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Eric Adams

Thursday’s Headlines: Welcome to the Mayoral Race, Eric Adams Edition

Mayoral candidate and Brooklyn Beep Eric Adams hands out literature in the subway. File Photo

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams announced his run for mayor on Wednesday with a poignant biographical video that focused tightly on a message of police reform and public safety. The campaign advertisement tied vignettes from Adams’s boyhood growing up Black and poor in South Jamaica — as teens, he and his brother were arrested and beaten by police — with his decision to join the NYPD and fight brutality from within it.

Adams sought to position himself as a strong Black voice on public safety, though perhaps as a law-and-order voice and certainly not a "Defund" voice like others in the race. “The fight can’t only be in the streets; it must be also in the agencies that patrol the streets. That is how we change policing,” he says in the video — segueing to the uptick in gang shootings. 

Left unsaid was Adams’s position on another pressing public-safety question: traffic violence (and it didn't help that Adams touted endorsements from car-loving Council Members Daneek Miller and Laurie Cumbo, and also was preparing to meet on Thursday with a clergy group headed by former Council Member [and unrepentant homophobe] Ruben Diaz Sr.).

But we expect that the beep, himself a cyclist, will (like Carlos Menchaca and, with hope, unlike placard user Maya Wiley) take up the issue soon when he and his rivals return Streetsblog’s mayoral candidate questionnaire (hint, hint). Until then, here's the rest of Wednesday's news:

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