Long before police reform became a national topic, Eric Adams was pushing for it first as an NYPD Captain, and then as a member of the State Senate. Adams is now a candidate for mayor and not all of his positions have aged well – including calling for all transit workers to be armed with tasers.

What You Need To Know

  • Right after leaving the NYPD, Eric Adams was elected State Senator
  • In Albany, he focused on public safety and police reform
  • Adams was critical of Bloomberg's Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
  • He left the State Senate after being elected Brooklyn Borough President

He retired from the New York Police Department in 2006, the year he ran for the State Senate, but Eric Adams never stopped being an officer. His seven-year-long tenure representing the 20th district in Brooklyn was defined by his actions on police reform and public safety.

“We wanna partner and empower parents that they too can play a role,” Adams said in 2011 about the role parents could play in keeping their children out of trouble.

Adams was that State Senator telling young people to stop the sag and raise their pants, posting the message in billboards around Brooklyn.

He also pushed for restricting the sales of ammunition, after he himself went undercover to make a purchase.

At the same time, Adams proposed having transit workers to be armed with tasers for self-defense.

He also sponsored legislation that banned the NYPD from compiling a database with the names and addresses of those people officers stopped but didn’t arrest.

“To hold personal information of innocent people regardless of their ethnicity. This is wrong,” Adams said at the time.

And despite his support for some use of “stop and frisk," Adams testified in the trial that ruled the practice unconstitutional and clashed with Mayor Bloomberg’s Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly.

“I heard him on two different occasions indicate that we are using this policy to instill fear into African-American and Hispanic youth so each time they leave their home they could feel as though they could stop by the police,” Adams said in 2013.

That year, he touted this record in the State Senate to propel his successful bid to Brooklyn Borough Hall.

“This community has stated, we watched you when you wore a blue uniform, we saw you in a blue suit and now we believe it’s time for you to expand your beat to an entire borough. Now we’d be patrolling the entire borough of Brooklyn when we win Borough Hall, we are looking forward to that,” he said.

Now, at a time of rising crime and calls for defunding the NYPD, he’s running to patrol the entire city as the next mayor of New York.