Indicting a Mayor — and Trust
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept. 27, 2024
Details of the alleged misdoings aside, watching the mayor of your city, the mayor of New York City, indicted in office along with the decapitation of the heads of police and schools and the head of public safety knocks out any feelings of stability.
The indictment may be bad news for Mayor Eric Adams, who may have had ambitions beyond City Hall, but it’s effects will be felt as continuing ripples across all the various pools of city services and on the credibility of these or other city officials to get programs and funds approved.
Hey. this is the guy I’m forced to depend on to maintain public library hours, rat policies and snow removal. His job is supposed to be about service.
Add to it the ignominy of federal agents raiding the official mayoral mansion in search of more evidence apparently towards schemes involving how the city is being run, and you have a perfect formula for why voters just might hold politicians in such low esteem. There even were NYPD officers deployed outside Gracie Mansion while the agents were inside after one police commissioner resigned suddenly, and other agents were at the home of his replacement this week.
Five charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal campaign donations by the mayor were being unsealed, reportedly revolving around Adams exerting influence to give fire safety clearance for a Turkish building project in the city in return for campaign donations running north of $100,000. There also were multiple investigations involving the police commissioners, the school chancellor and the other officials, some of whom are family members with one another or lovers.
But what tied them all together were charges of corruptive greed and the everyday way of running a city this complicated through personal friendships and relationships.
What a cliche: Money, insiders and personal nepotism. How many times have we heard the source of corruption as money, sex or power plays?
None of this has to do with Democrats or Republicans. Indeed, the mayor is elected in a non-partisan election that now pits top vote-gatherers in ranked choice. From the earliest days. The political class wasted no time in pressuring Adams to resign now, and to open the next season for would-be replacements.
Where’s the Trust?
Much of the federal and state investigations involved have been relatively secret, and it is only through sources speaking anonymously that we know what is under review until there are specific charges filed in court.
Generally, however, the former police commissioner was reported to be helping to license nightclubs, the kind of places you might think a police commissioner was in place to prosecute. And the school chancellor and a deputy mayor brother were linked to contracts that went to favored insiders. It created a pattern.
Is it any wonder that when we step back from these probes that there is concern about a presidential campaign in which international leaders know that they need to stay at Trump Organization hotels to be heard in official talks about trade and alliances? Is there any sympathy for repeated charges against Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, for dealings with Egyptian officials in his Senate role? New York, like states before it, lost its governor to public lying.
These days, we hear frequent talk about Trust or its lack from our politicians — without demanding that they show us trust in our majority vote or in just showing up to provide public service without pomp or enforced admiration.
We are asked to accept misstatements, stretching of truth, even outright lying in the name of some greater policy good for our city, state or country. We are asked to suspend belief when the candidate flops completely on an issue. We are asked to look away from schemes that benefit the office holder or family.
Now we’re even being asked to ignore indictments and even convictions to elect people who swear on a Bible to uphold our laws even as they are breaking them. Allegedly.
We can say no.
If criminal proceedings have any lasting, wider value than accountability for the individual, it should be to remind us that these politicians work for us and need to earn our Trust.
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