The BLM Criminal Protection League

Only time will tell whether yesterday’s confrontation between Black Lives Matter leaders and New York’s incoming mayor Eric Adams will be a defining moment. 

The BLM leaders, led by one Hawk Newsome, showed their hand. They are a pro-criminal organization that wants to get its way by threats, intimidation, extortion and violence. If you thought that it was about social justice or any kind of justice, you need a serious rethink. If you thought that this had anything to do with democracy, you also need a serious rethink.

Newsome stood face to face with a man who had been a police captain, who had run his campaign on an anti-crime platform, and announced that if the mayor made good on his campaign pledge to reconstitute an undercover plainclothes anti-crime unit, he, Newsome, would provoke riots and bloodshed.

Adams responded calmly that he was going to keep his word. 

Bob McManus reported in the New York Post:

New York’s mayor-elect got a credibility test Wednesday, and passed handsomely. Here’s hoping Manhattan’s next district attorney was paying attention. 

In normal times, Black Lives Matter bigmouth Hawk Newsome’s promise to bring rack and ruin on the city if Eric Adams doesn’t cede the streets to gangbangers on Jan. 1 could be dismissed as ugly street theater. 

“If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” Newsome declared after Adams promised to aggressively combat gun crime. “There will be riots. There will be fire. There will be bloodshed.” 

But we live in stupid times, in a city that stood supinely as a landmark department store, Macy’s Herald Square, was looted the last time BLM got a mad-on. And in which Alvin Bragg. the candidate for district attorney who promised to be even softer on crime than the marshmallow Cyrus Vance Jr., will take office alongside Adams. 

And so Newsome’s ugly threats must be taken seriously. At the very least, he has reason to believe they will be. 

As it happens, Hawk Newsome is not affiliated with the national BLM movement. Whatever consolation you gain from that fact, you should also recognize that in various large American cities, from Philadelphia to San Francisco and Portland, district attorneys have chosen not to prosecute crimes committed by black people.

As you perhaps know, Mayor de Blasio disbanded the undercover units, and New York City saw a dramatic increase in crime:

This is no empty threat. After an officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, rioters in New York damaged or looted about 450 businesses in a 12-day period, according to a New York Post tally. Many protestors marched under the Black Lives Matter banner.

Violent crime spiked in New York and other cities after the protest wave. 

Yet under progressive pressure, Mayor Bill de Blasio and police commissioner Dermot Shea disbanded the NYPD’s plainclothes units. These officers had seized hundreds of illegal guns each year in dangerous neighborhoods.

You might or might not consider this to be justice. But clearly, it shows that significant portions of the black community, along with a considerable number of white leftists, are all in with solving the problem of minority crime by not calling it crime.

More important, in many ways, is the reputational damage done to the black community by fools like Hawk Newsome. When people who purport to speak for that community, whether Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright or Louis Farrakhan, suggest that they goal is more about getting away with rioting, looting and arson, and less about being full participants in the American community, the civil rights movement will have been compromised and diminished.

As it happened, New York police officers strongly supported Adams:

NYPD cops blasted Black Lives Matter New York leader Hawk Newsome on Thursday over his warning that the city would face “riots” if Mayor-elect Eric Adams makes good on his pledge to revive undercover anti-gun efforts. 

One current police supervisor said Newsome “should be denounced by every politician because he is threatening to harm the citizens of New York.” 

“The FBI should investigate him as a domestic terrorist and look into where he is getting his money. The people funding him should also be investigated,” the official said. 

“He is threatening to overthrow the government, cause physical harm and property damage.” 

A veteran NYPD cop also called the controversy sparked by Newsome “a lose-lose situation for Black Lives Matter.” 

“If the mayor likes the cops, the cops will work for the mayor,” the source said. 

“People in these communities where shootings and other crimes are spiking want the cops on the street.”

We are fully confident that Adams will keep his campaign promise. Then again, time will tell. If he succeeds in tamping down crime in the city he will succeed. If he does not, he will not.