New York City’s Chaos Mayor

Updated at 5:25 p.m. ET on August 29, 2024.

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Eric Adams sounded certain—his city was in crisis. It was September 6, 2023. The mayor of New York was standing in a public-school gym on the West Side of Manhattan, in his shirtsleeves, mic in one hand. “The city we knew, we’re about to lose,” he warned. More than 100,000 migrants had made their way to New York over the past year. Caring for them would be an all-but-impossible task. “This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.”

And the mayor was getting a little tired of being pressed on how he was going to handle the situation. “As you ask me a question about migrants,” he said to a group of community leaders and local officials, “tell me what role you played.”

In the weeks that followed, Adams called for massive cuts to make up for the $12 billion he said New York would need in order to provide shelter, medical care, and classrooms for the migrants. He and his deputies proposed slashing services including police-academy classes, pre-K funding, and public-library hours; they even reduced the number of firefighters per truck.

And then Adams’s prediction fizzled. Thanks to better-than-projected tax revenues and cheaper costs for migrant care, New York found itself with an extra $3 billion in its budget. Some of the proposed cuts were restored. The “migrant crime wave” that Adams’s police commissioner claimed was “washing over our city” never materialized, with some high-profile exceptions. The city incorporated 34,000 migrant children into its public-school system. Providing services for the estimated 65,000 migrants who remain in New York’s shelter system is still a titanic challenge. But the idea that they collectively presented an existential threat to a city of 8.3 million—a city that survived the crack epidemic, 9/11, and the worst of COVID—seems, in hindsight, a bit hysterical.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Something’s fishy about the ‘migrant crisis’]

It’s also on brand for the proudly “not traditional” mayor, who has a tendency to portray just about any challenge as existential. (“There is a demonic energy that has engulfed our planet,” he said during a Christian “day of prayer” earlier this year.) Adams, a former police officer, ran for mayor as a law-and-order figure. By many metrics, he has delivered: Violent crime is down citywide; the illegal weed shops that had taken over empty storefronts are beginning to be closed; more than 17,000 guns have been taken off the streets.

Yet most New Yorkers aren’t fans of the job he’s doing as mayor. His approval ratings are stuck in the mid-20s, the lowest numbers for any New York mayor in three decades. Even unpopular mayors tend to coast to reelection here, but Adams has already drawn at least one primary challenger for next year’s election, City Comptroller Brad Lander; several others are reportedly considering getting into the race, including former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The mayors of Los Angeles and Chicago addressed last week’s Democratic National Convention, but Adams wasn’t offered a speaking slot.

Adams’s migrant panic—and similar blowups in the turbulent months that followed—help explain his troubles. Since taking office, in 2022, the mayor has all too frequently been a force for chaos. At times, he takes a combustible situation and throws a rhetorical match on it. In other instances, he cedes authority to the state. Sometimes his way of framing a problem is a jumble. In a single press conference this past March, he warned that “the foundation of the public-safety apparatus is dissolving right in front of our eyes,” while urging, “We have to push back on this narrative that we are living in a city that’s out of control.”

The constant whipsaw effect is undermining the very real progress the city is making in its recovery from the pandemic. And it’s giving a sense that whoever is supposed to be driving policy doesn’t have a firm grip on the wheel.

Even Adams’s biggest media boosters appear to have grown weary. The Murdoch empire—which not long ago championed him as the Democrats’ tough-on-crime future—is once again marketing the city as a national symbol of disorder and decay, and now lampoons the mayor as out of touch and unable to govern. It’s an ironic turn for Adams, who “got mileage out of being the one Democrat willing to borrow GOP talking points” about the city’s unraveling, a local elected official who regularly deals with the Adams administration told me. (Like some other sources quoted in this article, this person requested anonymity to avoid reprisal from city hall.) “When you gin that up—New York’s a cesspool, going down the drain—you risk becoming a victim of that narrative.”

Meanwhile, the mayor’s longtime friends and associates keep getting engulfed in scandal. The latest turn came earlier this month, when The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors had served Adams, city hall, and his campaign committee with subpoenas as part of a corruption probe. (Adams has not been accused of wrongdoing and has said he has “nothing to hide.”)

