Local Black Lives Matter leaders said Wednesday they would unleash violence and chaos if New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams reversed the abolition of the anti-crime police units.
SO WHAT
Can we call this what it is now?
WHAT HAPPENED
Hawk Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, threatened “riots” and bloodshed” following a heated meeting with Adams, the incoming Democratic mayor, a relative moderate elected on a law-and-order platform.
“If he thinks that they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we are going to take to the streets again,” Newsome also said to fellow BLM activists outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, where the summit took place and was livestreamed.
- “We will shut the city down,” Chivona Newsome, said Hawk Newsome’s BLM chapter co-founder and sister. “We will shut down City Hall, and we will give him hell and make it a nightmare.”
- Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a former police sergeant, invited the siblings and a few other BLM leaders to the meeting as they were holding a small protest outside his office.
THE GREAT UNWOKENING?
BLM was at the forefront of the 2020 George Floyd protests in New York City and nationwide, earning the radical left-wing group widespread acclaim and unprecedented public support.
- “Defund the police,” one of BLM’s central demands, was taken seriously by the mainstream media and implemented to varying degrees by major U.S. cities.
But violence associated with the protests caused death and destruction — estimated at tens of millions of dollars in New York City and $1-2 billion across the U.S. — and led to a national surge in murder and other violent crime.
- Despite the best efforts of some in the media, the public has lately soured on BLM and police funding cuts, and officials in New York City and elsewhere have quietly reversed course and started to “refund the police.”
Americans, it seems, maybe be returning to their senses.
THE RESPONSE
In an appearance on CNN Thursday, Adams — whose election has been seen as part of an electoral backlash against progressive politics — downplayed the BLM leaders’ violent rhetoric.
- Let’s not make believe that those 13 [BLM protesters] have really consumed all the oxygen in the room,” he said.
- Adams vowed to follow-though on his campaign pledge to bring back a “reinvented” version of the NYPD’s anti-crimes units.
- “We must zero in on gun violence in our community,” he said, citing a botched gang hit that recently killed an innocent man in the Bronx.
