Ex-cop Mayor Adams empowering a rogue’s gallery of allegedly corrupt, sexually predatory police officers he’s palled around with for decades to run the NYPD outside of its formal chain of command hasn’t been the cause of the sharp rise in subway system assaults and slayings amid a seemingly endless stream of horror stories about women being menaced, assaulted, shoved onto tracks or into trains and even lit on fire — but it isn’t just a coincidence.
Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, who resigned following the FBI’s raid on his house in September, was placed in that role by Adams a decade after Banks had abruptly quit the NYPD as the feds probed his relationship with two guys who later went to prison for bribing the previous mayor with campaign cash and top cops with plane trips and hookers.
Senior Advisor for Public Safety Tim Pearson, who made headlines for grabbing a female shelter guard by her neck when she wasn’t quick enough to let him in, resigned as the head of a shadowy new policing agency Adams created after the FBI also seized his devices in September.
Pearson had remained on the job with the mayor’s vocal support and taxpayers covering his legal bills for months after a female cop serving under his authority filed a lawsuit accusing him of ruining her career and those of the male supervisors who tried to protect her when she rejected his endless unwanted advances.
And Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey, the department’s top uniformed official, put in his resignation papers in December after he was accused of coercing a female cop under his authority for sex in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime, OT that was exposed by the Daily News.
His resignation hasn’t yet taken effect but new Commissioner Jessica Tisch suspended the mayor’s friend who he’s gone to bat for again and again despite Maddrey’s track record of abusing his authority and sleeping with cops under his command when the FBI raided his home on Thursday morning.
While Adams has tried to shrug all these scandals off as NYPD business-as-usual, the polls make it clear that New Yorkers don’t trust his word and don’t think he’s delivered the sense of security he’s promised.
Mandatory overtime to send surges of unhappy and ill-prepared cops underground hasn’t restored confidence in public safety, even as investigators are now probing how Friends of Eric benefitted from the OT torrent.
Hizzoner knows he’s in enough trouble ahead of his historic criminal trial in April and the Democratic primary in June that he’s finally brought in an evidently independent and empowered police commissioner — his fourth in not even three years — to clean up the mess he’s made by letting his buddies run the department.
Commissioner Tisch has been rapidly cleaning house and asserting her authority, a promising sign for New Yorkers who care much more about public safety than palace intrigue.
But given the damage the mayor and his crew have done to public confidence in policing, it’s concerning that the commissioner just tapped John Chell to replace Maddrey as chief of department.
As chief of patrol, the No. 2 unformed official, Chell has feuded wildly and needlessly with the press and politicians while leading a secretive and highly aggressive quality of life unit. He’s been the driving force behind a massive spike in police car chases and crashes and injuries and deaths.
And Chell — who was found responsible for the wrongful death of a fleeing suspect he shot earlier in his career with taxpayers awarding the man’s family $2.5 million for his pain and suffering — is presently a defendant in two active lawsuits tied to other cop bosses’ alleged predations.
In one of them, he’s accused of punishing the supervisors who tried to protect the officer Pearson punished for turning down his advances.
In the other, he’s accused of smearing police reform advocate Dana Rachlin, who’d worked closely with Maddrey and says she turned to him after she was sexually assaulted only to find that painful details she’d shared in confidence were leaked to police and community leaders to damage her reputation.
With Adams quite possibly down to his final months as mayor, Tisch may be on an awfully short clock to make big and overdue changes to a vast and vitally important department in urgent need of strong leadership and structure.
Here’s hoping she puts the right people in place to make that happen.
Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.