[Read: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]

The mayor has defenders, of course. “You may disagree with Adams’ politics or his policies, but you can’t disagree with the record,” the Reverend Al Sharpton wrote in a recent op-ed, adding that he sees parallels between the “coded” criticisms of Adams and those of David Dinkins, New York’s first Black mayor. Adams’s aides argue that his message on the migrant issue proved prophetic when national Democrats moved to tighten border restrictions. “All the things he’s talked about for well over a year, folks are coming along,” Fabien Levy, the deputy mayor for communications, told me. And although Adams’s rhetoric can clearly be a little aggressive—“He doesn’t mince words. He’s not shy,” Levy said—Adams’s team insists that he has helped restore New York’s “swagger.”

The problem for the mayor is that most New Yorkers don’t seem to agree. “If you run for mayor as Batman and you can’t tame Gotham City,” the elected official said, “what else is there?”

On April 30, Adams dispatched the NYPD to Columbia University for a second time that month, to clear out pro-Palestinian activists who had barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall. The mayor and the NYPD’s top brass held a press conference the next day to celebrate what they saw as a job well done. In many ways, it encapsulated the most chaotic aspects of the Adams era.

“There is a movement to radicalize young people,” Adams said. Seated to his left, his police commissioner held a bike lock similar to one that protesters had used to chain Hamilton Hall’s doors closed. Adams and the NYPD treated the locks as Exhibit A of “outside agitators” at Columbia and at pro-Palestinian demonstrations at City College of New York. After the press conference, a reporter noted to one deputy commissioner that the lock was the same type used by commuters across the city, and sold on Columbia’s campus.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams holds a press conference at city hall in November 2023. (Mark Peterson / Redux)

If Adams or the NYPD had wanted to make a careful case that national pro-Palestinian organizers had worked with the campus groups, they could have done so easily. If they had wanted to call out examples of individual protesters praising Hamas, certainly some could be found. Instead, they chose to make a maximal argument. “Gas masks, ear plugs, helmets, goggles, tape, hammers, knives, ropes, and a book on TERRORISM. These are not the tools of students protesting, these are the tools of agitators, of people who were working on something nefarious,” another deputy NYPD commissioner tweeted. The book in question was a standard introductory textbook on the topic, published by Oxford University Press. Adams was later asked by NPR how he could be so certain that the protests weren’t student-led. “I just had a gut reaction based on my years in law enforcement,” he said.

Urban leaders in positions like Adams’s typically look for ways to de-escalate a tense situation. Adams sounded more like the colonels I used to interview as a reporter in Baghdad and Kandahar during the wars there. He boasted of the NYPD’s “massive operation” at Columbia and City College. He crowed about the use of drones, encrypted radios, and precision-deployment tactics. He bragged about police replacing a Palestinian flag with the Stars and Stripes on the City College campus. “It’s despicable that schools will allow another country’s flag to fly in our country,” he said. “So blame me for being proud to be an American.” (“V-U. DAY!” the New York Post proclaimed on its front page.)

[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]

In June, I spoke with Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD’s intelligence chief; Adams had said that her team’s work informed his thinking on the protests. What triggered the NYPD response, she told me, was a perceived “shift in tactics” among pro-Palestinian groups nationwide, from protesting to more confrontational actions. She compared the protesters’ trajectory to the Weather Underground, the militant splinter group that grew out of the 1960s anti-war movement, and said she saw “some strong parallels.” She added that “foreign terrorist organizations” were cheerleading the campus activists, singling out al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which she said “has spilled a lot of ink on college-campus protests and encourag[ed] the protesters to continue to escalate.” (I have not found any public evidence of links between the terror group and the pro-Palestinian protest movement; none of Columbia’s demonstrators has been charged with violent crimes.)

The campus protests were just the latest example of how the uneasy bonds between law enforcement and citizens have been fraying under Adams’s watch. The mayor’s chosen chiefs now regularly go after his political opponents, his media critics, even judges deemed too lenient. Attacks on and civilian complaints about police officers have spiked.

