BOB HERBERT: Hi I'm Bob Herbert. Welcome to Op-Ed. T.V.

New York has seen a series of protests

demonstrations following the deaths at the hands of

police officers of Eric Garner on Staten Island

and Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri.

The city then went through the trauma of the cold blooded

assassination of two police officers by a

deranged man who shot them while they were sitting in

their patrol car and then killed himself. Those

killings lit the fuse of a continuing and bitter

controversy that has pitted angry police

officers against Mayor Bill de Blasio. We are

fortunate this week to be able to explore this

complex and potentially dangerous state of affairs

with the borough president of Brooklyn Eric Adams,

who graduated at the top of his class at the police

academy in 1984, and spent twenty two years as an

officer with the N.Y.P.D. Eric, how are you?

ERIC ADAMS: Thank you.

BOB HERBERT: Thanks for coming in today.

ERIC ADAMS: And it should be a footnote, I graduated

at the top not because of brilliance, endurance-

BOB HERBERT: Endurance, right, which is really an important

issue, you know, when I talk on college campuses I tell

college kids this, persistence and endurance, discipline

is really important, right? So-

ERIC ADAMS: So true, so true.

BOB HERBERT: But I'm sure a certain amount of

brilliance too. So you've been obviously on both

sides of this sort of thing, both as a police

officer within the department and as a public official.

How do we begin to sort out this unfortunate situation?

Do, for example, do the cops have a legitimate grievance

with Mayor de Blasio? What's going on there?

ERIC ADAMS: Well the first order, I believe,

is to understand that it's complex. Many people believe

there's a simplistic response to, how do we have public

safety and how do we ensure that our police

officers are safe and it's not. It is extremely

complex, particularly when you police in certain

communities and what you bring to those policing

environments. And if we don't identify all of them

then we're going to be in this constant state of

just debating with each other and not coming to resolutions.

BOB HERBERT: Now you recently wrote an op-ed piece

in The New York Times that carried the headline

We Must Stop Police Abuse of Black Men.

Now I've covered a tremendous amount over the

years of unwarranted violence by police

officers. I do not contend that that's the norm by

any means but there has been a great deal of it.

But if you talk to police officials they will almost

always tell you that there is very little excessive

force used by cops and almost no racial profiling.

This conflicts with sort of what I've seen in my career.

What's the truth there?

ERIC ADAMS: Well it's more than what you or I or anyone

else has witnessed, the facts speak for themselves.

The reality is, as I am attempting to

show as we have these conversations, is that a

police officer he or she leaves their command with

a tool box full of tools to go and fight crime or

correct conditions. They use the full scope of

those tools in certain communities. And in other

communities they only pull out their hammer.

They immediately go to this use of force. And I think that

is not so much racist as much as a racial society

that we live in. When a police officer is

recruited from that society, he goes to the

police academy with these racial stereotypes and

understanding and no one trains him in the police

academy how to deal with that and how to address

that. So they go on to the patrol with the

misunderstanding that you can just go into a

multicultural, multi diverse community and just

police based on what you know when you didn't

address some real issues that impact us all.

BOB HERBERT: Now you addressed that specifically in your

op-ed article. You wrote, and this is a quote,

"One of my white fellow officers once told me that

if he saw a white individual with a gun, he

took extra care for himself and the individual.

When he saw a black individual with a gun,

he took care only for himself." Now the double

standard could hardly be more stark or explicit

then it was in that paragraph. If the

situation is that bad how do we begin to change it

and who needs to take the lead here?

ERIC ADAMS: And I remember one case in particular in

the transit authority where a white male entered the system

armed with a gun and the officers saw him and

approached him in a very casual manner because,

again, they thought white male equals law

enforcement plus a gun. When you see, when one

sees a black male or Hispanic person they think

immediately gun, person of color, equal criminal.

So that misconception or that pre-disposition cannot

only harm the innocent person but you can also

endanger the officer. So our training must really

focus on the fact that when we come into law

enforcement we're coming in with the years and

years of what we believe is a definition of a

criminal and a definition of an innocent person.

And many of our officers Bob, which is interesting, they

come from communities where it's a monolithic

community. Not only white officers, even black officers,

many black officers may have grew up

in South Jamaica, Queens, Brownsville, Bedford-

Stuyvesant, had no interaction with Asians,

no interaction with Hasidic Jews,

no interaction with Italians and so until we understand

that we live in a monolithic community and

now we have to police in a diverse community, we have

to be trained to acknowledge that and leave

the area of denial. Policing believe that we

don't see color we only see crimes. That is not a reality.

