into various characters close to the mayor. Adams's love of loyalty confuses everyone, even though he brings it up constantly. Part of his faintly messianic personality is to surround himself with worshipful sinners. Adams is not surprised that people fail because he loves the thrill of forgiveness.

Amid that hysterical murk, a manufactured police pursuit, escalating a fare evader into someone so worth shooting that police are willing to spray a subway car and platform with bullets, is laughably bad policy in action — knife or no, "mental distress" or no. To Adams, who began defending the shootings right away, it was self-evident that everything here went exactly as it should have. The authority with which the city and the NYPD defended themselves directly mirrored the NYPD's statements about the killing of Kawaski Trawick in 2019. Police entered his apartment, demanded he drop a bread knife, then Tased and shot him. They called him emotionally disturbed, too. The same was true of Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly disabled woman shot and killed by police in her apartment in 1984 after she, fighting eviction, reportedly came at them with a knife.

"They were shot because there was a dangerous repeated offender on our subway system," Adams said of the passengers on the L train. Not particularly comforting; this is definitely one of those statements that's going to look amazing in the lawsuits. Between the fiscal years 2022 and 2023, the number of suits filed against the NYPD rose by 50 percent. That's a new pattern. Previously, the number of these suits hadn't increased since 2014. NYPD claims make up about a third of city payouts for personal-injury and property-damage settlements, or nearly $267 million. Maybe enterprising attorneys are filing thousands more lawsuits against the police, or maybe the police regime is encouraging more settlements or clearing a backlog. Or, another possibility, the police have simply become more suable.

At the same time, the Civilian Complaint Review Board — the body that investigates and makes recommendations about prosecuting police misconduct — has become New York City's biggest cruel joke. According to ProPublica, the recently departed commissioner, Edward Caban, tossed over half of the cases the CCRB investigated. The last route to accountability, for those who have access to it, is the courts. Those who look for help are casualties of the NYPD's refusal to be restrained. All this, the mayor swears, is by his book.