New York Mayor-elect Eric Adams on Thursday warned Black Lives Matter leader Hawk Newsome not to mess with his city.
”We’re not going to surrender to those who are saying we’re going to burn down New York. Not my city,” Adams said at a Police Athletic League event at the Harvard Club, according to the New York Post.
Adams, a retired NYPD captain, also said New York wouldn’t allow anarchists to ”come from outside our city and go into a community such as Queens and destroy the community for their own selfish needs.”
Newsome last month threatened ”riots” and ”bloodshed” if Adams reversed the abolition of the NYPD’s anti-crime units.
”If he thinks that they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we are going to take to the streets again. There will be riots, there will be fire and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people,” Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, told the New York Daily News after a heated meeting with Adams in Brooklyn Borough Hall.
”So there is no way that he is going to let some Gestapo come in here and harm our people,” Newsome added. ”We pray for peace but … prepare for the worst.”
On the campaign trail, Adams vowed to reinstate the anti-crime units that were disbanded at the height of 2020’s BLM protests.
