Don't Worry, Eric Adams: Maya Wiley Doesn't Actually Want to Defund the NYPD

And none of her progressive endorsers seem eager to push her on it, either.

Yesterday afternoon, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summoned 61 candidates for New York City Council to a press conference in Lower Manhattan to hear whether or not she’d be endorsing their campaigns. Disappointingly for them, it was 61 nos, as she merely released what amounted to a voter guide listing the names of candidates who scored highly on a questionnaire she made them fill out beforehand.

As a consolation prize, they got front row seats to the one endorsement she did deliver yesterday: Maya Wiley for mayor. It was the latest attempt by the city’s progressive establishment to consolidate behind a candidate after its two previous champions, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales, imploded in April and May, respectively. Many fear that a split progressive field could lead to victory for Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams or Tusk Ventures Investment Vehicle Andrew Yang, both of whom have been running on reactionary platforms that include vocal support for the NYPD.

Adams in particular is emphasizing his connection to law enforcement. While many Democrats have embraced the aesthetic, if not the substance, of police reform since the murder of George Floyd, Adams has made a different calculation about the politics of policing in this election. As a Black man with a long career in Brooklyn politics, Adams already enjoys formidable Black support and clearly doesn’t feel pressured to prove his anti-racist credentials. Indeed, it’s Black voters who have kept him competitive with blockbuster margins of support in just about every public poll of the race to date. As a former Republican and NYPD detective, he believes he can capitalize on surging violent crime in poor Black and brown neighborhoods, and ride high-octane promises to clean up the streets right into Gracie Mansion.

To that end, Adams released this statement shortly after AOC’s endorsement of Wiley:

“Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Maya Wiley want to slash the police department budget and shrink the police force at a time when Black and brown babies are being shot in our streets, hate crimes are terrorizing Asian and Jewish communities, and innocent New Yorkers are being stabbed and shot on their way to work. They are putting slogans and politics in front of public safety and would endanger the lives of New Yorkers.”

If you ask me, Eric Adams should take a page from his own book on wellness, align his chakras and relax. He may or may not win the mayor’s race, but the NYPD will probably get to keep its money either way. One thing is clear from the way Wiley has run her campaign, and it’s that she has neither the intention nor desire to defund the police. Not only that, but something else is clear from the way city progressives have consolidated around her, and it’s that they have neither the intention nor desire to push her on it if she wins.

I. Viewers to Voters

Wiley launched her campaign for mayor in October 2020 with an announcement video that stretched on for over two and a half minutes without mentioning a single policy she intended to pursue if elected. Remarkable even by the standards of MSNBC pundits and NYC politicians, but perhaps par for the course for lawyers. Curious to see if she offered more detail on her website, I took a look and found that while there were certainly more words there, few of them really qualified as “details.” But that doesn’t mean they weren’t illuminating.

The current version of Wiley’s website has a tab listing the policy plans she’s accumulated over the course of the campaign. Gone from the website is the “Priorities” page, which previously described the various perspectives that would inform her approach across a number of issue areas. Here were Wiley’s reflections on “Criminal Justice & Policing,” emphases added, courtesy of the Internet Archive:

“We have real concerns around public safety. Shootings are up and too many young people are losing their lives in neighborhoods like Brownsville and the South Bronx. Some communities are fearful of homeless residents who may suffer from serious mental health or substance use issues. Too often we make poverty a crime or criminalize people when what they need is a mental health professional, a social worker, a mediator or a job. In fact, the majority of calls the NYPD receives are for problems, not for crimes–problems that can be solved by people who don’t have a gun or a badge. We have an opportunity to reengineer how we respond to the crisis and non-crisis needs of our residents.

We also need leadership that will demand law enforcement accountability and culture change. Leadership that believes we can demilitarize the force while still clearly responding to and investigating serious crime, illegal guns, and threats of terrorism.”

Substantively, none of this is particularly reactionary, especially when compared to the rhetoric of a figure like Eric Adams, who just referenced the bullet-strewn corpses of children in a press release. Politically, none of it is that controversial either, including among Black and brown New Yorkers. But the greater prominence of quality-of-life appeals in Wiley’s earlier language is unmistakable, no less so because they exist directly alongside all the usual progressive paeans to decriminalizing poverty, investing in social services, removing police from mental health interventions, etc.

