It was the day after a New York City police officer had been fatally shot in the line of duty and a man killed after being shoved onto the subway tracks, and Mayor Eric Adams had reached the end of a somber hourlong news conference.
He had spoken emotionally about the loss of the officer; blamed the two deaths on a system that he said left the city vulnerable to the effects of recidivism and mental illness; and sought to counter the narrative that New York had descended into chaos.
And now it was time for Burger King.
“Give me those two pictures from Burger King,” the mayor commanded, launching into an explanation for a recent unannounced visit to an outpost of the fast-food chain in Lower Manhattan that has attracted complaints for drug dealing. After some research and face-to-face conversations there, Mr. Adams concluded the complaints were unwarranted.
“I did something revolutionary,” he said. “I went to talk to them and said, ‘Who are you?’”
Earlier that morning, Mr. Adams had visited Rikers Island for another closed-press drop-in, and watched the baptisms of several detainees. Three days later, he returned to Rikers for his own rebaptism, with the Rev. Al Sharpton doing the honors that included a thorough washing of the mayor’s feet.
The visits were part of the mayor’s unorthodox messaging strategy as he prepares to run for re-election next year, and faces what seems likely to be a contested Democratic primary.
Many of Mr. Adams’s events seem to be rooted in political theater or old-time religion, and sometimes a combination of both: the baptism at Rikers; the drop-in at Burger King; accompanying the police on an early-morning raid targeting a major robbery ring. On Wednesday, he announced a “Five-Borough Multifaith Tour,” a series of conversations with clergy and faith leaders.
For the mayor, getting rebaptized at Rikers was a “fortifying ritual that makes sense to a lot of his base,” said Christina Greer, a political science professor who is currently a fellow at the City University of New York. She likened the rebaptism to his trip to Ghana, where he received a spiritual cleansing, shortly after he was elected in 2021.
“But I don’t know if that’s enough,” Ms. Greer added. “A lot of his base wants to know where the city is going.”
In the view of many New Yorkers, the city is pointed in the wrong direction. Mr. Adams has the lowest approval rating of any New York mayor since Quinnipiac University began conducting city polls in 1996.
His standing among Black registered voters, typically among his most steadfast supporters, has also dipped. In Quinnipiac’s December poll, 38 percent of Black voters disapproved of the way Mr. Adams was handling his job, up from 29 percent last February.
Recent front-page headlines in the city’s tabloids have contributed to the impression that the city is spinning out of control, as has the mayor’s own rhetoric.
But since December, he has repeated variations of a new city slogan — jobs are up, crimes are down — and said that New York was in fine shape.
“I know a city out of control,” he said last week. “I visit some of them in this country. This is not one of them.”
Yet the mayor has been selective about who hears that message. He has limited his interactions with the City Hall press corps to a single weekly news conference, typically held on Tuesdays. He prefers to conduct one-on-one interviews, often on radio and frequently on programs with significant Black and Latino audiences.
Late last week, the mayor faced off against one of his most ardent critics, Olayemi Olurin, a lawyer and a political commentator who hosts a YouTube show. The two appeared together on “The Breakfast Club,” a popular morning show on Power 105.1 FM co-hosted by the author and media host Charlamagne Tha God.
The result was a volatile, nearly hourlong debate over his public safety policies, which Ms. Olurin said were most damaging to the Black and Latino, poor and working-class people who helped elect Mr. Adams.
Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff, said he wasn’t surprised to see Mr. Adams in the studio across from a vocal opponent or being rebaptized at Rikers Island. The mayor is comfortable with dissonance, Mr. Carone said, especially around his signature issue of crime and public safety.
“He believes that he’s the one who runs into the fire and doesn’t run away from it,” Mr. Carone said. “In this case, the fire is the conversation on criminal justice and public safety. He’s trying to articulate that real leadership addresses both.”
Clips of Mr. Adams sparring with Ms. Olurin have garnered hundreds of thousands of views. She criticized the rise in stop-and-frisk encounters during his administration and the return of plainclothes police squads focused on recovering guns. She asserted that as the mayor highlighted the killing of the police officer in the line of duty, he had ignored civilians who have been killed by the police.
“We’ve had a tradition of overpolicing for generations,” Mr. Adams said, deflecting blame away from his administration.
“And it’s gotten worse now that you’re here,” Ms. Olurin shot back.
The criticism struck directly at the mayor’s core political identity: a Black New Yorker with working-class roots; a teenager who said he was beaten by the police, and who used the confrontation to propel him toward a police career that saw him rise to captain; a politician who understood firsthand how government needed to work for people.
But the policies of Mr. Adams’s administration, as Ms. Olurin noted, have not always reflected that.
During his time in office, the city has ramped up the use of policing tactics such as stop and frisk, and has conducted too many unlawful stops, according to a federal monitor. Complaints to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates police misconduct, are on the rise. The arrest and detention rates of young people have increased.
The long-troubled Rikers Island is in danger of being taken over by federal authorities and the mayor has questioned whether the jail can be closed by the legally mandated August 2027 deadline.
And Mr. Adams canceled $17 million in funding for programs on Rikers Island designed to prepare those same men he was baptized alongside to re-enter society. All but $3 million of the funding was restored, but new contracts must now go to bid, causing a delay in providing those services.
Sandy Nurse, a city councilwoman who represents Bushwick and Brownsville and leads the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, praised Mr. Adams for visiting Rikers. “As a Black man, as the second Black mayor of New York City, that’s important,” she said. “But it can’t just be visits with photographs. It has to come with material support.”
Ms. Olurin said in an interview that she was glad that she was able to challenge some of the mayor’s rhetoric on a Black platform like 105.1 FM radio, where Mr. Adams has appeared a handful of times.
“People got to see how he answers things and evades things,” she said. “A lot of the things his administration is doing are not defensible.”
Charlamagne said in an interview that he also believed that the city’s tendency toward overpolicing did not necessarily make people feel safer. “With stuff like stop and frisk, it increases the amount of encounters between Black and brown people and police officers, and a lot of times those don’t end well.”
He added that he did not tell Mr. Adams in advance that Ms. Olurin would be questioning him.
In his Tuesday news conference, Mr. Adams seemed to evade a question about whether he was prepared for the adversarial interview, or, as a reporter worded the question, “Did they kind of punk you?”
“Well, one thing for sure,” the mayor replied. “I’m not a punk.”
The post Why Adams’s Campaign Strategy Involves Rikers Baptisms and Burger King appeared first on New York Times.