To close observers of Adams, his over-the-top rhetoric about the protests had a familiar ring. The mayor casts his personal rise as a hero’s journey, one in which he first overcame dyslexia and a police beating in a Queens precinct house to become a grad student and a cop, then overcame racist bosses and snickering naysayers to become a police captain and mayor. But there’s no heroism without drama, and Adams at times is all too ready to supply it. As State Senator Jessica Ramos, a political rival, told me, “He seems to create a crisis so that somehow he’ll become the hero, and there will be this crescendo, and he will save the day.”

Adams and his aides can, at other times, sound strangely passive, even on signature issues—an odd posture for someone with as much main-character energy as the mayor.

In March, when Governor Kathy Hochul deployed heavily armed National Guard troops to subway stations to combat crime, Adams backed her up. “You’re going to be feeling the safety. That uniform means a lot to people,” he told reporters, noting that he had just sent an additional 1,000 cops to patrol the trains too. Weeks later—after critics said the troops were making riders more fearful, not less—Adams passed the buck. In an interview on the morning radio show The Breakfast Club, he said, “I didn’t put the National Guards in the subway; the governor did.”

In the same interview, Adams also took a deferential stance when the hosts questioned a policy he had previously championed: congestion pricing, a plan to charge people driving into Lower and Midtown Manhattan and use the money collected to improve the subway system. “We had no authority on it,” he said. “Albany passed the law.” The policy was set to go into effect on June 30 before Hochul shocked many New Yorkers by putting an indefinite “pause” on it, citing worries about its economic impact. Her decision upended decades of study and preparation, and put tens of thousands of jobs at risk. But Adams seemed unbothered. “The first female governor in the state of New York is showing what true leadership is about,” he said in the days following Hochul’s announcement.

Adams even seemed willing to defer to Hochul while a crime spree of sorts played out on the city’s streets. Although possessing cannabis has been legal in New York State since 2021, having it in quantities larger than five pounds is a felony punishable by up to four years in jail. Selling it without a license is also illegal. Yet an estimated 2,800 unlicensed smoke shops were operating in the city as recently as April. The state had made opening legal weed stores, let alone supplying them profitably, borderline impossible—Hochul herself called the legalization rollout a “disaster.” So the illegal sellers took over the retail spaces left empty by COVID. Their garish storefronts became a defining feature of post-pandemic New York, and a symbol of urban entropy.

[Josh Barro: New York’s governor is inept]

For more than a year, Adams claimed that he couldn’t do much in response. “The state has the enforcement power,” he said in December. Give him the authority, he promised, and he’d close down every shop in 30 days. Here was a man who once made a viral video pushing parents to look for hidden drugs in their children’s toys. Was he really so incurious about who was supplying all these shops that he wasn’t willing to do anything about them?

In April, the state gave local cops broad authority to inspect and shut down illegal weed sellers. Adams walked back his pledge of an instant crackdown: “On the 31st day, don’t be standing in front of city hall saying, ‘Hey, I saw a weed shop.’” He dispatched a team from the NYPD and the sheriff’s department to padlock offending stores. Three months later, he called a press conference to celebrate closing 779 shops. “We’re trying to move as quickly as possible. We were just given these tools by Albany,” Levy, the deputy mayor for communications, told me. The Adams administration could have prepared to close the shops in a hurry once given the authority, and quickly reestablished a sense of order. For now, only a fraction of the job has been done.

Municipal bureaucracies aren’t known as models of ruthless efficiency. But even Adams’s allies complain that this city hall, with its competing czars and political fiefdoms, can be particularly disorganized. I spoke with half a dozen people in New York politics who respect Adams—operatives, fundraisers, elected officials, community leaders. They had similar assessments. “We don’t know who to talk to,” one Adams ally told me. “It’s the definition of dysfunction.” Another source, shortly after a meeting with the mayor, told me that Adams “understands what a mayor’s job should be, but there’s often no execution afterwards.”

A series of lawsuits and investigations has only added to the confusion. Consider Timothy Pearson, a longtime Adams friend with a nebulous portfolio who serves as a senior adviser to the mayor. Early in the administration, the Times revealed that Pearson was collecting paychecks simultaneously from the city and a Queens casino, prompting Pearson to step down from the private-sector job. Then he was reportedly involved in a brawl at a local migrant shelter. (An investigation by the city is ongoing.) Then he was sued—four times—for alleged sexual harassment and retaliation, including by an active NYPD deputy chief. One of the lawsuits accused Pearson of seeking a piece of the city’s migrant-care contracts for himself. A lawyer for Pearson has denied any wrongdoing by Pearson, and city hall did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the allegations against him. But Adams has defended him, going so far as to invoke 9/11: “As a person who was in the Trade Center when the buildings collapsed, I think he is due due process,” the mayor said in March.