As she launched her campaign, Wiley attempted to balance continuity with the social justice reputation she cultivated as a cable news pundit with a pivot toward the quality-of-life concerns of cable news viewers she hoped to turn into voters. By her estimate, such concerns included having to look at homeless people, hear about gun violence on television, and perform anxiety over impending acts of terrorism. There’s no denying she’s in touch with her base.

II. Size Matters

This high-wire act has also been on display in Wiley’s nimble answers as to whether or not New York City should defund the police. Two months into her campaign, the New York Times was already cataloging her Olympian spin:

“She has been careful not to fully embrace the phrase “defund the police.” The movement is popular among protesters, but could be viewed as too liberal among moderate voters. In an interview on MSNBC, Ms. Wiley was asked about President Obama’s recent comments that ‘defund the police’ was a ‘snappy slogan’ that could alienate ‘a big audience.’ She said Democrats should focus on specific policies to improve policing and public safety.

‘We should not get caught up in slogans — we should get caught up in solutions,’ she said last week.”

Solutions, not slogans: Maya Wiley was a woman after Eric Adams’ own heart - for the most part, anyway. Further into that interview, Wiley did admit that in her opinion, the NYPD budget is currently the wrong size. To her mind, the obvious remedy was to make it the “right size.” But what size is the right size, exactly? Despite returning to this phrase - “rightsizing the NYPD” - time and time again over the next six months, she refused to say. In February, the New York Times again noted Wiley’s vernacular performance art, this time in the context of a broader shift away from the defund movement among the mayoral candidates:

“Maya Wiley, a former top counsel for Mayor Bill de Blasio who gained a national following as an analyst for MSNBC, was often critical of the mayor’s handling of policing. Now she appears to be recalibrating her message to avoid using the defund slogan. ‘The word means different things to different people,’ Ms. Wiley said. ‘We should focus on the clarity of the demands.’

Ms. Wiley said at a recent mayoral forum that the Police Department budget was ‘bloated,’ but declined to say how much she would seek to cut police spending. ‘I don’t have a number for you, but that’s because it has been such a black box,’ Ms. Wiley said. ‘There really is so little transparency about what and how the budget is spent.’”

This approach contrasted with those of Wiley’s competitors in the so-called progressive lane, Dianne Morales and Scott Stringer. Morales had gone the furthest of the three, pledging to push for a $3 billion cut to the NYPD budget in the first year of her mayoralty. Stringer’s proposal reflected the activist consensus that had begun to crystalize prior to the murder of George Floyd but which now seems modest in comparison: a $1 billion total cut, spread out over four years.

It wasn’t until late April, the day after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, that Wiley finally put a number to her rightsizing proposal: $1 billion. Still unknown is the righttiming: Wiley’s website doesn’t specify which parts of the budget these cuts will come from, nor when we can expect her to try to implement them if elected. Considering that she only committed to the bare minimum figure to be taken seriously as an option for progressive voters - after half a year of foundering in the polls while trying to carve out a more moderate path - we might be waiting for some time.

III. Courage to Hedge

Despite this record, Wiley’s new progressive endorsers insist that she’s firmly committed to reducing the police budget. Sochie Nnaemeka, Director of the New York Working Families Party, says that Wiley is “uplifting the urgent matters facing our communities - from the need for truly affordable housing to divesting from the NYPD,” while Adams and Yang “continue to push pro-corporate, pro-carceral agendas.” At the rally yesterday, AOC said that “we’ve already tried Giuliani’s New York [and] Bloomberg’s New York. And what that got us was...a New York that criminalized young people and put them into lifelong carceral cycles. It ends now.”

But does it? Conspicuously absent from AOC’s remarks is that we’ve already tried Bill de Blasio’s New York as well. He too was elected on a platform of racial justice and police reform, yet under his administration, New York added more than 1,000 new police officers and over a $1 billion per year to the NYPD’s budget. By his side was Maya Wiley, defending him as investigators probed suspicious fundraising practices and lapses in transparency. On the campaign trail, she’s criticized her former boss and downplayed her own involvement his various scandals while pledging to chart a different path.

The progressive left has now hitched its credibility on one of its signature issues to a candidate who’s been hedging her bets on police reform from the day she launched her campaign. Will they be ready to oppose her if she hedges again in office, or like Wiley, will they only be ready to criticize their former ally once she’s basically out the door?