The mayor was careful not to condemn Penny, saying at the time, “We cannot just blatantly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that.”
Adams later told POLITICO in a telephone interview that he and Sharpton wanted the same thing: justice. But he had a responsibility as mayor to stabilize the city following the potentially explosive incident that many progressive elected officials and Sharpton saw as racially motivated vigilantism and conservatives viewed as a good Samaritan effort gone tragically awry.
“As we deal with our economic recovery, as we deal with tension in this city, as the leader of this city, I must make sure that I strike the right balance and that is what I did,” Adams said.
Neely was eventually charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. He pleaded not guilty and the case is ongoing.
Then, just a month after the deadly subway encounter, a federal monitor found that a controversial NYPD anti-crime unit Adams revived was performing illegal stop and frisks — mostly of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.
The data worried Sharpton. So he contacted the mayor, who testified against the unconstitutional use of the policing tactic under the Bloomberg administration.
“I’ve reached out to him and he says, ‘This is not the stop and frisk we protested. This is protecting citizens without profiling them,’” Sharpton said. “I said, ‘We need to look at the data.’ And he says, ‘Whatever questions you want, let’s sit down and go through it.’”
Adams offered to present the numbers to members of Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters in Harlem.
“I’m concerned and I’m probably going to take him up on doing a forum,” Sharpton told POLITICO in June.
The event hasn’t happened.
Hawk Newsome, who co-founded Black Lives Matter Greater New York, said in an interview that he’s troubled by Sharpton’s reluctance to criticize Adams for the report.
“Ninety-seven percent of the people stopped are Black and Brown and one-quarter of the stops are completely illegal,” Newsome said. “How on earth could a civil rights leader not hold him accountable?”
The mayor and Newsome keep an open channel of communication even though the two have clashed over Adams’ reinstatement of the anti-crime unit.
“We text. When something really egregious happens, I text him and say, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Ninety percent of the time he sides with the police,” Newsome said.
“He’s enforcing broken window policing, which study after study says is ineffective. He’s brought back stop and frisk. He’s criminalizing skin color. These are Giuliani practices. In the past, Al Sharpton would have protested this man,” Newsome said of Adams, who is a former Republican.
“Sweatsuit Al Sharpton is what I call young Al Sharpton, who is a force to be reckoned with. Sweatsuit Al Sharpton would have been fighting Eric Adams the way we do,” Newsome said.
“It was us who were in the streets fighting to get justice for Jordan Neely,” he added.
Incidentally, Sharpton was wearing a sweatsuit the first time Adams remembers crossing his path during a 1987 protest of a jury verdict in the Howard Beach race attack. The incident was reminiscent of the demonstrations led by Newsome and others who occupied the subway tracks in May to protest Neely’s death.
Adams, who was a transit cop in 1987, was aboard one of the trains that Sharpton forced to a halt while protesting the verdict.
“I saw him walk down the tracks in a jumpsuit. I said, ‘What’s this guy doing?’” Adams remembered. “That’s when he got on my radar.”
Five years later, in 1992, Adams put his life and reputation within the NYPD on the line for the civil rights leader. Sharpton was running for the United States Senate a year after he’d been stabbed during another Brooklyn protest march.
“Eric remembers there was a demonstration somewhere and a guy, a police officer, said over the walkie talkie: ‘Al Sharpton showed up. Should I let him in or shoot him?’” Sharpton recalled.
“Eric called me and said, ‘Look. We want to give you police protection when we off duty’ and I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Man you got them little girls. I know you think you’re Superman, but you got to look out for your family.’”
Sharpton agreed and they announced the security arrangement at the prominent Brooklyn church of Rev. Floyd Flake, then a U.S. congressmember.
“He came and announced it, which I thought was a very bold thing to do,” Sharpton said. “He’s standing up against police officers and saying they shouldn’t have said that on the walkie talkie.”
It was around the time that Adams, who joined the department to try to eradicate racist practices from within, helped start a group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.