Hawk Newsome, the leader of Black Lives Matter, has threatened “riots,” “fire,” and “bloodshed” if incoming New York City Mayor Eric Adams reinstates a contentious plainclothes police unit.
Mayor-elect Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain, has promised to restore the city’s anti-crime units.
These plainclothes units employed 600 officers until they were disbanded by Mayor Bill deBlasio last summer, amid a surge in anti-police sentiment following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
On Wednesday, during a meeting with Adams in Brooklyn, Newsome informed the incoming mayor that reforming the Anti-Crime Units would not sit well with Black Lives Matter activists in the Big Apple.
“If they think they’re going back to the old ways of policing,” Newsome said after the meeting, according to the New York Post.”Riots will erupt.” “There will be fire and bloodshed,” he forewarned.
“If he allows these cops to abuse us, we will be at his front door, at Gracie Mansion, and in the streets,” Newsome said.
Despite his tone, Newsome denied “threatening anyone,” insisting that his statement was a joke.
The Anti-Crime units, which were formed to combat violent crimes and remove illegal guns from New York’s streets, were credited by supporters with keeping the city relatively free of the criminality that erupted during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.
However, the units had a reputation for violence toward young black men, and a 2016 report by the force itself found about half the officers involved in “adversarial conflicts” where a gun was deliberately fired were plainclothes cops.
However, while the units were being disbanded, New York’s homicide rate was skyrocketing, with the city’s homicide rate going from 319 in 2019 to 500 in 2020.
In the year following Floyd’s death sparked countrywide demonstrations, all types of crimes have increased, with robberies nearly tripling between May 2020 and May 2021.
Bringing back plainclothes units is only one tactic advocated by Adams to keep crime under control, and speaking to the Post after Wednesday’s meeting, he said he expected activists like Newsome to do their bit and assist clean up their own neighborhoods.
“There’s no reason we can’t have safe streets and racial fairness in our community,” Adams added.
“If black lives genuinely count, we must address violence in our neighborhoods as well as enforcement racism.”
We won’t go far if we keep yelling and not listening.”
Though credited with founding the Greater New York chapter of Black Lives Matter, Newsome is not involved with the Black Lives Matter Global Network, and has attacked the network’s founders for allegedly siphoning money from the movement to finance their own extravagant lives.
