“I thought black lives mattered”

In his most flagrant attack on the city’s Black Lives Matter activists yet, New York Mayor Eric Adams condemned the movement for not taking to the streets to protest escalating gun violence, calling it ” Hypocrite”.

Adam’s comments came after a mass shooting on board a Brooklyn subway car on Tuesday that left 10 dead.

Despite the fact that the shooting drew massive media attention, less attention has been paid to the alleged gunman’s black nationalist tirades online, including posts promoting the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Corresponding PoliticallyAdams was speaking to New York cable news station NY1 on Wednesday when asked about over a dozen other incidents of gun violence in the city between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning — and specifically how he would handle gun violence in the city.

“By staying consistent with our message. Here’s my question I put to the city: I thought black lives matter. Where are all those who said black lives matter? he said. “Then do an analysis of who was killed or shot last night. I was up all night talking to my commanders in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The victims were black. Many of the shooters were black.

“Why are there 16, 17, 18 year olds armed with guns on our streets at 12:00 or 1:00?”

“If black lives matter, it’s the thousands of people I saw on the streets back then [George] Floyd was murdered should be on the streets now declaring that the lives of these black children who die every night matter,” Adams added. “We must not be hypocrites.”

This isn’t the first clash Adams has had with the city’s Black Lives Matter activists, led by the controversial Hawk Newsome.

Adams, a black former New York City Police Department officer, won the 2021 mayoral race largely on a law-and-order platform. That message was popular with voters increasingly concerned by a skyrocketing crime rate and progressive criminal justice policies.

One of Adams’ law-and-order proposals involved reinstating a unit of plainclothes officers that was disbanded by former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration following the death of George Floyd and the protests surrounding it. Newsome, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, promised things would get ugly when the unit got back up and running.

“If he thinks they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we’re going to get back on the streets,” Newsome said after a November meeting with then-mayor Adams. “There will be riots. There will be fire and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people.”

Not that it had any impact on Adams: “That’s what I’m going to do. That was my promise and I will keep it,” he replied.

However, it is clear that more needs to be done, as Politico noted that there has been “a dramatic increase in violent incidents since he began his tenure as mayor.

“Major crimes are up 44 percent year over year, according to NYPD statistics earlier this month. And shootings, which had already doubled from 2019, increased another 14 percent from last year,” Politico noted.

“To make his focus clear, the mayor has traveled to crime scenes across the five boroughs to speak to victims and hold press conferences. However, during the subway attack, which was the most serious incident of his tenure, he was quarantined at Gracie Mansion after contracting Covid-19.”

“It’s been very difficult for me not to be on 36th Street and in some of our command centers,” Adams said Wednesday. “But I have to listen to the orders of our healthcare professionals.”

However, Newsome had no plans to take to the streets to protest the Brooklyn subway shooting or other acts of violence New York City has been subjected to. Instead, he was still fighting Mayor Adams.

“He wants us to fight in the papers to distract people from the real issues,” Newsome said. “The mayor is great at press conferences and he’s really good at making statements, but he lacks efficiency and the ability to lead our city in a safer direction.”

Newsome’s approach? A program called Black Opportunities, which Politico reported, “is launching a series of community programs — including de-escalation training and neighborhood patrols — aimed at reducing shootings and violence without having to rely on City Hall or the NYPD.”

“He asked us to do the work of elected officials and the police, who have a collective budget of billions,” Newsome said. “He wants to do this from a grassroots perspective. And on behalf of Black Opportunities, we accept his challenge.”

One wishes Newsome and BLM Greater New York the best of luck with this, but he still misses the point.

His organization refuses to mobilize in defense of black victims of violence because black lives matter when they make a political stand. When they don’t, their safety is entrusted to authorities, which Black Lives Matter opposes.

Yes, the words Black Lives Matter form a sentence that expresses a coherent sentiment. If they don’t actively fight this feeling, however, the activist organization usually doesn’t care if it comes about.

Funny how that works.