Two years ago, in September 2020, an attorney named Joel Berger wrote a letter to The New Yorker magazine about a previous article that suggested that police unions were waning in influence. Berger, no fan of police unions, expressed his gratitude for the “diminishment of [unions’] electoral strength.” A self-professed “civil-rights lawyer suing N.Y.P.D. officers” (New York’s version of our own John Burris), Berger believed that police unions were impediments to police reform—specifically, the “accountability and transparency” that police critics like him demanded.
Berger wrote his letter only four months after George Floyd was killed, when the “defund the police” movement appeared ascendant across America. Here in Oakland, Carroll Fife was cruising to victory on a defund-the-police platform; although she misleadingly called it “disinvesting,” it was the same thing. In his letter, Berger expressed the “hope that…the elections of mayors” and other elected officials in New York City would bring progressives within reach of their cherished goal: defunding the police.
A little more than a year after Berger wrote his letter, New York City held its mayoral election. The three top Democrats in the primary were Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley. Wiley’s main campaign pledge was to “restructure N.Y.P.D.” and to “fire Police Commissioner Dermot Shea” because, she felt, he was not sympathetic enough to Black Lives Matter. Wiley, in other words, was the kind of candidate Berger favored. Garcia was non-committal on the subject of police reform; though vaguely liberal, her basic promise was to streamline New York’s bureaucracy. Then there was Adams. Black, and a former N.Y.P.D. Captain, Adams ran an explicitly pro-police campaign. When all the votes were counted, Adams won the primary with 50.4% of the vote. Garcia came in second, with 49.6%, while Wiley was eliminated in the final round of ranked-choice voting. (In the general election, Adams crushed the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa—who had been endorsed by Rudy Giuliani--in a landslide, 67.4% to 27.9%.)
Berger’s hope that a progressive mayor would lead to defunding N.Y.P.D. proved a fantasy. New York City voters elected the candidate who they believed would protect their safety—a concern only amplified by yesterday’s subway shooting. In February of 2022, when President Biden visited New York, he told the new mayor, “Mayor Adams, you and I agree, the answer [to rising crime]...is not to defund the police, it’s to give you the tools, the training, the funding to be partners.”
Historians will look back at this period between late 2020 and the Spring of 2022 and marvel at how rapidly and completely American attitudes toward the police changed. The Bergers and Fifes of this nation, who wanted to dismantle police departments, who smugly thought they were winning, have been thoroughly defeated. Whatever sympathy some Americans might initially have had for defunding the police was obliterated by the violence and mayhem that swept the country over the last year. Americans want cops to be well-trained and fair in their treatment of minorities, but they know that “the thin blue line” is the only thing protecting them—us—from becoming prey to the predators.
Steve Heimoff