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One morning this week, Eric Adams sat down at a sidewalk table outside the Washington Square Diner, in the West Village. Two decades ago, at the end of his career in the N.Y.P.D., Adams had worked nearby, in the Sixth Precinct. “This was my post,” he said. A waiter plopped a stack of thick menus on the table. Adams, who wore a crisp white dress shirt, with cufflinks, credits a strict vegan diet and exercise regimen with reversing a diabetes diagnosis. He ordered a peppermint tea.
Over the years, Adams, who is running for mayor, has cultivated a reputation as someone difficult to pin down politically, particularly on issues of law enforcement. “They can’t put me in a category,” he told me, deploying a favorite line with a smile. “I’m a New Yorker. We’re complex.” Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, by a single mother, Adams was beaten by N.Y.P.D. officers in the basement of a South Jamaica precinct house when he was fifteen years old. A few years later, heeding the advice of a mentor, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, Adams joined the city’s police ranks, hoping to fight racism and abuse from inside the system. In the nineteen-nineties, he came to public prominence as a co-founder of a police reform group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. The group denounced police killings and abuse, and did community outreach, holding seminars for young Black men on, for instance, how to behave during a stop-and-frisk. “Reaching while black shouldn’t be punishable by death,” Adams told the