In a city accustomed to wave-making entrances from its elected leaders, Adrienne Adams, New York City’s new speaker of the City Council, has spent the first six weeks in a relatively splash-free zone.
She has not danced in a cameo appearance on a television news weather report, or posted a social media video of herself singing along to Lady Gaga, as her predecessor, Corey Johnson, had done in his first weeks on the job.
Ms. Adams’s rollout has been far more sedate, partly by design and mostly by circumstance, with a spate of high-profile crimes affecting the tenor of the city, as well as her schedule.
In mid-January, she spoke at a memorial for a woman who was shoved to her death at the Times Square subway station, and then at a vigil for an 11-month old girl who was shot in the face in the Bronx. Days later, Ms. Adams attended the separate funerals of two police officers who were killed in Harlem.
Those appearances serve as an early reflection of how crime will be a dominant issue facing Ms. Adams, the city’s first Black person to become council speaker, as she seeks to steer her colleagues between public safety needs and a push to de-emphasize the city’s reliance on policing.
“We need to be in partnership with the N.Y.P.D. to let them know that we need community policing, that we shouldn’t be fighting each other and that we need to work together to help make our community safe,” Ms. Adams said. “But there is a mismanagement in the N.Y.P.D. that has got to be fixed, I don’t think there’s any question about it.”
The city’s newly elected mayor, Eric Adams, who is unrelated to the council speaker, plans to create an “omnipresence” of police in the subway, and to bring back plainclothes anti-gun squads. He has also called for changes to the state law around bail and the prosecution of minors charged with serious crimes.
Some City Council members support the mayor’s approach, but others find it regressive. Ms. Adams, a centrist Democrat who was a leading voice against defunding the police after the national protests over the murder of George Floyd, finds herself in the middle.
Indeed, the City Council is more ideologically diverse than ever. There are democratic socialist members who want to abolish the police and Republicans who despise Covid vaccine mandates.
“I think she has a challenge in front of her, which is to work with a mayor who is very clearly wanting to regress on crime but is also saying we need to focus on prevention,” said Sandy Nurse, a left-leaning councilwoman from Brooklyn. “She’s in the middle and has to walk that line very carefully given her own orientation and the expressions of the body.”
The fight over crime prevention strategies between Mr. Adams and the City Council could heat up as budget negotiations commence and legislation is introduced to end the use of solitary confinement and eliminate the gang database.
Tiffany Cabán, a left-leaning councilwoman from Queens, said many new council members “ran on platforms framing violence as a public health issue.” There is momentum to not solely rely on policing and “demand investment in public health infrastructure as a way to make our city safer.”
Ms. Adams, a former corporate trainer and an ex-flight attendant who boasts of being able to evacuate a 737 in 90 seconds, views herself as a good fit for the moment, someone who is able to bring “different personalities and, frankly, egos” to the table.
“Women,” Ms. Adams said, “govern very differently than men govern.”
Council members view Ms. Adams as less political than Mr. Johnson, her predecessor. It’s a relief, some members said, to have a speaker who’s not actively eyeing a run for mayor.
“She’s not an ideologue, and I think her instinct is to stay above the fray,” said Justin Brannan, a councilman from Brooklyn who was a contender for speaker before he threw his support to Ms. Adams.
Not everyone agrees. Charles Barron, a councilman from Brooklyn who voted against Ms. Adams as speaker, said the City Council must use its budget power to force the mayor “to deal with poverty and mass incarceration and homelessness and the real issues that cause people to commit crime.” He said that he lacked faith that Ms. Adams will do so.
Ms. Adams seemed pained when asked about the comments. She and her husband joined the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network after police officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, killing him in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building in 1999. She remains friends with the family of Sean Bell, who was killed on the morning of his wedding in 2006 when plainclothes police fired 50 shots at his car.
Initially, Ms. Adams wasn’t considered a front-runner when she entered the race for speaker. Mr. Adams supported a competitor, Francisco Moya, a councilman from Queens, but the move backfired, as City Council members pushed back against having the mayor choose their next leader.
Ms. Adams was able to cultivate a winning coalition of left-leaning council members, labor groups and members of the Bronx and Queens Democratic parties. Her supporters see Ms. Adams as a representative leader of the City Council, which for the first time is composed of a majority of women and people of color.
Ms. Adams never saw herself as a politician. A sorority sister from Spelman College urged her to join the chaotic Community Board 12 in Queens. When she became chairwoman she hired a parliamentarian to bring order. And then the City Council seat in her district opened up.
“People saw things in me that I didn’t see in myself and I had to be convinced to run for office,” Ms. Adams said. “I had to pray about it.”
She grew up in a comfortable home in Hollis, Queens. She sang gospel in church and Motown at home, and is still known for her voice, which is often compared to Anita Baker’s. She recently belted out a rendition of “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me” that brought the audience at Mr. Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters to its feet.
Ms. Adams is a married mother of four and a grandmother of 10 in her blended family, where she is known as the “cool Noni” whose closet occasionally gets raided by her granddaughters. Her mother was a correction officer whom the women on Rikers Island called “Ma.” Her father was a Teamster who drove an eighteen-wheeler for UPS.
Ms. Adams lost both her parents, who had separated when she was in high school, within the span of a year. Her father died of Covid in May 2020. Her family dropped him off at the hospital and was unable to visit during the height of the pandemic. Her mother died unexpectedly last February.
It was shortly after her father’s death that Ms. Adams became one of the leading Black council members to speak out against the push to defund the police in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests. Ms. Adams, then a chairwoman of the powerful Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, said police reform and spending money to prevent crime was necessary, but emphasized that mostly Black and Latino neighborhoods where gun violence is common did not want fewer officers.
Ms. Adams is supportive of the mayor’s crime plan, recently praising his call to expand violence interrupters, mental health services and youth jobs, but questioned his plan to bring back plain clothes anti-crime units. The City Council, she said, wants to make sure the mayor is enacting a “comprehensive range of strategies” to prevent violence.
“We are going to reimagine a system that has seen our children pick up a gun instead of picking up a pen,” Ms. Adams told a group of violence interrupters recently on the steps of theBronx County Courthouse.
Representative Gregory W. Meeks, chairman of the Queens Democratic Party, called Ms. Adams “the right person at the right time to be a speaker of the City Council” because of her centrist orientation.
For now, City Council members seem willing to give Ms. Adams the benefit of the doubt. When Mr. Adams lashed out at 29 City Council members criticizing his intention to restore solitary confinement to the city’s jails, Ms. Adams stood with her members. But she has also shown a willingness to work with the administration. Ms. Adams recently announced an agreement with the mayor to permanently fund half-price fares for low-income New Yorkers.
Ms. Nurse, who founded BK ROT, a youth composting service and green jobs project, was nonetheless surprised when Ms. Adams named her to head the sanitation committee.
“Given my political orientation, I thought I was going to be on the bottom of the barrel,” Ms. Nurse said. “But maybe this is a way of her thinking about putting the right people where they need to be.”
