> Adams won the Democratic primary by less than one percent, despite aggressive campaigning on his behalf by, among other organizations, the Police Benevolent

> Adams won the Democratic primary by less than one percent, despite aggressive campaigning on his behalf by, among other organizations, the Police Benevolent Association. (I am discarding the general election because his Republican opponent was, let's say, a less-than-serious candidate.) Adams barely won the primary, and that was only after literally four other forerunners all either dropped out for personal reasons or became embroiled in campaign-ending personal scandals (e.g. sexual harassment allegations). > I wouldn't exactly call his win a mandate for policing. The media reported it as if it were one, but that was an incredibly lazy and dishonest interpretation of the election results. There were many other citywide and local races on the same ballot, and more progressive candidates pretty consistently swept all of those races. The mayoral race was the one exception, making it quite obvious that was an accident of circumstance rather than an affirmation of Adams specifically. If anything, the 2021 NYC elections were a clear mandate for reigning in the NYPD: when given the option of a candidate who wanted to reign in NYPD power and didn't have objectively disqualifying personal behavior, voters pretty consistently chose that candidate for nearly every single race in every single level of government and in every district. Unfortunately, because of the series of scandals that marred the mayoral primary, it made it easy for national media to ignore the entire context and focus entirely on the end result of one single race, rather than the causes of that race, or the many other candidates that people voted for on literally the exact same ballot.