New York City’s new Mayor-elect Eric Adams (D-N.Y.) met with a radical leader of Black Lives Matter to discuss policing policy in the coming Adams Administration, Fox News reports.
Hawk Newsome, the leader of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, met with Adams on Wednesday behind closed doors at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. Newsome told Adams that there would be “bloodshed” if Adams tried to reverse the lax law enforcement policies of his predecessor, Bill de Blasio (D-N.Y.), in favor of tougher laws.
“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 said after the meeting. “There will be riots, there will be fire and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people.”
Chivona Newsome, Newsome’s sister and co-founder of BLM of Greater New York, agreed with her brother’s assessment and said that if Adams tried to bring back tougher policing tactics, “we will shut down City Hall, and we will give him hell and make it a nightmare.”
One paper reported that tensions flared up at the meeting, which at one point descended into a shouting match. A key point of contention was whether or not Adams should reinstate the city’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, which had controversially been abolished by de Blasio; Newsome compared the unit to the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo.
Newsome had gained infamy for a declaration in a Fox News interview last year that if Black Lives Matter did not get its demands, then it would “burn down this system.” His comments were made at a time when race riots were still ravaging the country in the wake of the accidental fentanyl overdose death of George Floyd, a black man, while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Adams, a former police officer, defeated a dozen other candidates in the Democratic Party primary in June. He then went on to easily defeat Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the civilian crime prevention group Guardian Angels, in the general election. Adams, who will be the second black mayor in New York City’s history, frequently walked a fine line between being a progressive and a moderate Democrat; although he identified himself as progressive, he rejected calls to defund the police department, a growing far-left movement in the country following last year’s riots.