In the wake of the protests over the murder of George Floyd, some New York City Council members called for cutting $1 billion from the Police Department’s budget. Adrienne Adams, then a city councilwoman representing Southeast Queens, did not join with them.
A few years later, after rising to become Council speaker, Ms. Adams led a rare override of a mayoral veto and pushed through the How Many Stops Act, a police accountability bill that requires police to record the race, age and gender of most people they stop.
Those decisions, Ms. Adams said, reflected a common-sense approach to policing that she believes distinguishes her from her opponents in the June 24 Democratic primary for mayor.
Ms. Adams hopes to build on that image on Thursday when she releases a detailed plan to address public safety, vowing to fill the more than 2,400 vacancies in the Police Department in her first eight months in office. She said she would offer housing and tuition support to attract new officers and modernize CompStat, the Police Department’s crime data system, to track officer recruitment, retention and trust levels between the police and community.
She said she would also move to increase police presence in the subway and have those officers focus on crime prevention while having mental health professionals and social workers deal more with homeless and mentally ill people.
Ms. Adams was the last major candidate to enter the mayor’s race and has significant ground to make up. She trails badly in fund-raising efforts and has yet to qualify for the city’s generous matching-funds program.
