New York’s new Mayor-elect, Eric Adams, certainly has his work cut out for him. The former police officer is inheriting a city in decline that’s seeing its worst violent crime spike in decades (though, there has been some slight decrease in the past several months).

That issue played prominently in the campaign, and Adams apparently has a plan: He wants to reinstate plain-clothed anti-crime police units. They were disbanded under current Mayor Bill de Blasio during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Here’s how the move was described at the time per NPR.

Make no mistake,” Shea said. “This is a seismic shift in the culture of how the N.Y.P.D. polices this great city. It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.”

Commissioner Shea made the surprise announcement on Monday that units would be broken up and reassigned to other teams. He said the units were a last vestige of the city’s aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policy, which overwhelmingly targeted non-whites.

Well, it was felt immediately, but not in the way Shea was insinuating. Rather, murder rates continued to rise into late 2020. Only recently have things started to plateau. But while 2021 may see a 2% or so decrease in gun crime compared to 2020, it will still be over 40% higher than 2019, the year before the anti-police movement gained steam nationally.

In response to Adams’ pronouncement, BLM leader Hawk Newsome levied a threat to the city he claims to want to help. That happened during a sit-down in Brooklyn. This via The New York Post.

“If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” New York BLM co-founder Hawk Newsome said outside Borough Hall after the meeting.

“There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed,” he threatened.

I’m not sure it gets any clearer than that. There’s no ambiguity in Newsome’s comments that I can find. What you are reading is a direct, terroristic threat to the City of New York. But while the FBI is busy rounding up grandmas and people who drank Nancy Pelosi’s beer, this kind of thing will almost certainly go unchecked.

Besides, all this is so self-defeating. The rise in violent crime in New York is almost exclusively hitting minority communities. You’d think someone whose motto is “black lives matter” would be concerned for all the dead black people that have resulted from the politicized decisions regarding policing. Instead, he is fighting measures that could make the streets safer.

The cold reality is that unjustified police shootings (and many called unjust actually aren’t or have extenuating circumstances) represent a tiny fraction of the black people murdered in New York. I understand if someone wants to speak up against violence emanating from the state. I’m as skeptical of the police as the next person at times, and if an officer does something wrong, they should be held accountable. But to demand policies that lead to far more black people being killed in the end while simply serving to stroke some activist’s ego? That is absolutely insane and incredibly selfish.

My final thought here is asking why Adams is even meeting with this person? Newsome is obviously not a good-faith actor. He is a radical partisan looking for an outcome that fits his ideology, not one that makes New Yorkers of all races safer. If the best he can do is threaten “bloodshed” when his nonsensical demands aren’t met, then he doesn’t deserve a seat at the table.