(Top) Asylum seekers outside of the Roosevelt Hotel on Lexington Avenue waiting to be processed and find shelter on August 1, 2023. (Bottom) Police officers hold a yellow rope to keep the press at a distance from mayor Adams on June 11, 2023. (Erica Lansner / Redux; Mark Peterson / Redux)

In addition to the corruption investigation, which is related to allegations that a foreign government illegally funneled money into Adams’s 2021 campaign, the mayor himself faces a lawsuit for alleged sexual misconduct. He has denied those allegations, and city hall did not respond to requests for comment about the FBI investigation. Meanwhile, four of Adams’s donors have pleaded guilty to crimes.

With so many distractions swirling around the mayor, it’s not surprising that the Adams administration has struggled to handle complex policy challenges, chief among them migration. New York’s shelter system was already overloaded when buses started arriving from Texas in April 2022, and the federal and state governments offered little assistance. This helps account for the fact that some of the city’s initial contracts to care for migrants were wasteful, and some of the emergency shelters were substandard. But it’s harder to explain some of the Adams administration’s actions later on, such as the decision to continue funding a no-bid contractor after it was found to be charging a 146 percent premium for its services and billing the city for empty hotel rooms, according to an audit by Lander, the city comptroller. (City hall said “new safeguards” had since been put in place.) Or the move to force families to leave a shelter after 60 days, ostensibly as a way to encourage them to find more permanent housing.

In May, before he’d announced his primary bid, Lander told me that the 60-day eviction policy had been implemented in an “erratic way.” He said he’d met a woman who was eight months pregnant and about to be evicted from a city shelter; she got a new bed only after a deputy mayor stepped in at the last second, according to Lander. (An Adams spokesperson, Kayla Mamelak, called the 60-day rule “one tool in our very limited toolbox to help migrants to exit shelter because, as we have repeatedly said, New York City is long past its breaking point.”)

“To me, that’s sort of a metaphor [for] a policy that was cruel on the front end and haphazard on the back,” Lander said.

Adams doesn’t show signs of being a deliberately cruel man. To the contrary, he’s demonstrated genuine care toward those on the margins—sitting down with accused drug dealers, getting rebaptized on Good Friday with inmates at the notorious Rikers Island jail. But haphazard? That’s another matter.

Adams’s predecessors got through times of crisis by championing signature policies: Bill de Blasio had universal pre-K education; Michael Bloomberg reimagined a greener city. Adams’s policy goals tend to be broader—back the blue, reopen the city for business, more building, more fun. “The mayor is not of this mindset that there’s one thing that you should be known for,” Levy said. “You have to walk and chew gum.”

[Qian Julie Wang: What really makes people feel safe on the subway]

Of course, public safety is job No. 1 for Adams. Levy ticked off a series of city efforts to decrease shootings and auto and retail theft. He noted that violent crime is mostly back down after a pandemic-era bump. Major felonies on the subway are at their lowest level since the Bloomberg administration (though researchers say that lower-level violent offenses are a bigger problem). New York remains one of the safest big cities in the country.

Yet in an April poll by the Manhattan Institute, 62 percent of likely voters in New York said they believed the city was less safe than it had been in 2020—results that track with previous polls. Adams’s messaging about public safety—apocalyptic at worst, confusing at best—has surely contributed to the perception that New York is still dangerous.

This spring, Adams unveiled a pilot program for gun-detecting scanners on the subway. He repeated statistics about how safe mass transit was, but added that three issues made the subway feel more treacherous than it actually was: severe mental illness, a small handful of repeat offenders, and random acts of violence. “It plays on the psyche of New Yorkers when someone is pushed to the tracks or someone shoots a gun in the subway system. Those three aspects are sending the message that our city is out of control,” Adams said.

Then he seemed to catch himself.

“Our city is not out of control.”

This story has been updated to clarify the NYPD intelligence chief’s comments on pro-Palestinian groups’ tactics.