‘This Is Vintage Eric’: NYC Mayor Adams Remains Defiant In Wild Presser After FBI Arrests Top Aide

New York Mayor Eric Adams looked back at his time as a police officer to explain why he’s fighting against the corruption charges brought against him.

On Tuesday, Adams held his weekly presser at City Hall, just hours after First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright resigned.

Mohamed Bahi, who ran Adams’s community affairs office, was also arrested Tuesday for witness tampering and destroying evidence.

While talking about the importance of continuing to do his job as the mayor while being indicted, Adams connected it to his career with the NYPD. In 1995, Adams co-founded the advocacy group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. The group focused on criminal justice reform and spoke out against police brutality.

According to Adams, that point in time demonstrated his willingness to continue fighting in the face of adversity:

Many people who are here, who are covering me, don’t know my history; and many of you do. Many of you have been around, a small number of you, you’ve been around me for 35, almost 40 years. And you when you see me you say, “This is the guy we’ve always known.” I mean, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement. I was in the police department — in the police department — as a rookie cop standing up against racism in the police department. I was a rookie cop standing up — sergeant, lieutenant.

When I was a captain, they wanted to fire me because they didn’t do what was right for the City of New York during an emergency, so this is not new ground. Many of you are saying, that know me, y’all [are] saying, “This is vintage Eric.” So, to to those who’ve just introduced themselves to me, they have a different belief. This has never changed who you’re seeing in front of me.

I say to all of you as you do your research on these stories, go Google back in [1984, 1985, 1986] rookie cop — rookie — standing up saying, “We need to treat people with dignity. We need to treat people fairly. The criminal justice system must be right,” going into the state senate and traveling to the state facilities upstate to see how we were treating inmates inside, visiting Rikers Island as someone alluded to the other day. This is vintage Eric. To someone like yourself and a few others in this room, all you’re saying is, “We don’t expect anything different from Eric Adams.”