Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik told Newsmax Tuesday that incoming Mayor Eric Adams "has the ability," but will need "courage" to battle the crime problem in the city.
"[Mayor-elect] Eric Adams has the ability to do it, whether he has the courage to do it, and stand up to the left and these radical leftist Marxists, that's another thing," Kerik said during "Greg Kelley Reports" Tuesday. "He has seen the city at its best during the renaissance of [Former Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani, and he's also seen the city at its worst under [Mayor Bill] de Blasio."
Adams, the Democratic Brooklyn Borough president, and former NYPD officer, won the New York City mayor’s race in November to become the second African American mayor in the city’s history.
"I wanted people to know my story, being a dishwasher, having a learning disability, being arrested as a child, going to school at night, working in a mail room," Adams told CNN shortly after winning the race in November. "That was the story I wanted to send New Yorkers, and they felt me. And because of that, I'm now going to be the mayor of one of the greatest cities in the globe."
The new mayor comes in on Jan. 1 to a city with a surge in crime and increasing violence in the streets, but Kerik said Adams worked under him as an officer while Kerik was commissioner, and while Guiliani was mayor during the crime spike in the 1990s, and knows what he must do to fix the problem.
"Eric Adams also worked for me and Giuliani during the time where we reduced violent crime by 65%, the murder rate by 70%, where we had the highest murder rate in the history of the country and knocked it down over an eight-year period," Kerik said. "That was unparalleled in this country, never happened before, and hasn't happened since. He knows how that happened. He knows what we did to create it. He knows how to use 'CompStat.' He knows how to use stop, question, and frisk. He knows you need more cops in the street."
Kerik said Adams can be successful bringing the crime and murder rates down if he doesn’t "cower" to the left and allow state officials to pass laws like bail reform that lets criminals right back out on the street to commit more crimes.
He said it is good that Adams is standing up to Black Lives Matter leaders who threatened more violence and "blood" on the streets if Adams clamps down on their activities.
"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 reported in the New York Post earlier this month. "We’re not going to have a city where anarchists come from outside our city and go into a community such as Queens and destroy the community for their own selfish needs or desires."
Kerik said that was the right attitude to have.
"It's the right thing to do," Kerik said. "You can't have a domestic terror group threatening you, telling you what they want, and what they're going to do, and if you don't do it, you're going to have blood on your hands. You know, wrong. You know you're going to wind up in prison. That's what you're going to wind up doing, and I think that's the stance."
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