Human beings acknowledge what they see

in front of them and we have to deal with it.

BOB HERBERT: So you mention the incidents where an

officer might see a white fella with a gun and they

think perhaps he's an officer. But we have seen

these so-called friendly fire incidents where

African-American police officers have actually

been fired upon by white officers who saw them and

didn't realize that they were police officers.

So the question becomes, you say that it's a question

of training, the question becomes who should be

responsible for initiating this training, if we have

it now we don't have enough of it, and who

should take the lead politically even outside

of the police department?

ERIC ADAMS: And we don't have enough of it because it has

never been acknowledged before, it has been ignored and I

use the analogy that our law enforcement community

across the globe particularly here in

America we suffer from abuse of law enforcement

abuse intoxication and any time you've taken those

steps towards sobriety, the first thing you have

to do is acknowledge it. We have failed to

acknowledge it. Finally I believe Mayor de Blasio,

Police Commissioner Bratton and Deputy

Commissioner Julian, they're looking at,

we have to acknowledge that we have a problem and take

steps towards sobriety. And that is looking at how

we treat police interactions based on what

communities we are in. And I think we are on the way

to doing that and it starts in the police

academy, very real honest training and how to go out

and deal with police- and then reinforcement.

Because anyone that goes through any form of

getting rid of some form of addiction you know that

it doesn't mean because you do a three day

training that all of a sudden you're not going to

have some of those same problems that got you in

trouble in the first place. It's the constant

retraining so that people don't get caught up in the

everyday life of answering jobs on the street.

BOB HERBERT: Now this is an unusual posture for a high

ranking elected official in the city to take. Why has this not

hurt you or hindered you politically do you think?

ERIC ADAMS: Well I think because people know that during my

time in days in a police department, a career that I

loved I enjoyed so much being a cop. I just thought that

there's no other type of profession I wanted to do,

study and to get promoted and in the department,

moving up from sergeant, lieutenant and then the captain,

was a dream come true for me. And when people knew

how much I enjoyed the career but I was willing to

critique the career because I wanted to make

it better. I thought the uniform and the badge

stood for something and because I was so

vociferous about police reform as a police

officer, then when I got into government and became

a state senator and then the borough president,

I was able to critique policing because people

knew that I was coming from a very honest and

authentic position making the department better.

BOB HERBERT: Now this issue of excessive police violence.

You experienced first hand, you were a victim of

police violence when you were just a teenager.

Can you tell us about that?

ERIC ADAMS: I was fifteen years old at the time.

I was arrested for criminal trespass trespassing and after

the arrest I was assaulted by police officers who,

you know, kicked me in my groin area repeatedly.

And when you think about it you could assault someone

all over the body but to focus on that area,

I thought there were other significant connotations

behind it. And you know for days Bob, I urinated blood and

I was concerned, even today when I think when my son was

born how I was relieved because I actually thought

I would never be able to have children and to see

his birth was you know it relieved me of some of the

demons and, you know, it's amazing some of the demons

you have inside you. So I had a demon in me and the

only way I could get it out was to go in.

BOB HERBERT: To go in to the police department?

ERIC ADAMS: Go in to the police department.

BOB HERBERT: Is that the reason you wanted to be a cop?

ERIC ADAMS: It was a combination.

Reverend Herbert Daughtry, from the House of Lords Church,

he was one of the driving forces that recruited some

young people to become law enforcement members after

there was a terrible shooting in our community

and I jumped at the chance because I realized it was

my opportunity to deal with some of those very

significant issues that I was dealing

with in police and police reform.

BOB HERBERT: You haven't just talked about these issues

I mean you were very proactive even when you were in the

department. You were one of the co-founders

of the group 100 Blacks In Law Enforcement Who Care.

I believe you were once the president of the Grand

Council of the Guardians. Can you tell us what those

two organizations were and what they were trying to achieve?

ERIC ADAMS: A significant legacies that Roger Ables and

so many of the men and women who came before me that paved the

way for those of us in law enforcement. They were

extremely progressive, they wanted diversity in the

police department. They wanted to ensure that police officers

were treated fairly but also treated the people fairly.

In addition to that what was important about those

organizations is that they paved the way. They were a

voice. We looked around Dr. King when he did his

speech in Washington D.C. Present was members of the

Guardian's Association. They played a very important role

in our community. The problem that I'm feeling now is many

of our young people who are of color and they are wearing a

police uniform or law enforcement uniform they

don't really understand the legacy and they're not present

in the moment and history is not going to be kind to

them because many people are asking, where are the