NYPD Unions Back Adams for Re-Election as PBA Withholds Nod Amid Legal Tempest

Endorsements from key NYPD unions for Mayor Adams test the boundaries between public-safety politics and persistent corruption claims, revealing the complicated ties binding City Hall, labour, and law enforcement in New York.

Manhattan’s City Hall might be better known for intrigue than unanimity, but Thursday’s show of support for Mayor Eric Adams by a suite of law enforcement unions marked an unusual public display of confidence in a sitting mayor dogged by adversity. Under ornate marble arches, the unions representing NYPD lieutenants, sergeants, detectives, correction officers, and even sanitation officers lined up behind Adams, lauding his record as New York’s chief public safety advocate. Yet, in a sign that unity is always provisional in the world’s most scrutinised police force, the city’s largest police union—the Police Benevolent Association (PBA)—remained conspicuously on the sidelines, declining for now to signal whose banner it will take up in this mayoral melee.

The endorsements come at a paradoxical moment in Adams’ tenure. On one hand, the mayor has staked his re-election prospects squarely on plunging crime rates, proudly citing city officials’ figures that homicides and shootings have dropped to record lows under his watch. On the other, the administration reels from a fusillade of corruption allegations—FBI raids on senior aides, his own indictment (later tossed by the Department of Justice), and on Wednesday, a racketeering lawsuit filed by former police commissioner Tom Donlon. Donlon claims that Adams and his top staff ran the NYPD “as a criminal enterprise.” City Hall has dismissed the suit as groundless, but as ever in New York, where there is smoke, the political savvy see the possibility of fire.

Lou Turco, president of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, offered an unambiguous rationale for breaking ranks: action, not promises. “Everybody running for mayor… they all have plans on how they’re going to reduce crime. Those are plans. We have action that has been working,” he stressed, framing Adams as the bulwark against dangerous experimentation. Not all labour seems convinced. The PBA, representing more than 20,000 rank-and-file officers, has opted for a wait-and-see approach, with its spokesman John Nuthall insisting the union’s endorsement process is ongoing and scrupulously neutral.

For union leaders, the calculus is pragmatic. Adams, a former NYPD captain, has consistently argued that police, not platitudes, are the indispensable ingredient for New York’s security. Few metropolitan leaders have lashed their fortunes so tightly to public safety. At the endorsement event, Adams doubled down: “This year, under the leadership of the police commissioner, we’re seeing the lowest numbers of shootings and homicides in the recorded history of the city.” His data, while broadly supported by City Hall’s release, is not immune to dispute; granular analysis reveals citywide dips are dampened by worrying upticks in burglaries and hate crimes.

Endorsements from uniformed unions carry weight in New York’s electoral machinery. They are mobilisers, able to pepper the airwaves with ads and fill campaign coffers with donations both direct and indirect. The symbolic capital—especially amid national ambivalence toward law enforcement—remains sizable. For Adams, the bet is that voters spooked by recent memory of the 2020 crime surge will value recent declines over ethereal ethical misdeeds. For his critics, it is a calculation that confuses public fear with the public good.

Absent from the choreography of City Hall support are advocates on the city’s left. Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who emerged as the Democratic primary victor, has called out what he describes as “heavy-handed” NYPD protest policing and an uptick in police stops, echoing a chorus for more civilian oversight and less punitive enforcement. Adams’ ability to parry these attacks depends, in part, on union support. But the legal conflict over the firing of 30 officers—currently on pause by court order following PBA intervention—exposes the mayor’s vulnerabilities when backing “accountability” means crossing his own base.

For ordinary New Yorkers, the spectacle is more than mere theatre. Law enforcement unions’ alliance with City Hall can influence deployment priorities, collective bargaining outcomes, and—when grievances go unresolved—city budgets themselves. Corrections officers and the sanitation union, whose support Adams also claimed, each bring their own leverage: threats of sick-outs, work slowdowns, or lobbying for budget carveouts all carry potential costs to Gotham’s daily rhythms.

Trade-offs between trust and order

The broader implications ripple outward. A mayor’s rapport with law enforcement unions shapes not just immediate public safety strategies, but also the city’s stance on national debates around police reform, decertification practices, and prosecutorial independence. As other American cities wrestle with crises in public safety legitimacy—from LA’s struggle with anti-corruption to Chicago’s woes over police contract reform—New York’s apparent détente stands out for its sheer transactional transparency, if not its purity.

Globally, few democracies afford police unions as much political ballast as the United States’ largest cities. In Paris or London, uniformed constabularies are barred from overtly political endorsements. In New York, union backing often portends greater insulation from attempts at civilian oversight or budgetary retrenchment, a pattern that may strike reformers as more exceptional than exemplary. Still, as American trust in institutions continues to founder, alliances anchored in empirical crime reduction—however contestable—prove hard for risk-averse incumbents to resist.

Yet, beneath the choreography, the mayor’s public embrace by all but the largest police union raises awkward questions. Will Adams, in practice, grant police greater autonomy in exchange for campaign support? Will the PBA extract a price for its eventual loyalty? And can City Hall square action on police reform with the reinforcement of long-standing labour privileges, without alienating younger, increasingly progressive voters?

It would be improper to dismiss the overtures from NYPD unions as mere symbolism. Union support absorbs some political shrapnel from Adams’ legal troubles and provides a shield from more radical calls to restructure policing. But the persistent shadow of corruption allegations, however unproven in court, saps much-needed credibility from an administration that has made trust and transparency its campaign watchwords. Meanwhile, continued legal wrangling over officer firings suggests a bumpy road ahead—not least if further revelations emerge.

For now, the mayor’s foes must reckon with a political structure forged as much in negotiation rooms as on the city’s streets. Adams’ ability to trade on recent safety gains, rather than be undone by controversy, says as much about the cyclical mood of New York voters as it does about his own talents. If voters are in a mood to forgive institutional peccadilloes for the promise of order, rivals for the city’s top job will need more than slogans to sway the electorate.

In charting this gambit—aligning closely with law enforcement while under a legal cloud—Mayor Adams is hardly blazing a trail; rather, he joins a lineage of embattled leaders hoping public safety reliably trumps scandal at the ballot box. Whether that calculation survives New York’s famously fickle political weather, or portends a backlash neither unions nor City Hall can contain, will make for instructive watching in the coming months. ■