Who are brutalized by the police? In March 2022, NYPD officers claimed an 18-year-old boy, Luis Manuel Monsanto, failed to stop for a traffic stop in The Bronx. So the officers chased the boy and opened fire on his vehicle, shooting him in the head, leaving him in critical condition. Officers are actually prohibited from opening fire on moving vehicles. So Eric Adams basically comes out as both a defense attorney and a judge for the police in the case and tells us that the police decision to open fire on the unarmed 18-year-old boy in a traffic stop, despite that being expressly against NYPD policy, is justified because the vehicle itself was a weapon.
He and his infinite discernment as Eric Adams reviewed all the evidence and determined without a shadow of a doubt that this young boy was going to roll over the officers with his car, a claim that has never been substantiated. Video has never emerged evidencing this, no weapons were ever recovered from the boy's car, and he was never charged for any criminal activity whatsoever.
And in the day of days where vehicles are used in terrorist attacks to drive into crowds, this we did we're dealing with a different moment in policing and we'll continue to train our police officers to deal with how now vehicles are used as weapons to harm innocent people as well as police officers. So this was not a rolling back this was not a backing up this was a very clear attempt to drive at a police officer.
Eric Adams really manages to position the police officers as under attack and I find that especially ballsy of him to remind them that people are using vehicles in terroristic attacks to drive into crowds because it's always NYPD carrying out those attacks on protesters.
Eric Adams likes to dramatize the danger police face while dismissing the danger police pose to everyone else even while he's being confronted with the evidence of their brutality because in reality very few officers die in the line of duty. In 2021 there was a record high in officers being killed on the job and that number was a whopping 73. Compare that to the 779 people police have already killed just this year or at least 1201 people police killed last year but you wouldn't know that if you let Eric Adams tell it because that wouldn't fit his narrative which is why he simply lies.
Two NYPD officers were killed during Eric Adams first month in office and when I say Eric Adams said baby I'm gonna milk this [ __ ] he milked that [ __ ] like a cow okay. Eric Adams came out and told us that the loss of those officers reminded him of his dear dear Fallen officer friend who died in the line of duty in 1987. So dear a friend in fact that Adams has never stopped thinking about Robert so he carries his photo in his wallet with him for decades and he pulled out that picture like the saint he is until his former aides came forward and told the media that Adams had instructed them to print that [ __ ] picture off Google in black and white and to make it look worn in the wallet by spilling some goddamn coffee on it.
What? This [ __ ] is a menace and a showman. Despite how Eric Adams loves to invoke his impoverished upbringing to position himself as a working class man and his petty crime-filled youth as a gang member trying to earn money to change his life circumstances, Adams offers little to no sympathy, grace, compassion or even understanding of the boys and men who look like him and come from similar backgrounds and experiences. And he demonstrates that repeatedly in his criminalization of young black boys especially those he in any way associates with hip-hop.
That is who the black cop is. That's what makes them particularly dangerous to the black community because as James Baldwin said "Black policemen were another matter. We used to say if you must call a policeman for we hardly ever did for God's sake try to make sure it was a white one." A black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could, and you were without defenses for this black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be to offer his proof that he was black but he was not black like you. Which is why it shouldn’t surprise anyone that despite using that police brutality story to appeal to Black voters as someone who understood the issues with police brutality in a police state, Eric Adams is a big “don’t talk to me about police brutality or black lives matter when there’s black on black crime” guy. In fact, Eric Adams thinks that the problem with white liberals is that they’re too scared to talk about the real problem: black on black crime.
www.theatlantic.com
